It isn't clear to me how this contradicts anything we already know. It only presents a new behavior that we don't yet understand.
The plant still mutates. These mutations can exist in the plants, and be passed on to children. That is what evolutionary theory predicts/requires. That there is a newly discovered and not yet understood mechanism for repairing some mutations is fascinating, but how does it represent an error in our previous understanding? Just because we weren't aware of all ways in which the negative effects of mutation could be mitigated?
Without a backup copy, there should have been no way for the gene to revert. Yet it did, so we're left with an odd conundrum.:-)
There is a conundrum as to what the recovery mechanism is. There is no conundrum in evolutionary theory, because the parents both aquired a mutated gene and thus clearly the correction method isn't perfect.
As you are obviously aware (re: cancer) most mutations are bad. An evolved mechanism for correcting certain kinds of harmful mutations is hardly a conundrum for evolutionary theory.
Look, I understand these arguments (and have for a long time). But I can't help but consider that your arguments invalidate something else which you no doubt support, which is encryption for your own personal privacy. Why is that "okay", and DRM isn't?
Why do you see those two things as even being related, other than they both involve encryption? Are you missing what the fundamental difference between encrypting for privacy and DRM is?
When I send a private email, I'm encrypting it so that during transit to the receiver it cannot be intercepted and read or modified. With DRM, I'm encrypting it so that the intended, legal recipient cannot read it or modify it without my explicit permission.
It's the difference between keeping privacy and keeping control.
And further, why is DRM not okay simply because you have a key embedded in software or a device for playback?
That has nothing to do with DRM's "okayness", it just means DRM will never be a feasible way to stop actual criminals.
This isn't about a dying "business model" as much as you'd like it to be. This isn't tantamount to Congress legislating that every horseless carriage have a horse whip to save the horse whip maker.
Right, right, DMCA and endless copyright extensions aren't gifts to the biggest media companies. The DMCA makes the very breaking of encryption illegal, even if what you are doing with the file once decrypted is perfectly legal. Even if you just talk about breaking encryption. So without actually legislating away our rights under copyright law, they allowed those rights to be stripped away and made regaining them illegal.
But in a way you are right. This isn't about protecting a dying business model. This is about killing a business model. The business model where you can keep something until it breaks or you don't want it anymore and then you can sell it. The model where you can take damaged products to anyone to fix them. The model where you can protect your investment by making copies. Microsoft and Columbia will love it. No more upgrading at you leisure, no more giving half your cd collection to a friend when you move. More sales, less effort. Everyone (who is already getting crazy rich of the current system) wins!
The fact that DRM is flawed as a concept and can't stop criminal behavior isn't a problem for them because they're getting the benefit they want anyway.
Sure, it's going to have to change. But even in this brave new world you envision, we'll still have concepts like copyright and ownership. Some may choose to distribute their music freely and widely. Others may decide they'd like people to pay for it. What you're really saying is that you'd like the "business model" we call, you know, "paying for things people want you to pay for" is "dying", and you're muddying the waters with your own personal dislike from artists you consider too "commercial".
Oh please. Jon didn't make iTunes free, did he? If you're a freeloader pirate, there is absolutely no reason to use iTunes in the first place.
This is about using the product one has paid for. I obtain a legitimate copy of a song, I am going to use that song in any way I see fit that doesn't involve violating the copyright owners rights. Those rights are limited and don't involve things like stopping me from playing a song on a Rio instead of an iPod.
"The internet" hasn't rendered music labels and their functions obsolete. What it's done is made it infinitely easier to instantly violate content owners' rights, and then do the mental gymnastics to justify not paying for things that don't belong to you
That's true -- well, they are obsolete, but "obsolete" and "still making gobs of cash" aren't mutually exclusive. Similarly with massive copyright violation, it seems. No, that doesn't make it okay. Yet it's also pretty hard to feel too bad about it. At least not bad enough to think I should have to give up the right to reverse engineer.
But when all is said and done we'll still have property, copyright, and rule of law.
Where's that wealth of information about the secret US wars in Central America in the 1980s? Or in Angola in the 1970s? Or in Chile in the 1970s? Or in Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s? Iran in the 1950s?
I don't know how much of a 'wealth' you want, but there's actually a surprising amount of FOIA material at the National Security Archive about Central America, Iran, etc.
Ever wonder if the CIA knew and allowed the Contras to run drugs into the States to fund their war against the Sandanistas? Wonder no more.
At least Gentooapparently. That's how linuxhardware was able to get benchmarks of various linux software on 64-bit AMD and Intel, and compare the speeds of 64 vs 32 bit binaries on both. Presumeably other AMD64 distros shouldn't have a problem.
EMT64 is basically identical to AMD64, by design since they went off of pre-release documentation for AMD64 in order to be compatible (ha! what a historic reversal of roles!). The only differences that exist between EMT64 and AMD64 are almost certainly due to errors/changes in the documentation that Intel used. These differences don't seem to stop OSes for AMD64 from running.
Don't you mean having to move back to the P3 line?
You mean the Pentium Pro line? The changes going from PPro to P2 to P3 were no greater than the changes going from P3 to Pentium M. Similarly, the K8 is just a souped-up K7, though that still isn't nearly as old. Pentium Pro: the architecture that won't die.
Well, the answer would be the number of 64-bit chips that AMD has sold that were purchased at least in part due to being 64-bit. Not knowing whether they were sold for 64-bit use or not, you could just go by the number of 64-bit chips AMD has sold. This is a big number by AMD standards -- simply HUGE in the server space, where AMD didn't have much of a presence with K7. By Intel standards, it isn't that big, so Intel hasn't really lost as much as you might think in terms of real money.
By Itanium standards (which I'm assuming is the "failed 64-bit attempt" you refer to) it's quite a bit, which is really a sign that the problem with Itanium wasn't potential sales lost to AMD, but the cost of the project itself compared to the return.
Back to that server thing -- in terms of raw sales lost in terms of being late to the show with 64-bit x86, the numbers aren't that great. But the clearest effect is shown in the price of the Xeon line. Formerly a spot AMD didn't really compete in, it was a cash cow for Intel that helped fund price wars in the desktop market. The average price dropped by half pretty quickly. So they at least had to lower prices out of concern for losing substantial sales. Woo, competition.
Which, going full circle, still only amounts to "slightly less monstrous piles of cash" in terms of the impact on Intel.
At least they don't pull out the old "The devil can quote scripture to his own ends" line. That one really drives me up the wall. You can prove things out of your magic book, but I can't?
Want to turn the tables and piss them off back? Just say "Indeed, he can" and let it hang. A thoughtful Christian might ponder the times that even Saint Peter was a hypocrite and wonder if he himself could be too. But for the ones that pull that line it usually enrages them. Caution: this idea may get you beat up. "Turn the other cheek" is another piece of Christian philosophy that isn't practiced much.:)
It's not as if they didn't have a word meaning "stages" back then.
And in fact they did. Unfortunately for us several thousand years later, it was the same word that is translated as "day" in English. It means the period between sunrises, the period between sunrise and sunset, an era, or just a division of time.
Which not only suggests that the author of Genesis had an understanding of metaphor, it also suggests that it is pretty foolish to take a strict literalist interpretation of the Bible based on an translation.
But that's not the point. I used to wonder why fundamentalists would insist so vehemently that God created earth in exactly seven days when the billions of years of galaxies and solar systems forming seems so much more inspiring and God-like in scope. Now that I'm older I know it has nothing to do with whether God went "zap" and mammals appeared or whether God made sure lightning struck a pool of complex carbon chains at just the right time and that the background radiation level provided just the right rate of mutation.
The only exception to this I can think of is Will Wright being backed by EA, and if it weren't for that I'd lost hope almost completely.
Which is a small hope, because they're doing it for the same make-money-screw-all-else mentality. Will Wright just happens to be that kind of genius that can make "experimental, different" and "shed-loads of loot" cross paths. On the other hand, it shows market demand for cool, unique stuff (but we already knew that; the problem is few big publishers are daring enough to risk going after it).
Yes, there's a difference. Feigning misunderstanding of the intent based on that difference is indeed being a Grammar Nazi. If you wish, you can email the author of the story to let him know of his grammatical error. Anything else is pedantry for the sake of pedantry, or Grammar Nazi Masturbation.
Microsoft openly exploited the BSD TCP/IP network stack because of the liberal BSD license, something the authors of FreeBSD have absolutely no problem with, and in fact encourage.
Yep. When dealing with reasonable people who aren't actually proprietary developers who just like BSD over GPL because BSD lets them take stuff, the GPL/BSD schism really comes down to a difference in intent:
GPL aims to create as much quality free software as possible and in doing so minimize the relevence of non-free code. If this means Windows users can't benefit from some feature in GPL software, that's fine, because the goal is to give them freedom and they can't ever get that from Windows.
BSD aims to create as much quality software as possible, period. If using the BSD TCP/IP stack improves Windows and gives their users a better OS, that's cool. The Windows user doesn't get any more freedom, but that isn't the goal.
I first heard this goal expressed by the maintainer of FreeBSD (name slips my mind, pre-coffee) but I've had a lot of respect for the BSD license since. Most flamewars are not started by people with this goal, but rather zealots who won't accept goals different than the GPL or even more commonly clost proprietary types who are really after "free as in ride".
I say this because as a commercial developer I know plenty of managers who won't let me use Open Source on their projects because they think all Open Source has a viral license such as GPL.
I understand that you can't just change your manager's mind, or hit them with some smartifying ray, but excluding GPL software from your definition of "Open" because you know managers who don't understand it strikes me as the wrong reaction.
The GPL isn't viral. Okay, maybe it's viral in the same way as a good idea is viral. If you don't want to be "infected", nothing can force you to be. If you choose to "infect" yourself, well, it must have been worth it, no?
Nice concept, but reality is we live in what's called a zero-sum game. We as humanity have a finite amount of resources, which means that if I'm going to expend resources by writing software I need to get something in return, in order to provide for my family.
In reality, the only truly zero-sum games is Conservation of Energy*. Since that only applies to closed systems, from the viewpoint of earth even that isn't due to the influx of energy from the sun.
What I'm trying to say is that sharing is in no way a violation of some fundamental law of nature. It's this "zero-sum" viewpoint that has caused people to view sharing as strange and threatening. Yet it is not-sharing that is strange and must be enforced through legal creations.
BSD style licenses allow me to... get buy-in from management. GPL licenses do not. Essentialy I write GPL software and I cannot use it in any commercial projects.
If you write the software (and it isn't work-for-hire) then you can license it under as many licenses as you want. If you didn't write the code, then what you're talking about is using someone else's code in your proprietary project, and no you can't do that with GPL software and I don't see why you think you should. You have no intention of sharing, you want to sell my own free code back to me with proprietary restrictions, so why should I want to share with you?
IMHO, GPL is not designed to increase free software but to get rid of commercial software.
If by commercial you mean proprietary (they aren't the same), then you are correct except that the GPL aims to both increase freedom and decrease software which is not free by making it obsolete.
As someone who's method of feeding my newborn baby is writing software you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to work on any GPL'd code.
Even if you were being paid to do it? That sounds very strange to me. Or are you assuming it is impossible to be paid to develop GPL software? There are many programmers who would be surprised to hear that, and would wonder where their paychecks have been coming from then...
Let me let you in on two secrets, one about the present and one about the future. About the present: developers who create software so that their employers can sell individual copies of that software using restrictive license agreements, like with you, are in the minority. Most software is written in-house or by contract to solve specific business needs, like with me. About the future: The proprietary pay-per-copy model is going to go away, and nobody will miss it except those who got rich off artificial scarcity. GPL software is going to win. The benefits of sharing are just too great. This isn't going to happen soon; your child may well be in college before you need to adjust. But adjust you must. You'll already find it damned near impossible to sell a non-free UNIX. The same thing is happening and will happen with other software. You can still get paid to write software, but you have to be ready to do it differently than you have before.
Just a heads up.
* and Momentum, but the metaphor becomes even more strained.
I think you're reading too much into that statement. I don't think the idea is that Intel released their "open" bios in order to deliberately distract developers away from developing a truly free and working bios. It's just not what is needed. Intel released some useless crap in an effort to get the OSS guys to shut up, and it didn't work. It isn't really "such lengths", it's just some code that Intel doesn't find important.
They get it. The advertisers are at war with us over posession of our eyeballs. We will see advertisements and we will be forced to look at them because they'll obscure something we want to see. The browser is both how they attack us and our defense. Popup blocking, the FlashBlock NukeAnything extension are just steps in the escalating arms race.
Man, I hate advertising. I'm with Bill Hicks on this: If you're in marketing, just kill yourself. Please.
I don't think writing ugly code disqualifies one from being a 'pretty good' programmer. His code is efficient -- E DR 13 ran great on a pentium 120MHz -- but not necessarily the most robust or maintainable.
Getting one of the three qualifies as 'pretty good' imho.:)
the theme he's got on there is ugly as sin, but seeing through that and looking at the tech behined the whole thing, and you see what the future could be.
Yeah, that's pretty typical of reactions to E with a default Rasterman-created theme. "Wow, that window manager is awesom! Any themes for it that don't look horrible?" That was basically my reaction to DR11 back in the day. Snazzy stuff I'd never seen before, but crud was the theme ugly.
Rasterman is a good architect, a pretty good programmer, and not so great at the 'graphic design' side of things.:)
Hardly. Tweaked models are still tweaked models. They are still designed to show certain effects, no matter what data they get fed.
But the point is that despite their tweaking they correctly predicted current weather phenomenon, while the other models didn't.
That is the fundamental test of a scientific theory: Does the theory predict the measured data?
Maybe you're missing what they did: They took the models, and used them to predict climate changes. They compared these predictions to measured data. The model using greenhouse gasses as a driver of climate changed matched the data closely, the other models did not. There is only one conclusion you can make, political machinations of the model designers being irrelevent: the greenhouse gas model was accurate, the other models were not.
So yes, it does blow away your criticism of politically motivated "tweaking" invalidating the models. They can tweak the model, they can't tweak the real-world data that their model was used to predict. Maybe Newton "tweaked" his theory because he wasn't sure of it. It still perfectly predicts planetary motion.
It's clear you want to dismiss these results. If you want to, a better way to do it would be to say that the paper has not yet been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. That's my main criticism -- they've ran to the press before their results were analyzed, and even if the paper stands up this can still be damaging.
And don't forget that this "greenhouse warming" causes cloud formation -- and the albedo of clouds is significantly less than that of the ground.
You're assuming the delta in light reflected would be greater than the delta in heat retained. I won't say with assurance that it's either, but I'll note that the coldest days of January in Michigan are the few without clouds.
If we weren't here, we couldn't have caused it, and if it happened before when we didn't cause it, there is no reason to believe we are causing it now.
That's fallacious reasoning. Fires existed before man, therefore man has started no fires?
The reason to suspect man is not because climate change is unique, because it isn't. The reason to suspect man is because the massive release of greenhouse gasses caused by industrialization is unique.
Plenty of fires have been caused by lightning. When you see a field with a charred box of fireworks in the middle, suspecting human interaction instead of assuming lightning is prudent.
I thought it was silly when people said Counter Strike "trained" people to use guns. GTA? It has an "aim" and "fire" button. What the hell can you learn from that?
Of course shooting is just one part of the game, not the main focus, which is of course the titular auto theft. I tried to use GTA to train me how to car jack, but when I tried it in real life I could never seem to find the farging triangle button.:(
Yeah. And it would be OS/2 whose ass Linux would be kicking in the commodity server market instead of Windows, and Linux would still be kicking the ass of AIX in the UNIX server market. The existence or non-existence of Windows would do nothing to change the appeal of using one CD to load an entire server farm with operating systems at zero cost.
And IBM would still be making their money from selling hardware. The motivation to ditch AIX in favor of free community-developed Linux would be the same. Hell, they might have seen the benefit to creating binary or at least library compatability between OS/2 and Linux. but that might be stretching it.
Apple, on the other hand, I don't see going for it. Yes, they make money selling hardware like IBM, but they get too much out of controlling the software. But I could be wrong; this is all hypothetical anyway.
I'm not sure I see how this is going to get rid of competition. It's not like the local government (which by the way is anything but limitless in funds or manpower) is going to be making wi-fi routers or constructing fiber optic cable itself.
So the local government is going to buy a whole bunch of wi-fi hotspots. Aren't companies going to have to compete to have their equipment purchased?
And those wi-fi hotspots are useless if they aren't connected to a fat wire/fiber pipe to the internet. Some ISP is going to be providing this, and there will be competition to get the deal.
I don't get it. Municipal wi-fi means that the ISPs/hardware makers get an entire city worth of business, which is probably more than they'd get if they tried to sell to individual consumers themselves. It sounds like this could be quite lucrative for these companies, not harmful.
Oh, wait... now I get it. Since its an entire city, the municipality can apply collective bargaining power to the deal. This puts the ISP and the customer on even footing, and that means the ISP will have to give a better price and make less money.
This has nothing to do with being "anti-competitive" and has everything to do with ISPs fearing collective bargaining will cut into their profit margins.
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It isn't clear to me how this contradicts anything we already know. It only presents a new behavior that we don't yet understand.
The plant still mutates. These mutations can exist in the plants, and be passed on to children. That is what evolutionary theory predicts/requires. That there is a newly discovered and not yet understood mechanism for repairing some mutations is fascinating, but how does it represent an error in our previous understanding? Just because we weren't aware of all ways in which the negative effects of mutation could be mitigated?
Without a backup copy, there should have been no way for the gene to revert. Yet it did, so we're left with an odd conundrum. :-)
There is a conundrum as to what the recovery mechanism is. There is no conundrum in evolutionary theory, because the parents both aquired a mutated gene and thus clearly the correction method isn't perfect.
As you are obviously aware (re: cancer) most mutations are bad. An evolved mechanism for correcting certain kinds of harmful mutations is hardly a conundrum for evolutionary theory.
Look, I understand these arguments (and have for a long time). But I can't help but consider that your arguments invalidate something else which you no doubt support, which is encryption for your own personal privacy. Why is that "okay", and DRM isn't?
Why do you see those two things as even being related, other than they both involve encryption? Are you missing what the fundamental difference between encrypting for privacy and DRM is?
When I send a private email, I'm encrypting it so that during transit to the receiver it cannot be intercepted and read or modified. With DRM, I'm encrypting it so that the intended, legal recipient cannot read it or modify it without my explicit permission.
It's the difference between keeping privacy and keeping control.
And further, why is DRM not okay simply because you have a key embedded in software or a device for playback?
That has nothing to do with DRM's "okayness", it just means DRM will never be a feasible way to stop actual criminals.
This isn't about a dying "business model" as much as you'd like it to be. This isn't tantamount to Congress legislating that every horseless carriage have a horse whip to save the horse whip maker.
Right, right, DMCA and endless copyright extensions aren't gifts to the biggest media companies. The DMCA makes the very breaking of encryption illegal, even if what you are doing with the file once decrypted is perfectly legal. Even if you just talk about breaking encryption. So without actually legislating away our rights under copyright law, they allowed those rights to be stripped away and made regaining them illegal.
But in a way you are right. This isn't about protecting a dying business model. This is about killing a business model. The business model where you can keep something until it breaks or you don't want it anymore and then you can sell it. The model where you can take damaged products to anyone to fix them. The model where you can protect your investment by making copies. Microsoft and Columbia will love it. No more upgrading at you leisure, no more giving half your cd collection to a friend when you move. More sales, less effort. Everyone (who is already getting crazy rich of the current system) wins!
The fact that DRM is flawed as a concept and can't stop criminal behavior isn't a problem for them because they're getting the benefit they want anyway.
Sure, it's going to have to change. But even in this brave new world you envision, we'll still have concepts like copyright and ownership. Some may choose to distribute their music freely and widely. Others may decide they'd like people to pay for it. What you're really saying is that you'd like the "business model" we call, you know, "paying for things people want you to pay for" is "dying", and you're muddying the waters with your own personal dislike from artists you consider too "commercial".
Oh please. Jon didn't make iTunes free, did he? If you're a freeloader pirate, there is absolutely no reason to use iTunes in the first place.
This is about using the product one has paid for. I obtain a legitimate copy of a song, I am going to use that song in any way I see fit that doesn't involve violating the copyright owners rights. Those rights are limited and don't involve things like stopping me from playing a song on a Rio instead of an iPod.
"The internet" hasn't rendered music labels and their functions obsolete. What it's done is made it infinitely easier to instantly violate content owners' rights, and then do the mental gymnastics to justify not paying for things that don't belong to you
That's true -- well, they are obsolete, but "obsolete" and "still making gobs of cash" aren't mutually exclusive. Similarly with massive copyright violation, it seems. No, that doesn't make it okay. Yet it's also pretty hard to feel too bad about it. At least not bad enough to think I should have to give up the right to reverse engineer.
But when all is said and done we'll still have property, copyright, and rule of law.
DRM isn't needed or justified by any of those.
Where's that wealth of information about the secret US wars in Central America in the 1980s? Or in Angola in the 1970s? Or in Chile in the 1970s? Or in Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s? Iran in the 1950s?
I don't know how much of a 'wealth' you want, but there's actually a surprising amount of FOIA material at the National Security Archive about Central America, Iran, etc.
Ever wonder if the CIA knew and allowed the Contras to run drugs into the States to fund their war against the Sandanistas? Wonder no more.
At least Gentoo apparently. That's how linuxhardware was able to get benchmarks of various linux software on 64-bit AMD and Intel, and compare the speeds of 64 vs 32 bit binaries on both. Presumeably other AMD64 distros shouldn't have a problem.
EMT64 is basically identical to AMD64, by design since they went off of pre-release documentation for AMD64 in order to be compatible (ha! what a historic reversal of roles!). The only differences that exist between EMT64 and AMD64 are almost certainly due to errors/changes in the documentation that Intel used. These differences don't seem to stop OSes for AMD64 from running.
Don't you mean having to move back to the P3 line?
You mean the Pentium Pro line? The changes going from PPro to P2 to P3 were no greater than the changes going from P3 to Pentium M. Similarly, the K8 is just a souped-up K7, though that still isn't nearly as old.
Pentium Pro: the architecture that won't die.
Well, the answer would be the number of 64-bit chips that AMD has sold that were purchased at least in part due to being 64-bit. Not knowing whether they were sold for 64-bit use or not, you could just go by the number of 64-bit chips AMD has sold. This is a big number by AMD standards -- simply HUGE in the server space, where AMD didn't have much of a presence with K7. By Intel standards, it isn't that big, so Intel hasn't really lost as much as you might think in terms of real money.
By Itanium standards (which I'm assuming is the "failed 64-bit attempt" you refer to) it's quite a bit, which is really a sign that the problem with Itanium wasn't potential sales lost to AMD, but the cost of the project itself compared to the return.
Back to that server thing -- in terms of raw sales lost in terms of being late to the show with 64-bit x86, the numbers aren't that great. But the clearest effect is shown in the price of the Xeon line. Formerly a spot AMD didn't really compete in, it was a cash cow for Intel that helped fund price wars in the desktop market. The average price dropped by half pretty quickly. So they at least had to lower prices out of concern for losing substantial sales. Woo, competition.
Which, going full circle, still only amounts to "slightly less monstrous piles of cash" in terms of the impact on Intel.
At least they don't pull out the old "The devil can quote scripture to his own ends" line. That one really drives me up the wall. You can prove things out of your magic book, but I can't?
:)
Want to turn the tables and piss them off back? Just say "Indeed, he can" and let it hang. A thoughtful Christian might ponder the times that even Saint Peter was a hypocrite and wonder if he himself could be too. But for the ones that pull that line it usually enrages them. Caution: this idea may get you beat up. "Turn the other cheek" is another piece of Christian philosophy that isn't practiced much.
It's not as if they didn't have a word meaning "stages" back then.
And in fact they did. Unfortunately for us several thousand years later, it was the same word that is translated as "day" in English. It means the period between sunrises, the period between sunrise and sunset, an era, or just a division of time.
Which not only suggests that the author of Genesis had an understanding of metaphor, it also suggests that it is pretty foolish to take a strict literalist interpretation of the Bible based on an translation.
But that's not the point. I used to wonder why fundamentalists would insist so vehemently that God created earth in exactly seven days when the billions of years of galaxies and solar systems forming seems so much more inspiring and God-like in scope. Now that I'm older I know it has nothing to do with whether God went "zap" and mammals appeared or whether God made sure lightning struck a pool of complex carbon chains at just the right time and that the background radiation level provided just the right rate of mutation.
It's about control.
The only exception to this I can think of is Will Wright being backed by EA, and if it weren't for that I'd lost hope almost completely.
Which is a small hope, because they're doing it for the same make-money-screw-all-else mentality. Will Wright just happens to be that kind of genius that can make "experimental, different" and "shed-loads of loot" cross paths. On the other hand, it shows market demand for cool, unique stuff (but we already knew that; the problem is few big publishers are daring enough to risk going after it).
Next week on /.
Your Rights Online : Google and BitTorrent apply for new patent on using RFID to mirror Wikipedia
Ha! And I didn't even need to subscribe!
Yes, there's a difference. Feigning misunderstanding of the intent based on that difference is indeed being a Grammar Nazi. If you wish, you can email the author of the story to let him know of his grammatical error. Anything else is pedantry for the sake of pedantry, or Grammar Nazi Masturbation.
Are you being a Grammar Nazi, or do you really not recognize a phrase intended for the portion of the audience that doesn't know what a compiler is?
Odd, I did a lookup first and it came back empty.
Still does.
I wanted a domain name that expressed my distaste for suck.com. If I registered com-sucks.com, I could have the subdomain suck.com-sucks.com.
Actually, com-sucks.com would be a good one to register for all the hate-sites. There are so many companies that suck, why pay $15 for each one?
Microsoft openly exploited the BSD TCP/IP network stack because of the liberal BSD license, something the authors of FreeBSD have absolutely no problem with, and in fact encourage.
Yep. When dealing with reasonable people who aren't actually proprietary developers who just like BSD over GPL because BSD lets them take stuff, the GPL/BSD schism really comes down to a difference in intent:
GPL aims to create as much quality free software as possible and in doing so minimize the relevence of non-free code. If this means Windows users can't benefit from some feature in GPL software, that's fine, because the goal is to give them freedom and they can't ever get that from Windows.
BSD aims to create as much quality software as possible, period. If using the BSD TCP/IP stack improves Windows and gives their users a better OS, that's cool. The Windows user doesn't get any more freedom, but that isn't the goal.
I first heard this goal expressed by the maintainer of FreeBSD (name slips my mind, pre-coffee) but I've had a lot of respect for the BSD license since. Most flamewars are not started by people with this goal, but rather zealots who won't accept goals different than the GPL or even more commonly clost proprietary types who are really after "free as in ride".
I say this because as a commercial developer I know plenty of managers who won't let me use Open Source on their projects because they think all Open Source has a viral license such as GPL.
I understand that you can't just change your manager's mind, or hit them with some smartifying ray, but excluding GPL software from your definition of "Open" because you know managers who don't understand it strikes me as the wrong reaction.
The GPL isn't viral. Okay, maybe it's viral in the same way as a good idea is viral. If you don't want to be "infected", nothing can force you to be. If you choose to "infect" yourself, well, it must have been worth it, no?
Nice concept, but reality is we live in what's called a zero-sum game. We as humanity have a finite amount of resources, which means that if I'm going to expend resources by writing software I need to get something in return, in order to provide for my family.
In reality, the only truly zero-sum games is Conservation of Energy*. Since that only applies to closed systems, from the viewpoint of earth even that isn't due to the influx of energy from the sun.
What I'm trying to say is that sharing is in no way a violation of some fundamental law of nature. It's this "zero-sum" viewpoint that has caused people to view sharing as strange and threatening. Yet it is not-sharing that is strange and must be enforced through legal creations.
BSD style licenses allow me to... get buy-in from management. GPL licenses do not. Essentialy I write GPL software and I cannot use it in any commercial projects.
If you write the software (and it isn't work-for-hire) then you can license it under as many licenses as you want. If you didn't write the code, then what you're talking about is using someone else's code in your proprietary project, and no you can't do that with GPL software and I don't see why you think you should. You have no intention of sharing, you want to sell my own free code back to me with proprietary restrictions, so why should I want to share with you?
IMHO, GPL is not designed to increase free software but to get rid of commercial software.
If by commercial you mean proprietary (they aren't the same), then you are correct except that the GPL aims to both increase freedom and decrease software which is not free by making it obsolete.
As someone who's method of feeding my newborn baby is writing software you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to work on any GPL'd code.
Even if you were being paid to do it? That sounds very strange to me. Or are you assuming it is impossible to be paid to develop GPL software? There are many programmers who would be surprised to hear that, and would wonder where their paychecks have been coming from then...
Let me let you in on two secrets, one about the present and one about the future.
About the present: developers who create software so that their employers can sell individual copies of that software using restrictive license agreements, like with you, are in the minority. Most software is written in-house or by contract to solve specific business needs, like with me.
About the future: The proprietary pay-per-copy model is going to go away, and nobody will miss it except those who got rich off artificial scarcity. GPL software is going to win. The benefits of sharing are just too great. This isn't going to happen soon; your child may well be in college before you need to adjust. But adjust you must. You'll already find it damned near impossible to sell a non-free UNIX. The same thing is happening and will happen with other software. You can still get paid to write software, but you have to be ready to do it differently than you have before.
Just a heads up.
* and Momentum, but the metaphor becomes even more strained.
I think you're reading too much into that statement. I don't think the idea is that Intel released their "open" bios in order to deliberately distract developers away from developing a truly free and working bios. It's just not what is needed. Intel released some useless crap in an effort to get the OSS guys to shut up, and it didn't work. It isn't really "such lengths", it's just some code that Intel doesn't find important.
Nevertheless, it is a distraction.
They get it. The advertisers are at war with us over posession of our eyeballs. We will see advertisements and we will be forced to look at them because they'll obscure something we want to see. The browser is both how they attack us and our defense. Popup blocking, the FlashBlock NukeAnything extension are just steps in the escalating arms race.
Man, I hate advertising. I'm with Bill Hicks on this: If you're in marketing, just kill yourself. Please.
I don't think writing ugly code disqualifies one from being a 'pretty good' programmer. His code is efficient -- E DR 13 ran great on a pentium 120MHz -- but not necessarily the most robust or maintainable.
:)
Getting one of the three qualifies as 'pretty good' imho.
the theme he's got on there is ugly as sin, but seeing through that and looking at the tech behined the whole thing, and you see what the future could be.
:)
Yeah, that's pretty typical of reactions to E with a default Rasterman-created theme. "Wow, that window manager is awesom! Any themes for it that don't look horrible?" That was basically my reaction to DR11 back in the day. Snazzy stuff I'd never seen before, but crud was the theme ugly.
Rasterman is a good architect, a pretty good programmer, and not so great at the 'graphic design' side of things.
Hardly. Tweaked models are still tweaked models. They are still designed to show certain effects, no matter what data they get fed.
But the point is that despite their tweaking they correctly predicted current weather phenomenon, while the other models didn't.
That is the fundamental test of a scientific theory: Does the theory predict the measured data?
Maybe you're missing what they did: They took the models, and used them to predict climate changes. They compared these predictions to measured data. The model using greenhouse gasses as a driver of climate changed matched the data closely, the other models did not. There is only one conclusion you can make, political machinations of the model designers being irrelevent: the greenhouse gas model was accurate, the other models were not.
So yes, it does blow away your criticism of politically motivated "tweaking" invalidating the models. They can tweak the model, they can't tweak the real-world data that their model was used to predict. Maybe Newton "tweaked" his theory because he wasn't sure of it. It still perfectly predicts planetary motion.
It's clear you want to dismiss these results. If you want to, a better way to do it would be to say that the paper has not yet been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. That's my main criticism -- they've ran to the press before their results were analyzed, and even if the paper stands up this can still be damaging.
And don't forget that this "greenhouse warming" causes cloud formation -- and the albedo of clouds is significantly less than that of the ground.
You're assuming the delta in light reflected would be greater than the delta in heat retained. I won't say with assurance that it's either, but I'll note that the coldest days of January in Michigan are the few without clouds.
If we weren't here, we couldn't have caused it, and if it happened before when we didn't cause it, there is no reason to believe we are causing it now.
That's fallacious reasoning. Fires existed before man, therefore man has started no fires?
The reason to suspect man is not because climate change is unique, because it isn't. The reason to suspect man is because the massive release of greenhouse gasses caused by industrialization is unique.
Plenty of fires have been caused by lightning. When you see a field with a charred box of fireworks in the middle, suspecting human interaction instead of assuming lightning is prudent.
I thought it was silly when people said Counter Strike "trained" people to use guns. GTA? It has an "aim" and "fire" button. What the hell can you learn from that?
:(
Of course shooting is just one part of the game, not the main focus, which is of course the titular auto theft. I tried to use GTA to train me how to car jack, but when I tried it in real life I could never seem to find the farging triangle button.
Yeah. And it would be OS/2 whose ass Linux would be kicking in the commodity server market instead of Windows, and Linux would still be kicking the ass of AIX in the UNIX server market. The existence or non-existence of Windows would do nothing to change the appeal of using one CD to load an entire server farm with operating systems at zero cost.
And IBM would still be making their money from selling hardware. The motivation to ditch AIX in favor of free community-developed Linux would be the same. Hell, they might have seen the benefit to creating binary or at least library compatability between OS/2 and Linux. but that might be stretching it.
Apple, on the other hand, I don't see going for it. Yes, they make money selling hardware like IBM, but they get too much out of controlling the software. But I could be wrong; this is all hypothetical anyway.
I'm not sure I see how this is going to get rid of competition. It's not like the local government (which by the way is anything but limitless in funds or manpower) is going to be making wi-fi routers or constructing fiber optic cable itself.
So the local government is going to buy a whole bunch of wi-fi hotspots. Aren't companies going to have to compete to have their equipment purchased?
And those wi-fi hotspots are useless if they aren't connected to a fat wire/fiber pipe to the internet. Some ISP is going to be providing this, and there will be competition to get the deal.
I don't get it. Municipal wi-fi means that the ISPs/hardware makers get an entire city worth of business, which is probably more than they'd get if they tried to sell to individual consumers themselves. It sounds like this could be quite lucrative for these companies, not harmful.
Oh, wait... now I get it. Since its an entire city, the municipality can apply collective bargaining power to the deal. This puts the ISP and the customer on even footing, and that means the ISP will have to give a better price and make less money.
This has nothing to do with being "anti-competitive" and has everything to do with ISPs fearing collective bargaining will cut into their profit margins.
Damned if I care about that.