Socialist governments like imprecise laws, because then the laws can mean what ever you want them to mean
That's a very interesting definition of "socialist". I bet there are loads of nations you wouldn't normally think of as left wing that qualify under that analysis.
"all these halp files are, are a lit of reason's why the problem is not MS's fault".
*ahem* "all these help files are, are a list of reasons why Microsoft is not to blame any given problem"
Never been one for excessive proofreading, but all the same...
Lots of things. Win95 is where I presonally mark the change/ it was a marketing lead rollout that persuaded lots of people to shell out money for an OS that would not run well on their current machines, and that even if it did, their current apps would run slower. Up until that point I'd though MS was about the best solution to the problem.
W95 was also the debut of the Registry with all it's attendant obfuscations and encrypted entries. No more of this human readable.ini file malarkey. We'll have a binary format that can only be read using our software.
Then there were the help files. I taught myself how to use Win3.11 to quite a high level purely from the bundled helpfiles. W95 seemed a lot less helpful. However I think the nadair was reached with WinME when I was tryng to troubleshoot my wife's PC and suddenly though "all these halp files are, are a lit of reason's why the problem is not MS's fault".
Then there was Stacker - where MS bough out just enough of the company to squash the product. Everyone has their favourite MS unfair competition story - that was the one that made me realise these guys were not playng fair
And there was the chap on USENET - demon.local - who posted a message subject "Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!". Apparently he'd found a bug in 95, reported it and was told he'd be given 30 days free credit while they looked into it. He was outraged - he spent his own valuable time tracking down a bug for Microsoft to improve their product, and in return they threatened to charge him money if they couldn't replicate it in 30 days. How to alienate your techically adept userbase in one easy lesson...
The final straw for me, was finding that getting a copy of office for my dad's new XP machine doubled the cost of the computer (which we'd already bought) and that we'd need a new printer and scanner. None of which was advertised, of course.
These are some of the landmarks on the journey from me as a MS enthusiast c.1990 to a Linux evangelist in 2005. It's not that I woke up one day and thought "linux looks cool", MS had to work long and hard before I started to think of them as the enemy.
There's a line, arguably a subtle one, between wrtiting novice-friendly software and treating your users as idiots. Further on in the same directin there's another one markign the start of treating the user with contempt. As far as I'm concerned, MS crossed first one, then the other, and have not so much as looked over their shoulder the whole time...
Contrary to what many on slashdot think, the *AA orgs employ some pretty clever people,
Interesting.I don't personally think of the *AA as being stupid.I think they're using some intelligent methods in persuit of a deeply stupid goal.
The goal is the surpression of file sharing. It's a stupid goal because it's doomed to fail. The way in which the world works has changed. Supposedly there was once a law requiring that the earliest automobiles be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag to ensure no one was injured by the vehicle. That's what the *AA are doing; desperately trying uphold an outmoded status quo.
Why are these intelligent people doing this stupid thing? Well, it's the reason their organisations exist. In that sense, they have no choice.
Remember, the goal isn't to elimiate the network. The goal is to make it so untrustworthy and unreliable that it's too much trouble for Joe User and he'll go to the theater instead.
Mmm... exactly. They can't close the channel, so they'll try and jam it. A smart response in pursuit of a stupid goal
The sad thing is that is that the need to jam it to near 100% or the strategy fails. It only takes one guy per neighbourhood who can separate the wheat from the chaff and the tactic fails; partly because he serves as an example that it can be done, and party because local distributuion can be handled by sneakernet
But like I said before, they've no choice but to try...
It's been a long time since I studied this stuf...
I always think of is as the the more predictable the signal, the less info. Of course, that is how physics entropy works, with the value maximising as the energy of every atom tends toward the same value.
And I do remember that the two are opposites, because Maxwell's Demon "works" by turning one sort into the other.
So yeah, looks like you're both right. I stand corrected. Thank you.
The Mozilla Corporation is responsible for productizing and distributing Firefox, Thunderbird, and related branded products built on the Mozilla open source code base. The Mozilla Corporation's mission, shared by that of the Mozilla Foundation, is to promote choice and innovation on the Internet.
Whoo, what'd they do - cut and past that last bit from an epiphyte(2) prospectus?
Sometimes I could almost wish one of these press releases would say our aim is to make the Internet a shittier place for everyone and to gouge the public so deep that their children's children will still be paying off the debt.
I wouldn't approve, but at least it would reduce the entropy of the data stream.
It's not that I suspect the Mozilla corp of anything untoward, and short of omitting it entirely, I can't think of a better way to
to say what they appear to be saying.
All the same, it's a bit semantically null, innit? Where's the point of a FAQ if you fill it with meaningless platitudes?
True enough. Sadly neither of us have the power to change the world, so accepting that this is a common flaw of management makes one take it less personally when treated impersonally. So to speak.
And yet, if we all, stoics to the end, suffer in silence, then the problem is never discussed and the situation never improves.
And we do too have the power to change the world. You and me and everyone else on the planet - a little more every day. Defeatism serves us ill.
It's cheaper to retain people with respect and money than with money alone. As the saying goes "it doesn't cost anything to be polite". I can't understand why more corporate cultures don't embrace this idea, but I suspect it's because so many people get into management just so they can have people to boss around.
Alas, I think I have to agree with you. Still, I take heart from the fact that many corporate cultures do "get it". I suppose the question is how do these companies form and how can we encourage them over less enlightened entities...
Well, i thought that his lack of understanding would be obvious to anyone who has read the article, but seeing that it wasn't, i might just as well take the time to give some examples.
Well, I did and it wasn't and I appreciate the examples.
The point he's missing is that the Hungarian representative in the commission does not have to (and is not supposed to) follow his government's orders, as he's acting in the interest of the whole union, not just those of his country.
I'd missed that one myself. Wow. So the commission are accountable to no one at all? That doesn't sound very good to me.
There are many reasons why this is unreasonable (the main reason, of course, being that it would simply not work on such a large scale)
This is the twenty first century. We have, as the saying goes, the technology.
what makes the proposition especially absurd is that he wants to change a system that has been proven to work by the very same patents decision Stallman is ranting about.
Umm... "work" to what end? How do you see the outcome as successful and for whom?
We mobilised a massive campaign against patents, only to have the manifest wishes of the electorate and parliament repeated ignored and overruled, and in the end we gained a no score draw, because the bad guys feared they would lose. I think Stallman is correct is as much as the campaign served to highlight how undemocratic the EU system actually is.
Stallman's proposition would, however, eliminate one step from the legislative process, seriously distorting the balance of powers
... by requiring legistaltion be drafted by elected legislators with more than a theoretical responsibility to the electorate? I can't see that as a drawback
as there would be noone keeping the "upper house" in check (who keeps an eye on the people?);
Which people? The electorate? The commission? I think Stallman's proposed referenda fulfill that role. The people get to keep check on the "upper house" directly. Sounds good to me.
it would still, however, be quite easily manipulable (the EU referendums all around Europe are a good example of this).
Yeah I noticed that. They do it by saying "this is just an advisory referendum - we don't have to do what you say unless it's the answer we want". Or they ask it again and again until they get the proper answer.
Stallman's proposing changes to make the EU legislative apparatus more accountsble to the electorate. That's what democracy is supposed to be about.
Well, if you feel that being talked about as a cost to be managed "de-humanizes" you, you might try thicker skin,
Well, I can see how that might help. However, leaving aside my oh-so-delicate skin for a moment, I also don't think it helps to get into the habit of thinking of people as units or costs. It reduces the amount of empathy in the workplace. People will treat "costs" with far less sympathy than they would "people"
of course it's bad management to actually tell people that to their faces, as respect is cheaper than salary as a retention mechanism.
Gosh yes. Because workers are regularly rude as hell the the company CEO and he never objects because he gets all that money... no, wait, it doesn't work like that does it?
Stallman seems to lack knowledge of how the EU works. This is best illustrated by his "proposal" for changes in the legislative process.
It's all very well to say that, but haven't said how you think his understand may be lacking or why you feel his proposal is unrealistic. You could be making a valuable
point of penetrating insight. Alternatively, you're more likely to be a troll spoutng kneejerk disagreements on a subject of which you know nothing.
In the absence of evidence, it's very difficult to tell whic it might be. However Stallman's name carries considerably more weight, so unless you're willing to explain...
If you're IT staff but don't make the product, then you can expect to be treated as a cost to be managed - since you are.
Would managing us involve a public slagging off at the AGM? If so, I'm not sure I'd agree. Any employee is deserving of some basic respect for the tasks he performs. I can understand taking fire if a group have been performing poorly, but purly because of the function they perform?
In any case, the coders in this case were making product.
If you're an engineer designing the product in *any* field and you're treated like a cost to be managed, it's a real good sign that there's a better company out there looking for you!
The turnover at this place was indeed very high. I knew one guy who signed on because his partner was in scotland, and the company had jsut started a big project there. Within a week he'd been transferred to the opposite end of the UK. I remember the farewell party when he left.
If you want someone that doesn't make anything, there's always middle management.
They don't make product, so if anyone was going to be de-humanised into "a cost to be managed" you'd expect it to be them. Doesn't happen very often compared with IT guys for some reason.
A bit of context: I've been coding professionally since 1984, hacking C, C++, perl and various dialects of shell.
Most of that time has been as a contractor. That distorts the workplace experience a little, but it also means I've seen a lot of different companies and how they treat their personel. I'm quite content in my current role, but I think I've seen both ends of the spectrum over that time.
Increasingly over that period, some environemts have come to see IT staff as a necessary evil. One CEO of a software house(!) gave a speech at the company's annual meeting saying how salesmen were good because they brought money in, and how developers were bad because all they did was cost money. I don't know what he though the salesmen sold. That sort of thing gets dispiriting real fast.
Overall I wouldn't be at all surprised if the general level of dissatisfaction among UK IT types has increased. Are we going to see an exodus? Of course not - coders still need to eat. However a low morale workforce benefits no one.
... not the Constitution. I don't think your ancestors were confused about what they wre fighting for when he defended the constitution.
You know, the way you harp on the verb "confuse", a casual reader could be forgiven for thinking that the GP's main point was that the constitution was deliberately confusing, rather than that a horde of small local ordinances are nibbling away at the first amendment piecemeal.
Interestingly enough however, the GP doesn't use the word "confuse" once in his post. Were you perhaps confused about which post you were replying to?
Well, they already do, at least where I come from. I have to agree that the issue might be less fraught if they were to discontinue the practice and explicitly separate the two aspects under different names.
The best approach might be to strip "marriage" of all legal meaning.
But to an extent, it doesn't really matter if prior art exists.
Simply defending against a lawsuit from Microsoft would vankrupt a great many small companies. Unless the EFF make a point of overturning this one, there are still thousands of others they can abuse.
The problem is that many advocates of same sex couples want to be MARRIED and are not satisfied with some kind of state issued paper labeled "Civil Union" or some such giving them equal legal standing.
Aye, but look at it this way.
There are two dimensions two what we currently think of as "marriage". Let's call them spiritual and governmental.
The spiritual aspect involves getting God to OK your choice of a partner. Or to witness it maybe. I expect different faiths have different ideas of what marriage is about.
The governmental aspects however deal mainly in legal aspects. Married couples may get taxed at a different rate, there better defined procedures in place should the union break up, that sort of thing.
You'll note that this separation is already implicit in the concept of a civil ceremony marriage. The government already allows (heterosexual) couples to implement the govermental aspects of a marriage union without any spiritual component.
Now since we're talking politics here, we're really restricted in the changes we can demand. We can require that the government extend its concept of governmental marriage to encompass same sex unions. In fact I can see no sane reason why this should be denied.
However, we shouldn't expect the government to force religions to change their creeds. That has to be an internal decision for each particular faith.
So, suppose we have a government that permits same sex marriage in the purely governmental aspect of it. Do we call this "marriage" or should we find a new name for it?
As a geek, and with a geek's dislike of overcrowded namespaces, I'd have to say choose a new name. "Civil Union" seems as good as any.
Interestingly, this would have the effect of technically "unmarrying" hetero couples married under a civil ceremony, although their "Civil Union" would be unaffected.
It should also be possible to gat around this by creating a non-governemtal, agnostic "church" whose sole function was to bless Civil Unions into formal marraige.
After that, anyone who wanted the explicit blessing of their own faith would have to campaign internally within his or her church.
It wouldn't satisfy everyone, but it would be fair. And fair is as much as we can sometimes hope for in this sort of argument.
I was going to purchase a commerical bulletin board, but found a better, free one and used it instead. I am not going to ever need developers to come in and work on the code
Yeah, that works for small projects. Most business though have specalist requirements.
They're going to want some tweakage to their database packages, they'll want something to reflect their internal accounting system. Once companies get used to the idea that they can have the building blocks for free, I think they're going to get creative about how they want their software to work
Most companies will never give anything back into the community. They will just take the program and use it to their advantage.
That's acceptable. We wrote it so everyone could take it and use to their advantage.
Microsoft may have abused its position of power by letting IE go, but there still is competition (firefox and safari come to mind).
mmm... no. Letting IE stagnate was MS privilege.
It does however illustrate how monopolies provide poorer products since they lack an incentive to innovate. MS didn't restart work on IE until Firefox started eatiing into their market share - in other words until they stopped having a monopoly on web browsers.
Now if you want abuse, look at how they presure OEMs into only shipping windows as the OS.
This is all you need to do to defeat Microsoft (rather than bitch about getting a law passed).
Never bitched about getting a law passed, myself. Of course, since I'm not a US citizen, I don't get much of a say anyway. It doesn't matter - I think we can do it with better software.
Create something better that most people will want to use (of course this is easier said than done).
Yes, of course. Errm.... didn't we get into this discussion because you said that writing better software was evil? Or is it only evil if I release it for free?
Software patents -- at least in their current form(s) of existence -- might be a Bad Solution, but they're hardly evil.
Obviously I disagree. I'll explain why.
They are evil only if you believe that authors should hold no rights over their creation (because "Information wants to be free").
Well, actually, there is a school of thought, including the US
Constitution, to the effect that authors hold no "rights" to
their creations at all.
All information of every sort is automatically part of the public
domain. However to encourge creative works, a temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea called "copyright" is permitted. Similarly, to encourage
inventors to disclose methods of manufacture, an time-limited monopoly
called a patent is also permitted. Copyright applies to the specific
expression of an idea and patent to tangible inventions and manufacturing
processes. The distinction has been sadly blurred on recent times, but these
are the underlying principles as I understand them.
"Information wants to be free" doesn't enter into it.
Only then is there any reason in completely rejecting software patents -- or any other forms of protecting some form of creation or invention -- as 'evil'.
Umm... no. Patents are unnecessary to reward software innovation where
copyright has proven suffcient to the task. Patents far from protecting
people's "intellectual property" have the effect of making existing copyrights
worthless (since the patent holder can prevent marketing of a pre-existing
copyright) and far from protecting the small developer, they give the holders of
large patent portfolios a means to extort patents and copyright from small holdes who cannot trade one-for-one. They can be used to stifle innovation and
unfairly surpress competition in the marketplace and they can be used to
surpress open source software in its entirity.
I think those are excellent reasons for characterising software patents as
"evil". Once again, "information wants to be free" doesn't enter into it.
If, however, the creators of software are to be protected (and Copyright is not Good Enough)
I'm going to have to ask you to justify that statement. How is Copyright
insufficent to the task? Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet
using Copyright, backed by Trade Secrets and Non Disclosure Agreements. I
think Gates' billions present an irrefutable demonstration that Copyright is
indeed Good Enough.
Please explain why you think this may not be the case.
software patents turn out to be just a bad solution to a problem. Unfortunately, they seem to be the only existing solution.
So which problem would that be? Protecting creator rights? To they extent that
they have them they are vested in copyright and, as I have argued, adequately
protected. So I'll give you the "bad solution" part, but the "only existing
solution" part would appear to be utter nonsense.
Unless of course the "problem" you see software patents solving is "legitimate competition in a free market" or "open source software". In that case I might grant the effectiveness
but debate the desirability and morality of the solution.
Hence, I completely agree; software patents are a bad thing.
Sorry, didn't mean to sound so aggressive. I just don't like the idea of someone walling away with the idea that there can be non-evil swpats. Just twitchy after the big EU patent debate, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very interesting definition of "socialist". I bet there are loads of nations you wouldn't normally think of as left wing that qualify under that analysis.
Never been one for excessive proofreading, but all the same...
W95 was also the debut of the Registry with all it's attendant obfuscations and encrypted entries. No more of this human readable
Then there were the help files. I taught myself how to use Win3.11 to quite a high level purely from the bundled helpfiles. W95 seemed a lot less helpful. However I think the nadair was reached with WinME when I was tryng to troubleshoot my wife's PC and suddenly though "all these halp files are, are a lit of reason's why the problem is not MS's fault".
Then there was Stacker - where MS bough out just enough of the company to squash the product. Everyone has their favourite MS unfair competition story - that was the one that made me realise these guys were not playng fair
And there was the chap on USENET - demon.local - who posted a message subject "Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!". Apparently he'd found a bug in 95, reported it and was told he'd be given 30 days free credit while they looked into it. He was outraged - he spent his own valuable time tracking down a bug for Microsoft to improve their product, and in return they threatened to charge him money if they couldn't replicate it in 30 days. How to alienate your techically adept userbase in one easy lesson...
The final straw for me, was finding that getting a copy of office for my dad's new XP machine doubled the cost of the computer (which we'd already bought) and that we'd need a new printer and scanner. None of which was advertised, of course.
These are some of the landmarks on the journey from me as a MS enthusiast c.1990 to a Linux evangelist in 2005. It's not that I woke up one day and thought "linux looks cool", MS had to work long and hard before I started to think of them as the enemy.
There's a line, arguably a subtle one, between wrtiting novice-friendly software and treating your users as idiots. Further on in the same directin there's another one markign the start of treating the user with contempt. As far as I'm concerned, MS crossed first one, then the other, and have not so much as looked over their shoulder the whole time...
Looking at the syntax, I think the GPL version is called Perl 6
Interesting.I don't personally think of the *AA as being stupid.I think they're using some intelligent methods in persuit of a deeply stupid goal.
The goal is the surpression of file sharing. It's a stupid goal because it's doomed to fail. The way in which the world works has changed. Supposedly there was once a law requiring that the earliest automobiles be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag to ensure no one was injured by the vehicle. That's what the *AA are doing; desperately trying uphold an outmoded status quo.
Why are these intelligent people doing this stupid thing? Well, it's the reason their organisations exist. In that sense, they have no choice.
Remember, the goal isn't to elimiate the network. The goal is to make it so untrustworthy and unreliable that it's too much trouble for Joe User and he'll go to the theater instead.
Mmm... exactly. They can't close the channel, so they'll try and jam it. A smart response in pursuit of a stupid goal
The sad thing is that is that the need to jam it to near 100% or the strategy fails. It only takes one guy per neighbourhood who can separate the wheat from the chaff and the tactic fails; partly because he serves as an example that it can be done, and party because local distributuion can be handled by sneakernet
But like I said before, they've no choice but to try...
I always think of is as the the more predictable the signal, the less info. Of course, that is how physics entropy works, with the value maximising as the energy of every atom tends toward the same value.
And I do remember that the two are opposites, because Maxwell's Demon "works" by turning one sort into the other.
So yeah, looks like you're both right. I stand corrected. Thank you.
Sometimes I could almost wish one of these press releases would say our aim is to make the Internet a shittier place for everyone and to gouge the public so deep that their children's children will still be paying off the debt. I wouldn't approve, but at least it would reduce the entropy of the data stream.
It's not that I suspect the Mozilla corp of anything untoward, and short of omitting it entirely, I can't think of a better way to to say what they appear to be saying.
All the same, it's a bit semantically null, innit? Where's the point of a FAQ if you fill it with meaningless platitudes?
And yet, if we all, stoics to the end, suffer in silence, then the problem is never discussed and the situation never improves.
And we do too have the power to change the world. You and me and everyone else on the planet - a little more every day. Defeatism serves us ill.
It's cheaper to retain people with respect and money than with money alone. As the saying goes "it doesn't cost anything to be polite". I can't understand why more corporate cultures don't embrace this idea, but I suspect it's because so many people get into management just so they can have people to boss around.
Alas, I think I have to agree with you. Still, I take heart from the fact that many corporate cultures do "get it". I suppose the question is how do these companies form and how can we encourage them over less enlightened entities...
Well, I did and it wasn't and I appreciate the examples.
The point he's missing is that the Hungarian representative in the commission does not have to (and is not supposed to) follow his government's orders, as he's acting in the interest of the whole union, not just those of his country.
I'd missed that one myself. Wow. So the commission are accountable to no one at all? That doesn't sound very good to me.
There are many reasons why this is unreasonable (the main reason, of course, being that it would simply not work on such a large scale)
This is the twenty first century. We have, as the saying goes, the technology.
what makes the proposition especially absurd is that he wants to change a system that has been proven to work by the very same patents decision Stallman is ranting about.
Umm... "work" to what end? How do you see the outcome as successful and for whom?
We mobilised a massive campaign against patents, only to have the manifest wishes of the electorate and parliament repeated ignored and overruled, and in the end we gained a no score draw, because the bad guys feared they would lose. I think Stallman is correct is as much as the campaign served to highlight how undemocratic the EU system actually is.
Stallman's proposition would, however, eliminate one step from the legislative process, seriously distorting the balance of powers
as there would be noone keeping the "upper house" in check (who keeps an eye on the people?);
Which people? The electorate? The commission? I think Stallman's proposed referenda fulfill that role. The people get to keep check on the "upper house" directly. Sounds good to me.
it would still, however, be quite easily manipulable (the EU referendums all around Europe are a good example of this).
Yeah I noticed that. They do it by saying "this is just an advisory referendum - we don't have to do what you say unless it's the answer we want". Or they ask it again and again until they get the proper answer.
Stallman's proposing changes to make the EU legislative apparatus more accountsble to the electorate. That's what democracy is supposed to be about.
Well, I can see how that might help. However, leaving aside my oh-so-delicate skin for a moment, I also don't think it helps to get into the habit of thinking of people as units or costs. It reduces the amount of empathy in the workplace. People will treat "costs" with far less sympathy than they would "people"
of course it's bad management to actually tell people that to their faces, as respect is cheaper than salary as a retention mechanism.
Gosh yes. Because workers are regularly rude as hell the the company CEO and he never objects because he gets all that money... no, wait, it doesn't work like that does it?
Maybe people value both money and respect?
Did I forget to close a tag? oops!
Stallman seems to lack knowledge of how the EU works. This is best illustrated by his "proposal" for changes in the legislative process.
It's all very well to say that, but haven't said how you think his understand may be lacking or why you feel his proposal is unrealistic. You could be making a valuable point of penetrating insight. Alternatively, you're more likely to be a troll spoutng kneejerk disagreements on a subject of which you know nothing.
In the absence of evidence, it's very difficult to tell whic it might be. However Stallman's name carries considerably more weight, so unless you're willing to explain...
If you're IT staff but don't make the product, then you can expect to be treated as a cost to be managed - since you are.
Would managing us involve a public slagging off at the AGM? If so, I'm not sure I'd agree. Any employee is deserving of some basic respect for the tasks he performs. I can understand taking fire if a group have been performing poorly, but purly because of the function they perform?
In any case, the coders in this case were making product.
If you're an engineer designing the product in *any* field and you're treated like a cost to be managed, it's a real good sign that there's a better company out there looking for you!
The turnover at this place was indeed very high. I knew one guy who signed on because his partner was in scotland, and the company had jsut started a big project there. Within a week he'd been transferred to the opposite end of the UK. I remember the farewell party when he left.
If you want someone that doesn't make anything, there's always middle management. They don't make product, so if anyone was going to be de-humanised into "a cost to be managed" you'd expect it to be them. Doesn't happen very often compared with IT guys for some reason.
Most of that time has been as a contractor. That distorts the workplace experience a little, but it also means I've seen a lot of different companies and how they treat their personel. I'm quite content in my current role, but I think I've seen both ends of the spectrum over that time.
Increasingly over that period, some environemts have come to see IT staff as a necessary evil. One CEO of a software house(!) gave a speech at the company's annual meeting saying how salesmen were good because they brought money in, and how developers were bad because all they did was cost money. I don't know what he though the salesmen sold. That sort of thing gets dispiriting real fast.
Overall I wouldn't be at all surprised if the general level of dissatisfaction among UK IT types has increased. Are we going to see an exodus? Of course not - coders still need to eat. However a low morale workforce benefits no one.
They're not the only ones!
You know, the way you harp on the verb "confuse", a casual reader could be forgiven for thinking that the GP's main point was that the constitution was deliberately confusing, rather than that a horde of small local ordinances are nibbling away at the first amendment piecemeal.
Interestingly enough however, the GP doesn't use the word "confuse" once in his post. Were you perhaps confused about which post you were replying to?
Or maybe just trying to confuse the issue...
The best approach might be to strip "marriage" of all legal meaning.
Here's a heuristic suitable for human beings:
If you're about whether something is exciting or not, it isn't exciting.
Simply defending against a lawsuit from Microsoft would vankrupt a great many small companies. Unless the EFF make a point of overturning this one, there are still thousands of others they can abuse.
And more every day...
Aye, but look at it this way.
There are two dimensions two what we currently think of as "marriage". Let's call them spiritual and governmental.
The spiritual aspect involves getting God to OK your choice of a partner. Or to witness it maybe. I expect different faiths have different ideas of what marriage is about.
The governmental aspects however deal mainly in legal aspects. Married couples may get taxed at a different rate, there better defined procedures in place should the union break up, that sort of thing.
You'll note that this separation is already implicit in the concept of a civil ceremony marriage. The government already allows (heterosexual) couples to implement the govermental aspects of a marriage union without any spiritual component.
Now since we're talking politics here, we're really restricted in the changes we can demand. We can require that the government extend its concept of governmental marriage to encompass same sex unions. In fact I can see no sane reason why this should be denied. However, we shouldn't expect the government to force religions to change their creeds. That has to be an internal decision for each particular faith.
So, suppose we have a government that permits same sex marriage in the purely governmental aspect of it. Do we call this "marriage" or should we find a new name for it?
As a geek, and with a geek's dislike of overcrowded namespaces, I'd have to say choose a new name. "Civil Union" seems as good as any.
Interestingly, this would have the effect of technically "unmarrying" hetero couples married under a civil ceremony, although their "Civil Union" would be unaffected. It should also be possible to gat around this by creating a non-governemtal, agnostic "church" whose sole function was to bless Civil Unions into formal marraige.
After that, anyone who wanted the explicit blessing of their own faith would have to campaign internally within his or her church. It wouldn't satisfy everyone, but it would be fair. And fair is as much as we can sometimes hope for in this sort of argument.
Yeah, that works for small projects. Most business though have specalist requirements. They're going to want some tweakage to their database packages, they'll want something to reflect their internal accounting system. Once companies get used to the idea that they can have the building blocks for free, I think they're going to get creative about how they want their software to work
Most companies will never give anything back into the community. They will just take the program and use it to their advantage.
That's acceptable. We wrote it so everyone could take it and use to their advantage.
Microsoft may have abused its position of power by letting IE go, but there still is competition (firefox and safari come to mind).
mmm... no. Letting IE stagnate was MS privilege. It does however illustrate how monopolies provide poorer products since they lack an incentive to innovate. MS didn't restart work on IE until Firefox started eatiing into their market share - in other words until they stopped having a monopoly on web browsers.
Now if you want abuse, look at how they presure OEMs into only shipping windows as the OS.
This is all you need to do to defeat Microsoft (rather than bitch about getting a law passed).
Never bitched about getting a law passed, myself. Of course, since I'm not a US citizen, I don't get much of a say anyway. It doesn't matter - I think we can do it with better software.
Create something better that most people will want to use (of course this is easier said than done).
Yes, of course. Errm.... didn't we get into this discussion because you said that writing better software was evil? Or is it only evil if I release it for free?
e e cummings
i should stick to the the poetry
if i were you
Obviously I disagree. I'll explain why.
They are evil only if you believe that authors should hold no rights over their creation (because "Information wants to be free").
Well, actually, there is a school of thought, including the US Constitution, to the effect that authors hold no "rights" to their creations at all. All information of every sort is automatically part of the public domain. However to encourge creative works, a temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea called "copyright" is permitted. Similarly, to encourage inventors to disclose methods of manufacture, an time-limited monopoly called a patent is also permitted. Copyright applies to the specific expression of an idea and patent to tangible inventions and manufacturing processes. The distinction has been sadly blurred on recent times, but these are the underlying principles as I understand them.
"Information wants to be free" doesn't enter into it.
Only then is there any reason in completely rejecting software patents -- or any other forms of protecting some form of creation or invention -- as 'evil'.
Umm... no. Patents are unnecessary to reward software innovation where copyright has proven suffcient to the task. Patents far from protecting people's "intellectual property" have the effect of making existing copyrights worthless (since the patent holder can prevent marketing of a pre-existing copyright) and far from protecting the small developer, they give the holders of large patent portfolios a means to extort patents and copyright from small holdes who cannot trade one-for-one. They can be used to stifle innovation and unfairly surpress competition in the marketplace and they can be used to surpress open source software in its entirity.
I think those are excellent reasons for characterising software patents as "evil". Once again, "information wants to be free" doesn't enter into it.
If, however, the creators of software are to be protected (and Copyright is not Good Enough)
I'm going to have to ask you to justify that statement. How is Copyright insufficent to the task? Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet using Copyright, backed by Trade Secrets and Non Disclosure Agreements. I think Gates' billions present an irrefutable demonstration that Copyright is indeed Good Enough.
Please explain why you think this may not be the case.
software patents turn out to be just a bad solution to a problem. Unfortunately, they seem to be the only existing solution.
So which problem would that be? Protecting creator rights? To they extent that they have them they are vested in copyright and, as I have argued, adequately protected. So I'll give you the "bad solution" part, but the "only existing solution" part would appear to be utter nonsense.
Unless of course the "problem" you see software patents solving is "legitimate competition in a free market" or "open source software". In that case I might grant the effectiveness but debate the desirability and morality of the solution.
Whoo, caps lock! Is that authoratative or what?
So, how does this make a software patent less EVIL? What benefit does this grant to society that we should sanction these MONOPOLIES?
Sorry, didn't mean to sound so aggressive. I just don't like the idea of someone walling away with the idea that there can be non-evil swpats. Just twitchy after the big EU patent debate, I guess.
Which still leaves considerable scope for it to be vile, unfair, anti-competetive and counter-productive.
Software patents are a bad thing. Even the slightly-less-bad-than-the-others ones.