There is more to this than it seems. I remembered an old article that people might find really interested (I believe this article was submitted to slashdot previously but I couldn't find it).
The article talks about Sun's strategy. Steps 1 and 2 are very interesting:
"Step No. 1: Make the argument that Linux equals Red Hat. Linux has become a social force, with all of the free world supposedly cooperating to create an always improving operating system that is forever cheaper and more valuable than the other versions of Unix."
Coincidence? I don't think so.
"Step No. 2: belittle Red Hat. By collapsing Linux into Red Hat, sun now has a clear target. It can hammer away at a company, as opposed to waging the impossible task of fighting a social movement. And according to Sun, Red Hat is a very vulnerable target -a company with limited resources, engineering talent, world coverage and capabilities- with potentially serious intellectual-property issues."
There are two more points which you can check directly going to the link above.
Also I suppose this will mean some more astroturfing in the short term trying to convince us all that Linux = Red Hat.
personally I prefer the 'big taxes, least corruption in the world' method.
I prefer the "less corruption in the world, no need for big taxes" method.
Honestly I don't think that feeding the government more money will make them feel satiated. And as a matter of fact I would rather pay the same tax directly to whatever service they provide needs more money. That way at least it would be much clearer if the tax is actually required.
The fact that the TV is on doesn't stop you from not watching it.
In any case you shouldn't turn off a tv that's not yours without asking before for permission to do so. If you are alone I see nothing wrong with you turning it off, but I still think you need to ask. Maybe the doctor actually wants it on in case someone else comes in.
Hell sometimes I have trouble concentrating on TVs in airports. You know, it is hard sometimes since TVs usually are on mute and there's a lot of people passing by and talking and airplanes landing and those mini-cars moving around...
Something similar happens when I hear a cell-phone ringing. I just take it out of the owner's pocket, throw it to the floor and start jumping on it until it doesn't wanna ring anymore.
I wonder why they say I am a childish bastard though.
And it's the height of arrogance and intellectual elitism to think that a TV with a working IR receiver should not be made use off. Put some black tape on it if you don't want the TV to receive signals.
Oh sure. I bet the owner of the bar really wanted customers to come by with their own remote controllers. After all he didn't put black tape right?
And hey, since he put the salt on the table without any kind of chain attaching it to the table he probably wanted you to take it home when you're finished. How sweet!
I don't know if they are allowed to do that or not, but I suppose there may have been some reason why they would not want to reveal the intrusion too soon. IMHO as long as they take the necessary steps to try and solve the mistake they are doing a good job, and a 1 month delay in spreading the notice is not that much time if the FBI is already investigating on it.
I have no clue of where you live but I know that most european countries have laws on privacy issues. For example in Italy (and I think this applies to the UK too) you cannot publicate someone's private information without his written permission.
And honestly, I can't see any benefit in having the freedom to post other peoples private information around. So from my point of view this kind of "censorship" (as you call it) is welcome here.
And how would an international court, made up of say, France, Libya, China, Germany, Turkey, Spain, Canada and Greece, be necessarily so much more impartial? I am certainly no Bushite, but even I, as a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, would find the idea of an international court to try bin Laden patently offensive. He committed a crime against me, in my territory and I deserve to have him tried in a court that follows my laws. The crime was committed here, and he should be tried here. Victims have rights too, you know, and that's why extradition treaties exist in the first place.
I can't see how an international court can be offensive to anyone. This statement alone shows the little trust you have in other countries. Many people from other countries are giving their lives for a war on terrorism that the US wanted, just because the US wanted. Wether it was a right war or a wrong war is another problem. But what is it that makes those lives less important than american lives?
It is also funny to note that the US is always contrary to military action from other countries, when those countries are the target of terrorists (Israel...). Maybe other countries are not capable of being impartial like the US... right?
No, because he would not be tried for attacking the United States and he would not be judged by the American people - he would be tried for the murder of almost 3,000 people in the United States, and he would be judged by trained and experienced legal professionals just like every other case in this country.
If the US wants to be the judge alone, then it shouldn't ask foreingers to give their lives for their cause. They have a debt with many countries for their support.
Obviously, as in any other case, the judge would have to have had no personal involvement in the attacks. It's a judge's duty by law to be impartial; now, not all of them are, but I'd trust a US federal judge any day of the week over any international court, which these days would almost necessarily be comprised primarily of countries not friendly to us and in many cases openly sympathetic to bin Laden's cause.
Oh, right. An international court cannot be as impartial as US judges. That must be the reason why those two jet pilots that killed 20 people in italy a few years back were tried in the US to then make it out without much pain.
When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies. Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever.
"A one handed device to manually change certain computer controlled graphical bits that appear on screen to allow the controlling person to intuitively make decisions on a virtual environment and quickly execute any chosen task."
Do you think the patents office would say no to that?
"... I believe voice comm was standard in Half-Life multiplayer in 1998..."
I'm not sure about that but there's an old Mac game called Marathon which was released nearly when Doom was released that had the in-game voice communication feature.
"PC games will never go away, but if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy... then the number and quality of games will almost certainly decrease."
Yeah, especially expensive games. Why not do like other industries do and look for ways to reduce the price of the games you sell? You know, you can only buy so many games for 40 euros before you run out of money...
The entertainment industry is the only one I know that seems to think that if they don't sell, it's their customers fault. And they even get laws to backup that!
Perfectly legal? By the time you realize what the game is installing you will probably have accepted all agreements and be unable to give it back.
Don't get me wrong, the license probably talked about the driver installation but explain that to my computer-ignorant friends who thought the game would just be a game but now can't use half of their computer.
You want to put something that disables the programs I use? That's fine, just make sure I know about it by reading the box. Put something like a big "THIS SOFTWARE IS DESIGNED TO DISABLE OTHER PROGRAMS IN YOUR COMPUTER TO PREVENT PIRACY" or something along that line.
I'd really want to see how many people still buys it.
The point is that the general public doesn't know what happens behind the scene when they click on a button with their mouse.
And that is the very reason why they should question it in the first place, for God's sake!
This may sound strange to you buy I think it is quite the opposite. When you go to the supermarket looking for milk and are given a bottle of milk, you have to trust the work that goes behind it's production even if you don't understand it. Otherwise you would not drink milk, would you? The same thing applies to almost everything in your life. This is because, unfortunatelly, if we were to question every product or service we use, we would end up not trusting any of them.
This doesn't mean the product/service is going to live up to your expectations, but simply that you are trusting someone else (ie. the computer experts) to decide wether the voting system is to be trusted or not. And by computer experts I don't mean a random geek, but someone with access to the system to at least be able to see how it works.
As you said, the drake equation can give us estimates to work on but unfortunately most of the values used inside that equation have an exessively wide range of possible values.
The fl and fi for instance both range from 100% to close to 0%.
So while we do have theoretical means to try and calculate statistics on life existing somewhere else it's all based on unaccurate estimates and wide value ranges. The idea is interesting although it doesn't tell us if the chances are high or low.
The point is that the general public doesn't know what happens behind the scene when they click on a button with their mouse. Maybe the reason those experts don't trust e-voting is because they know it takes only so much to be able to read and modify data going through the net.
How frigging arrogant would we have to be to honestly believe that in the ENTIRE universe, we are COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNIQUE?
That's not arrogance, it's just a belief. You can call it a "statistically improbable belief" but not arrogance.
On the other hand I would like to understand how is it even possible to calculate the chances of life appearing in another spot of the galaxy, and the chances that such life becomes intelligent. Personally, I don't think they are as high as you seem to believe.
IBM is in it for IBM. I completely agree with that. But it seems to me as if IBM is currently trying to beat it's competition by working on R&D while the rest of the industry (I am exagerating a bit here) spends it's time and resources fighting over patents.
In my opinion this is not only because of the monetary benefits of such tactics, but also because they want to cast an image of a good company (both in quality and morality). They embrace what's popular, and quickly forget what becomes obsolete. By working this way, it is unlikely that they will ever need to fight something as Linux.
And anyway, in my opinion IBM cares too much on their image to try and fight Linux in an unfair manner. They would just probably try to come out with something better.
I have. And I am not a Linux user. Right now I am using a Mac but my previous computer was a PC running XP. XP wasn't all that bad for personal use... but stability? I had my registry corrupted twice, and it's not like I did anything weird with it.
Maybe it was just me and the linux users... but hey it's not like I was trying my best to make my PC with XP crash or anything like that.
You may have heard about recent charges in online forums that some JBoss employees, including me, were personally involved in anonymous postings on developer sites, which I could deny, but I'll try to save my butt here by confusing you. The practice, known as "astroturfing", is wildly popular on sites like Slashdot that actually let you post as "anonymous coward". We at JBoss know this because everyone does that here. JBoss has the reputation as an in your face, straight up, tell it like it is company were we take advantage of any chance we get to promote ourselves and our products as if we were normal people. I personally don't need a mask to speak my mind and one thing I can't stand is two faced hypocrisy even though I really enjoyed doing it myself. This has made us many friends and a few critics... well ok many critics and little if any friends.
As you may know, the open source community would not be what it is today -- a real challenge to traditional software models -- without the strong opinions and outspoken voices of the developers, developers like us who really enjoy their own voices. I myself am among these wonderful voices. But we do not always see eye to eye on the evolution of the open source movement, especially because most of the open source community doesn't like us anyway. Some prefer subsidized open source, whereby they work corporate jobs and contribute/moonlight on the side without getting a dime for all the sacrifice they put into it. Many others, including us at JBoss, prefer the "Professional Open Source" model, whereby it is our job to work on open source and free software all day long, all the time, while reading Slashdot especially. We all passionately believe in the standalone potential of professional open source. JBoss' growing traction in the enterprise market, our expansion of products and services beyond the original JBoss Application Server and our recent funding from VCs have intensified scrutiny on our community and company, for bad and worse.
JBoss is transitioning as a company to deliver on our commitment to make open source a safe and viable alternative for companies such as yours, which could be our next customer if we could only force you to buy from us. We have hired the most talented developers - many of whom are innovators and lead developers of popular open source projects and can write up to 100 posts a minute. We provide them with the means to continue developing and support these products while creating value for our community and wealth for themselves. As a company we are growing rapidly to meet the expert professional services needs of our customers and partners and even for those who don't give a damn about us. We want to be role models for ALL open source developers around the world. To do so, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard and try not to get caught the next time. Our visibility and success puts our customers and partners in a situation where you expect and demand that employees of JBoss Inc. hold themselves to that higher standard. Let's all put the professional back in professional open source, because it was your fault too if we removed the professional from open source in the first place. "Astroturfing", as we all knew it, is hereby banned at JBoss, starting with me.
"So does that mean if you come up with some novel idea, intel or some other big company should be able to profit from it, while you don't because they have the capital to persue the idea and you don't? Would it really benefit society if people could only earn money through either manual labor, or being part of the already established business community?"
Yes, we need some level of protection. The problem is patents, at least as they are now, are not the solution at all. Especially if you look at how long their life is.
Their purpose should be to grant the person that came up with such idea, a fari remuneration for his efforts. As they are now, they are an incentive for companies to sue everyone in sight and ask for really absurd ammounts of money. I mean, ok stealing an idea is a bad thing... but 500 Million US dollars? I think we are highly overrating ideas.
K, I figured this was a girl (Andrea) and thought a last name of "Arch Angel" was, like, way cool and stuff, but figured for sure that was her IRC nick... was quite shocked when I read the pronoun "his" later in the blurb....
Someone with a bit of more knowledge on Latin please correct me if I am wrong.
AFAIK the reason "Andrea" is used as a male name in Italy is that it has the latin root of the word "Andros", which means "male". Keep in mind that in most italian schools you still have to study Latin, and sometimes even Greek.
I'm a bit off-topic here, but I imagined people would be interested to know this.
As an independent shareware developer I would like to refuse to sell software where software patents exist. But using that as a way to protest against patents means I'm probably not going to see a dime, as those countries are probably my best and only customers.
This sucks...
On the other hand maybe it would work if a big group of small commercial and non-commercial developers organized a boycott of that kind that lasted at least a few weeks. I would surely take my chances and risk some customers to speak out my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
The article talks about Sun's strategy. Steps 1 and 2 are very interesting:
Coincidence? I don't think so.
There are two more points which you can check directly going to the link above.
Also I suppose this will mean some more astroturfing in the short term trying to convince us all that Linux = Red Hat.
I prefer the "less corruption in the world, no need for big taxes" method.
Honestly I don't think that feeding the government more money will make them feel satiated. And as a matter of fact I would rather pay the same tax directly to whatever service they provide needs more money. That way at least it would be much clearer if the tax is actually required.
Diego Rey
The fact that the TV is on doesn't stop you from not watching it.
In any case you shouldn't turn off a tv that's not yours without asking before for permission to do so. If you are alone I see nothing wrong with you turning it off, but I still think you need to ask. Maybe the doctor actually wants it on in case someone else comes in.
Hell sometimes I have trouble concentrating on TVs in airports. You know, it is hard sometimes since TVs usually are on mute and there's a lot of people passing by and talking and airplanes landing and those mini-cars moving around...
Something similar happens when I hear a cell-phone ringing. I just take it out of the owner's pocket, throw it to the floor and start jumping on it until it doesn't wanna ring anymore.
I wonder why they say I am a childish bastard though.
Oh sure. I bet the owner of the bar really wanted customers to come by with their own remote controllers. After all he didn't put black tape right?
And hey, since he put the salt on the table without any kind of chain attaching it to the table he probably wanted you to take it home when you're finished. How sweet!
I don't know if they are allowed to do that or not, but I suppose there may have been some reason why they would not want to reveal the intrusion too soon. IMHO as long as they take the necessary steps to try and solve the mistake they are doing a good job, and a 1 month delay in spreading the notice is not that much time if the FBI is already investigating on it.
I have no clue of where you live but I know that most european countries have laws on privacy issues. For example in Italy (and I think this applies to the UK too) you cannot publicate someone's private information without his written permission.
And honestly, I can't see any benefit in having the freedom to post other peoples private information around. So from my point of view this kind of "censorship" (as you call it) is welcome here.
I can't see how an international court can be offensive to anyone. This statement alone shows the little trust you have in other countries. Many people from other countries are giving their lives for a war on terrorism that the US wanted, just because the US wanted. Wether it was a right war or a wrong war is another problem. But what is it that makes those lives less important than american lives?
It is also funny to note that the US is always contrary to military action from other countries, when those countries are the target of terrorists (Israel...). Maybe other countries are not capable of being impartial like the US... right?
If the US wants to be the judge alone, then it shouldn't ask foreingers to give their lives for their cause. They have a debt with many countries for their support.
Oh, right. An international court cannot be as impartial as US judges. That must be the reason why those two jet pilots that killed 20 people in italy a few years back were tried in the US to then make it out without much pain.
A digital thing lasts forever???
Maybe after 10 cognac glasses...
"A one handed device to manually change certain computer controlled graphical bits that appear on screen to allow the controlling person to intuitively make decisions on a virtual environment and quickly execute any chosen task."
Do you think the patents office would say no to that?
I'm not sure about that but there's an old Mac game called Marathon which was released nearly when Doom was released that had the in-game voice communication feature.
What's that? Like 1992?
Yeah, especially expensive games. Why not do like other industries do and look for ways to reduce the price of the games you sell? You know, you can only buy so many games for 40 euros before you run out of money...
The entertainment industry is the only one I know that seems to think that if they don't sell, it's their customers fault. And they even get laws to backup that!
Diego Rey Mendez
Perfectly legal? By the time you realize what the game is installing you will probably have accepted all agreements and be unable to give it back.
Don't get me wrong, the license probably talked about the driver installation but explain that to my computer-ignorant friends who thought the game would just be a game but now can't use half of their computer.
You want to put something that disables the programs I use? That's fine, just make sure I know about it by reading the box. Put something like a big "THIS SOFTWARE IS DESIGNED TO DISABLE OTHER PROGRAMS IN YOUR COMPUTER TO PREVENT PIRACY" or something along that line.
I'd really want to see how many people still buys it.
Diego Rey Mendez
This may sound strange to you buy I think it is quite the opposite. When you go to the supermarket looking for milk and are given a bottle of milk, you have to trust the work that goes behind it's production even if you don't understand it. Otherwise you would not drink milk, would you? The same thing applies to almost everything in your life. This is because, unfortunatelly, if we were to question every product or service we use, we would end up not trusting any of them.
This doesn't mean the product/service is going to live up to your expectations, but simply that you are trusting someone else (ie. the computer experts) to decide wether the voting system is to be trusted or not. And by computer experts I don't mean a random geek, but someone with access to the system to at least be able to see how it works.
Just a thought.
As you said, the drake equation can give us estimates to work on but unfortunately most of the values used inside that equation have an exessively wide range of possible values.
The fl and fi for instance both range from 100% to close to 0%.
So while we do have theoretical means to try and calculate statistics on life existing somewhere else it's all based on unaccurate estimates and wide value ranges. The idea is interesting although it doesn't tell us if the chances are high or low.
The point is that the general public doesn't know what happens behind the scene when they click on a button with their mouse. Maybe the reason those experts don't trust e-voting is because they know it takes only so much to be able to read and modify data going through the net.
Just my 2 cents.
That's not arrogance, it's just a belief. You can call it a "statistically improbable belief" but not arrogance.
On the other hand I would like to understand how is it even possible to calculate the chances of life appearing in another spot of the galaxy, and the chances that such life becomes intelligent. Personally, I don't think they are as high as you seem to believe.
IBM is in it for IBM. I completely agree with that. But it seems to me as if IBM is currently trying to beat it's competition by working on R&D while the rest of the industry (I am exagerating a bit here) spends it's time and resources fighting over patents.
In my opinion this is not only because of the monetary benefits of such tactics, but also because they want to cast an image of a good company (both in quality and morality). They embrace what's popular, and quickly forget what becomes obsolete. By working this way, it is unlikely that they will ever need to fight something as Linux.
And anyway, in my opinion IBM cares too much on their image to try and fight Linux in an unfair manner. They would just probably try to come out with something better.
Diego
I have. And I am not a Linux user. Right now I am using a Mac but my previous computer was a PC running XP. XP wasn't all that bad for personal use... but stability? I had my registry corrupted twice, and it's not like I did anything weird with it.
Maybe it was just me and the linux users... but hey it's not like I was trying my best to make my PC with XP crash or anything like that.
Forgot to remove the signature. Of course the parent post if not from JBoss or Mac Fleury.
You may have heard about recent charges in online forums that some JBoss employees, including me, were personally involved in anonymous postings on developer sites, which I could deny, but I'll try to save my butt here by confusing you. The practice, known as "astroturfing", is wildly popular on sites like Slashdot that actually let you post as "anonymous coward". We at JBoss know this because everyone does that here. JBoss has the reputation as an in your face, straight up, tell it like it is company were we take advantage of any chance we get to promote ourselves and our products as if we were normal people. I personally don't need a mask to speak my mind and one thing I can't stand is two faced hypocrisy even though I really enjoyed doing it myself. This has made us many friends and a few critics... well ok many critics and little if any friends.
As you may know, the open source community would not be what it is today -- a real challenge to traditional software models -- without the strong opinions and outspoken voices of the developers, developers like us who really enjoy their own voices. I myself am among these wonderful voices. But we do not always see eye to eye on the evolution of the open source movement, especially because most of the open source community doesn't like us anyway. Some prefer subsidized open source, whereby they work corporate jobs and contribute/moonlight on the side without getting a dime for all the sacrifice they put into it. Many others, including us at JBoss, prefer the "Professional Open Source" model, whereby it is our job to work on open source and free software all day long, all the time, while reading Slashdot especially. We all passionately believe in the standalone potential of professional open source. JBoss' growing traction in the enterprise market, our expansion of products and services beyond the original JBoss Application Server and our recent funding from VCs have intensified scrutiny on our community and company, for bad and worse.
JBoss is transitioning as a company to deliver on our commitment to make open source a safe and viable alternative for companies such as yours, which could be our next customer if we could only force you to buy from us. We have hired the most talented developers - many of whom are innovators and lead developers of popular open source projects and can write up to 100 posts a minute. We provide them with the means to continue developing and support these products while creating value for our community and wealth for themselves. As a company we are growing rapidly to meet the expert professional services needs of our customers and partners and even for those who don't give a damn about us. We want to be role models for ALL open source developers around the world. To do so, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard and try not to get caught the next time. Our visibility and success puts our customers and partners in a situation where you expect and demand that employees of JBoss Inc. hold themselves to that higher standard. Let's all put the professional back in professional open source, because it was your fault too if we removed the professional from open source in the first place. "Astroturfing", as we all knew it, is hereby banned at JBoss, starting with me.
Sincerely (most of all),
Marc Fleury
Founder, Chairman and CEO
JBoss, Inc.
Yes, we need some level of protection. The problem is patents, at least as they are now, are not the solution at all. Especially if you look at how long their life is.
Their purpose should be to grant the person that came up with such idea, a fari remuneration for his efforts. As they are now, they are an incentive for companies to sue everyone in sight and ask for really absurd ammounts of money. I mean, ok stealing an idea is a bad thing... but 500 Million US dollars? I think we are highly overrating ideas.
Diego Rey
Someone with a bit of more knowledge on Latin please correct me if I am wrong.
AFAIK the reason "Andrea" is used as a male name in Italy is that it has the latin root of the word "Andros", which means "male". Keep in mind that in most italian schools you still have to study Latin, and sometimes even Greek.
I'm a bit off-topic here, but I imagined people would be interested to know this.
Diego Rey
As an independent shareware developer I would like to refuse to sell software where software patents exist. But using that as a way to protest against patents means I'm probably not going to see a dime, as those countries are probably my best and only customers.
This sucks...
On the other hand maybe it would work if a big group of small commercial and non-commercial developers organized a boycott of that kind that lasted at least a few weeks. I would surely take my chances and risk some customers to speak out my mind.
Diego Rey