Planck looked the black body radiation problem and the ultraviolet catastrophe and sent of a postcard claiming that fatal flaw was the assumption that energy was continuous.
Actually, according to Kuhn (and I tend to agree), Planck actually didn't realize he was making that break from classical physics.
Planck had worked on the black-body problem for a long time, and only after that time did he cave in to follow Boltzmann's ideas, thinking at the time that the quantization condition was simply a mathematical tool. It took Einstein and Poincare to point out that the use of Boltzmann's technique implied small quantum occupation numbers in the high-frequency portion of the spectrum; i.e. that the Boltzmann approach was actually radically new physics.
Now, Planck did realize at them time that his introduction of "h" and its failure to be cancelled in the final formula was dramatically new: he was quite proud (justifiably, of course) to have discovered a new fundamental constant. But it took years for the new mechanical implications to become clear, even to him.
International trade simply does not devastate economies and communities. CHANGE can devastate communities. Look what happens to mining towns when the ore runs out. Pin your hopes on the wrong cause, and you are going to suffer. That is called LIFE.
People at the "bottom" have jobs *because* these jobs are part of profitable organizations. Companies that lose money do not provide jobs for long. Nobody owes you a job just because you are a nice guy, or a little guy. You get a job because your labor is being put to use in a profitable way.
When your community cannot provide a use for your labor, then you should either upgrade your labor or move. That's life. You shouldn't blame some international trade bogeyman that you claim to like except when it hurts you, which seems to be all the time.
Look at the bright side: at least nobody tried to "ethnically cleanse" you. *That* devastates communities.
These hypothetical machine tools are NO GOOD without corresponding machinists to use them. They make it cheaper to give machinists jobs. Still don't want them? Then you must be against the machinist jobs you claim you want to create.
A key concept you are missing is that exporting is the "disadvantage" of international trade. Working to produce goods is not the chief reward in life, being able to *consume* goods is! Other countries sending us stuff we want is the advantage of trade. This country sending out stuff that other countries want is the burden.
And what "normal cycle" of things are you talking about? International trade is not barter by individuals or individual companies. Just because you personally don't get orders from India doesn't mean that nobody else gets orders from them.
In fact, to a first approximation, all those U.S. dollars that get sent to India to compensate for software services *have* to come back to the U.S. in exchange for something, because they don't have value elsewhere.
Like I said, READ ABOUT DAVID RICARDO, who understood these issues much better than you seem to way back in the early 1800s. Until you do, suffice it to say that your apparent views on how international trade works are inaccurate, misleading, and in the hands of politicians, positively dangerous to economic well-being.
How can you possibly say you would turn down low-cost machine tools? They're exactly the way to support all those advanced machinist jobs you claim are so great: get some machinists machine tools and let them go to work.
If I put American in front of the machine tools, I assume you would accept them? Even though you would be taking business from a high-cost American machine tool maker, and giving business to a low-cost American machine tool maker?
From the same place that software jobs came from: new companies developing new technologies to serve new markets.
Way back around the time of the American revolution, about 90% of the U.S. population was employed in agriculture. Today, the corresponding percentage is something below 5%. My god, all those farmers losing jobs! How could you possibly replace all those farmers?
The answer is that the farmers became immeasurably more productive (actually, there are still too much farming in America due to wasteful subsidies and trade barriers) while the rest of the population found some other job due to this thing called the Industrial Revolution.
Does anyone think the U.S. has some huge shortage of farming jobs? Someday, we'll feel the same way about tool-and-die makers.
If I invented some "magic software machine" that worked in response to e-mail and voice commands to produce software according to specification for a small material cost, then that would be a tremendous boost to productivity. I don't have to spend time and effort coding myself, I just have to work on the specs, and the magic software machine writes and tests it for me.
Given how much Slashdot can gush over the latest gcc release or Java IDE advancement, you'd think people would recognize this kind of machine as a tremendously powerful tool for eliminating grunt work and speeding development.
Yet, because the "magic software machine" is actually a bunch of Indian programmers at the other end of the phone/e-mail connection, this is somehow a terrible and destructive thing.
There isn't some limited amount of "work to be done" which has to be divided among workers. Adding workers to the economy does not reduce the amount of work available for each worker. Instead, it expands the amount that can be produced.
If India offered to ship us low-cost machine tools, would you turn them down?
[if] Michigan were a country where major killers were things like starvation and dysentary, I would see no problem with banning car imports from Detroit....Michigan were a country where major killers were things like starvation and dysentary, I would see no problem with banning car imports from Detroit.
Your economic thinking is about 250 years out of date, in addition to being wrong. Please download the David Ricardo patch to correct this bug.
Economics and international trade are most definitely NOT a zero sum game. Importing services from India does not directly impoverish the United States. In fact, it allows the United States to produce more by deploying its labor in *relatively* more efficient ways. Your error is one of composition: simply because one programmer in the U.S. is displaced does not mean that there is a net loss in economic welfare in the U.S.
Trade barriers hurt the general economy while avoiding dislocation of a very visible but small sector of the economy. Nonetheless, the net impact is NEGATIVE for both the importer and exporter. Trade barriers REDUCE the total amount of economic output that can be generated by the economy. They keep the pie small, while the slice that represents the protected sector stays relatively large.
If instead, we dropped barriers and redeployed our labor and capital according to the freed market, the total output of the two economies combined will increase. Redeployment is painful, but it is more painful the longer it is delayed. Evidently, too many people in the U.S. are working in jobs that can be outsourced, and not enough people in India are working at those jobs. The people in the U.S. need to find other ways to employ their labor where the rewards are higher. Just like they went into software because they could get jobs there in the past.
The world is a dynamic place. Trade barriers make things stay the same for a little longer, but only because they impede economic growth.
he is arguing that, at a very high level, current scientific approaches to large systems are flawed.
Yes, but of course they are flawed. Wolfram fails to present anything *better* in the sense of leading to results.
CA can generate pretty and "surprisingly" complex patterns. In fact, and this is the one real advance, which isn't *new* in ANKOS, just quoted, you can prove that at least one 1-D CA nearest-neighbor rule can support Turing-complete computing. But only if you found the particular rule in advance by a brute-force search.
The universe is fully of pretty and "surprisingly" complex patterns. That doesn't mean that a CA can be constructed to explain them, or even if one could, that the CA actually "explains" anything, in the sense of telling us something we didn't already know.
There isn't any apparent way to make *progress* on any physical problem by using CA ideas. Having to do an exhaustive search to identify "complex" behavior in a 1-D CA means that there isn't yet any a priori method to determine which CA have a potentially interesting property, and which to reject. In which case Wolfram's "program" for future scientific progress is a mind-bendingly *huge* and mindless task, which will, just possibly, provide a CA formula which simulates the universe.
How are you supposed to identify that CA, however, if you don't *already* know what kind of physics that the CA is supposed to simulate? It's pretty easy to solve a problem even by an inefficient technique when you know what the answer should be. But also unnecessary. And not new.
SMP hardly "blew away" the competition. It was superior in some ways, but much worse in others. It could not use exact ratios, for instance.
As far as Mathematica goes, although implemented in C, the language attempts to simulate a pseudo-Lisp, and fails terribly. It absolutely reeks of someone who saw Lisp, comprehended it in an only superficial way, then thought they could do better. When you try to actually use it as a Lisp, its defects (e.g. its special treatement of the "head" of the expression, including the bizzare nature of its pseudo-APPLY) make it impossible.
Another classic flaw of Mathematica is its idiosyncratic approach to "precision." Yes, it has some advantages in toy demonstrations, but still has big gaping holes just like regular old floating-point.
Superconductivity actually is *my* field, and I'll concur with the anonymous coward: this is an important advance in basic experimental physics, but is *extremely* unlikely to lead in any direct way to the kinds of applications (such as electric power distribution) that are mentioned by the lay press.
What *might* happen is that these experiments give theorists a good proving ground for more sophisticated theories of superconductivity and other quantum states, which *might* apply to new solid-state materials designed to have newly understood properties, which *might* exhibit desirable engineering behavior, such as high temperature, high field superconductivity.
It is an important part of the marketing of any experiment to give a compelling, easily understandable civilian and/or military goal which relates to the research being proposed. Marketing is an important part of scientific research, because it leads to funding. Journalists need it because their editors and readers need to have an easily digestible answer to "why should my readers/I care." Good scientists can communicate that. They also know the difference between "possible impact sometime in the next 50 years" and "probable impact for the next round of funding."
These suggestions of future applications certainly are an attempt to support future funding. And there is absolutely no reason for them to be insulted by it.
Hey, to each his own. I think calling this a matter of "freedom of speech" is a bit over-the-top. Nobody is saying that he can't write or publish his code. He's not being arrested for the code he wrote.
Copyright is very distinct from First Amendment issues.
But if he thinks the licensing terms of his library are worth dying for, I'd say he's gone loopy.
The real question, which I haven't seen clearly articulated in this discussion, comes in two parts:
1) what do you want to achieve 2) what makes you think you have any way of compelling these alleged violators to grant you what you want in number 1?
These are the basics of entering into any kind of negotiation, but you haven't framed them at all. It so happens that many lawyers are trained to analyze situations of this kind and give advice. Which makes it all the sillier that you want to resolve this without lawyers. "I have a leak in my faucet. I don't know how to fix it, but I don't want to call a plumber." But I digress.
If you are the typical idealist who reads slashdot and *still* thinks it is a source of useful information, than the answer to question (1) is probably something like "Force them to release the source for their changes." One has to wonder WHY you care. Do you think they've made changes that will truly benefit the community? Or are you just trying to be a pain in the ass to anyone who doesn't want to play by your rules? (This is my ball, and I'm taking it home...)
Here's a clue: the world ain't fair. People lie, cheat, steal, murder, and do all sorts of awful things to other people who don't deserve it. In the grand scheme of things, is your library really worth fighting an epic battle over? Does it really hurt you to have people take your code without following the GPL? Why don't you just take it as a compliment that someone would find your code worth stealing, and move on? Don't you have anything better to do with your energy?
After all, even if these guys did steal your code, your code is still available and open to everyone else. The people who didn't get the source from these violators can still get the source from you, off the web. Are the "victims" really any worse off than they were before?
Anyhow, even *if* you conclude after careful thought, that your answer to (1) is a worthwhile goal, what makes you think you have any leverage to compel the violators to do what you want? After all, releasing the source is a pretty damn easy thing to do. Perhaps they don't understand their obligations, in which case you have to spend your valuable time educating the ignorant. Keep in mind that one has to be pretty willful to be a software engineer and ignorant of the GPL. And most people don't like comparative strangers showing up on their doorstep to "teach." When a Jehovah's Witness shows up on my doorstep wanting to teach me about his faith, I usually just close the door. Folks who do this kind of thing face a lot of disappointment. They are willing to put up with this, because think they are doing it for God, who will reward their suffering. If you worship RMS, perhaps you feel the same way.
Another possibility is that they don't want to release the code, either because it is risky to their business (no one would pay us if they saw they could get the same thing for free..., or trade secrets, or what not). In which case you have to make your solution more attractive to them. How? What's in it for them? The chance to walk in the righteous path of GNU? What possible ways can you persuade them to change their mind?
A third possibility is that they are malicious bastards who stole your code just to make you mad. In which case getting yourself in a tizzy will just entertain them more.
The ideal of Free Software depends on users and writers of software behaving with a certain integrity. It is difficult to force people to behave well unless they are already so inclined.
Before you go to much effort, be sure that the effort really will pay off.
"For the quarter [ended 27 Dec 2003], the Company posted a net profit of $63 million, or $.17 per diluted share. These results compare to a net loss of $8 million, or $.02 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter."
Capitalism. Learn to love it. Hint: net profit = more shiny toys later. net loss = fewer shiny toys.
I hate to reply to one person in particular, but this "too many specialized bricks" is a real red herring.
"too many" for what? to build some structure that is in your head? perhaps. But that isn't the only purpose of LEGO.
Lots of play involves things like role-playing and acting out stories. Look at a real seven year old playing with one of these "non-creative" LEGOs. Jar-jar will be playing some role in a story that has very little in common with episode 1. (the real Ep 1 was much worse than an average seven-year-old's story, but I digress...)
One who says Jar-Jar has "no real place other than in a star wars scene" is the one lacking in creativity. Jar-jar can go wherever your imagination takes him. Are you under some sort of Lucas mind-control or Star Wars orthodoxy? Do you feel pain when your Jar-jar story line differs from canon? The whole concept of canon is a restriction on your mind. Let it go! A seven-year old doesn't care.
It's also hard to build the structure of your dream with crayons or a tea set, but that doesn't make crayons or tea sets a bad toy. And even some of the so-called specialized blocks can be used in surprising ways. Look at the the brick testament, for instance.
Perfect competition leads to zero *economic* profit. Which is not the same as zero *accounting* profit. Economic profit also includes compensation for opportunity costs.
The idea is that every factor of production (capital and labor) gets *just enough* compensation to make it worthwhile compared to the other opportunities for which those factors could be used. Any less, and the capital or labor would be used elsewhere; any more, and a competitor could undercut your costs.
Q: How will your electric company provide power without a [government-regulated] monopoly?
A: More poorly, with more blackouts, more chances for market makers to gouge California, less accountability for system reliability, less incentive to increase generating capacity,...
Competitive markets are not a panacea. Where their advantages are useful, and the basic requirements (such as low barriers to entry, good information, low externalities...) are present they provide an efficient mechanism for reaching a Pareto-optimal solution for prices and resource allocation.
But the real world doesn't always correspond to these idealized assumptions.
In any case, Standard Oil could point to an excellent record of low prices for consumers of kerosene. The "offense" was to other oil companies and railroad companies. Not to consumers or to SO stockholders.
But their ASCII is a giant pain-in-the-ass if you want to change it to anything using mark-up. Their ASCII lacks *any* information on how the page is organized. Want to read it in anything more sophisticated than vi? Forget it.
Yes, free-formatted ASCII is the least-common-denominator. The emphasis goes on LEAST. As in the format with the LEAST usable information.
Consider As You Like It. The lines are entered with hard returns at 80 columns. There is no easy way to get a machine to recognize the Scene and Act boundaries, no easy way to get a machine to distinguish between stage directions and dialog and even the character's names. The only navigation is the page-up and page-down key.
Doing anything useful (where "useful" even includes tolerable navigation through the document !) requires going through these texts all by hand.
They punted because the electronic formats are volatile, but there is a huge cost to it, in the extreme loss of essential information.
And is there any particular reason that I would prefer to get my information from FreeRepublic.com? Plus the fact that these alleged warheads were supposed to have been made in Russia???? What kind of sense does that make?
Taiwan is a lot closer than the U.S., and China has PLENTY of missles that can reach Taiwan without being able to reach the U.S. They don't have to use their DongFeng 5 missiles to mess with Taiwan.
Slashdot Mirror
Planck looked the black body radiation problem and the ultraviolet catastrophe and sent of a postcard claiming that fatal flaw was the assumption that energy was continuous.
Actually, according to Kuhn (and I tend to agree), Planck actually didn't realize he was making that break from classical physics.
Planck had worked on the black-body problem for a long time, and only after that time did he cave in to follow Boltzmann's ideas, thinking at the time that the quantization condition was simply a mathematical tool. It took Einstein and Poincare to point out that the use of Boltzmann's technique implied small quantum occupation numbers in the high-frequency portion of the spectrum; i.e. that the Boltzmann approach was actually radically new physics.
Now, Planck did realize at them time that his introduction of "h" and its failure to be cancelled in the final formula was dramatically new: he was quite proud (justifiably, of course) to have discovered a new fundamental constant. But it took years for the new mechanical implications to become clear, even to him.
So, were you the $29,500 man?
International trade simply does not devastate economies and communities. CHANGE can devastate communities. Look what happens to mining towns when the ore runs out. Pin your hopes on the wrong cause, and you are going to suffer. That is called LIFE.
People at the "bottom" have jobs *because* these jobs are part of profitable organizations. Companies that lose money do not provide jobs for long. Nobody owes you a job just because you are a nice guy, or a little guy. You get a job because your labor is being put to use in a profitable way.
When your community cannot provide a use for your labor, then you should either upgrade your labor or move. That's life. You shouldn't blame some international trade bogeyman that you claim to like except when it hurts you, which seems to be all the time.
Look at the bright side: at least nobody tried to "ethnically cleanse" you. *That* devastates communities.
These hypothetical machine tools are NO GOOD without corresponding machinists to use them. They make it cheaper to give machinists jobs. Still don't want them? Then you must be against the machinist jobs you claim you want to create.
A key concept you are missing is that exporting is the "disadvantage" of international trade. Working to produce goods is not the chief reward in life, being able to *consume* goods is! Other countries sending us stuff we want is the advantage of trade. This country sending out stuff that other countries want is the burden.
And what "normal cycle" of things are you talking about? International trade is not barter by individuals or individual companies. Just because you personally don't get orders from India doesn't mean that nobody else gets orders from them.
In fact, to a first approximation, all those U.S. dollars that get sent to India to compensate for software services *have* to come back to the U.S. in exchange for something, because they don't have value elsewhere.
Like I said, READ ABOUT DAVID RICARDO, who understood these issues much better than you seem to way back in the early 1800s. Until you do, suffice it to say that your apparent views on how international trade works are inaccurate, misleading, and in the hands of politicians, positively dangerous to economic well-being.
How can you possibly say you would turn down low-cost machine tools? They're exactly the way to support all those advanced machinist jobs you claim are so great: get some machinists machine tools and let them go to work.
If I put American in front of the machine tools, I assume you would accept them? Even though you would be taking business from a high-cost American machine tool maker, and giving business to a low-cost American machine tool maker?
Where are the jobs going to come from?
From the same place that software jobs came from: new companies developing new technologies to serve new markets.
Way back around the time of the American revolution, about 90% of the U.S. population was employed in agriculture. Today, the corresponding percentage is something below 5%. My god, all those farmers losing jobs! How could you possibly replace all those farmers?
The answer is that the farmers became immeasurably more productive (actually, there are still too much farming in America due to wasteful subsidies and trade barriers) while the rest of the population found some other job due to this thing called the Industrial Revolution.
Does anyone think the U.S. has some huge shortage of farming jobs? Someday, we'll feel the same way about tool-and-die makers.
If I invented some "magic software machine" that worked in response to e-mail and voice commands to produce software according to specification for a small material cost, then that would be a tremendous boost to productivity. I don't have to spend time and effort coding myself, I just have to work on the specs, and the magic software machine writes and tests it for me.
Given how much Slashdot can gush over the latest gcc release or Java IDE advancement, you'd think people would recognize this kind of machine as a tremendously powerful tool for eliminating grunt work and speeding development.
Yet, because the "magic software machine" is actually a bunch of Indian programmers at the other end of the phone/e-mail connection, this is somehow a terrible and destructive thing.
There isn't some limited amount of "work to be done" which has to be divided among workers. Adding workers to the economy does not reduce the amount of work available for each worker. Instead, it expands the amount that can be produced.
If India offered to ship us low-cost machine tools, would you turn them down?
Can you guys all shut up about Pentium and clockspeed for crying out loud?
This is about optical networking using silicon as the semiconductor. Not about a CPU.
Everyone who doesn't understand what an optical modulator is can go post on the latest SCO story. That is all.
[if] Michigan were a country where major killers were things like starvation and dysentary, I would see no problem with banning car imports from Detroit....Michigan were a country where major killers were things like starvation and dysentary, I would see no problem with banning car imports from Detroit.
Your economic thinking is about 250 years out of date, in addition to being wrong. Please download the David Ricardo patch to correct this bug.
Economics and international trade are most definitely NOT a zero sum game. Importing services from India does not directly impoverish the United States. In fact, it allows the United States to produce more by deploying its labor in *relatively* more efficient ways. Your error is one of composition: simply because one programmer in the U.S. is displaced does not mean that there is a net loss in economic welfare in the U.S.
Trade barriers hurt the general economy while avoiding dislocation of a very visible but small sector of the economy. Nonetheless, the net impact is NEGATIVE for both the importer and exporter. Trade barriers REDUCE the total amount of economic output that can be generated by the economy. They keep the pie small, while the slice that represents the protected sector stays relatively large.
If instead, we dropped barriers and redeployed our labor and capital according to the freed market, the total output of the two economies combined will increase. Redeployment is painful, but it is more painful the longer it is delayed. Evidently, too many people in the U.S. are working in jobs that can be outsourced, and not enough people in India are working at those jobs. The people in the U.S. need to find other ways to employ their labor where the rewards are higher. Just like they went into software because they could get jobs there in the past.
The world is a dynamic place. Trade barriers make things stay the same for a little longer, but only because they impede economic growth.
he is arguing that, at a very high level, current scientific approaches to large systems are flawed.
Yes, but of course they are flawed. Wolfram fails to present anything *better* in the sense of leading to results.
CA can generate pretty and "surprisingly" complex patterns. In fact, and this is the one real advance, which isn't *new* in ANKOS, just quoted, you can prove that at least one 1-D CA nearest-neighbor rule can support Turing-complete computing. But only if you found the particular rule in advance by a brute-force search.
The universe is fully of pretty and "surprisingly" complex patterns. That doesn't mean that a CA can be constructed to explain them, or even if one could, that the CA actually "explains" anything, in the sense of telling us something we didn't already know.
There isn't any apparent way to make *progress* on any physical problem by using CA ideas. Having to do an exhaustive search to identify "complex" behavior in a 1-D CA means that there isn't yet any a priori method to determine which CA have a potentially interesting property, and which to reject. In which case Wolfram's "program" for future scientific progress is a mind-bendingly *huge* and mindless task, which will, just possibly, provide a CA formula which simulates the universe.
How are you supposed to identify that CA, however, if you don't *already* know what kind of physics that the CA is supposed to simulate? It's pretty easy to solve a problem even by an inefficient technique when you know what the answer should be. But also unnecessary. And not new.
SMP hardly "blew away" the competition. It was superior in some ways, but much worse in others. It could not use exact ratios, for instance.
As far as Mathematica goes, although implemented in C, the language attempts to simulate a pseudo-Lisp, and fails terribly. It absolutely reeks of someone who saw Lisp, comprehended it in an only superficial way, then thought they could do better. When you try to actually use it as a Lisp, its defects (e.g. its special treatement of the "head" of the expression, including the bizzare nature of its pseudo-APPLY) make it impossible.
Another classic flaw of Mathematica is its idiosyncratic approach to "precision." Yes, it has some advantages in toy demonstrations, but still has big gaping holes just like regular old floating-point.
Superconductivity actually is *my* field, and I'll concur with the anonymous coward: this is an important advance in basic experimental physics, but is *extremely* unlikely to lead in any direct way to the kinds of applications (such as electric power distribution) that are mentioned by the lay press.
What *might* happen is that these experiments give theorists a good proving ground for more sophisticated theories of superconductivity and other quantum states, which *might* apply to new solid-state materials designed to have newly understood properties, which *might* exhibit desirable engineering behavior, such as high temperature, high field superconductivity.
It is an important part of the marketing of any experiment to give a compelling, easily understandable civilian and/or military goal which relates to the research being proposed. Marketing is an important part of scientific research, because it leads to funding. Journalists need it because their editors and readers need to have an easily digestible answer to "why should my readers/I care." Good scientists can communicate that. They also know the difference between "possible impact sometime in the next 50 years" and "probable impact for the next round of funding."
These suggestions of future applications certainly are an attempt to support future funding. And there is absolutely no reason for them to be insulted by it.
She has always worn an iPod in the commercial.
Absolutely. And we've always been at war with Eurasia.
Chillingly ironic, isn't it?
Hey, to each his own. I think calling this a matter of "freedom of speech" is a bit over-the-top. Nobody is saying that he can't write or publish his code. He's not being arrested for the code he wrote.
Copyright is very distinct from First Amendment issues.
But if he thinks the licensing terms of his library are worth dying for, I'd say he's gone loopy.
The real question, which I haven't seen clearly articulated in this discussion, comes in two parts:
1) what do you want to achieve
2) what makes you think you have any way of compelling these alleged violators to grant you what you want in number 1?
These are the basics of entering into any kind of negotiation, but you haven't framed them at all. It so happens that many lawyers are trained to analyze situations of this kind and give advice. Which makes it all the sillier that you want to resolve this without lawyers. "I have a leak in my faucet. I don't know how to fix it, but I don't want to call a plumber." But I digress.
If you are the typical idealist who reads slashdot and *still* thinks it is a source of useful information, than the answer to question (1) is probably something like "Force them to release the source for their changes." One has to wonder WHY you care. Do you think they've made changes that will truly benefit the community? Or are you just trying to be a pain in the ass to anyone who doesn't want to play by your rules? (This is my ball, and I'm taking it home...)
Here's a clue: the world ain't fair. People lie, cheat, steal, murder, and do all sorts of awful things to other people who don't deserve it. In the grand scheme of things, is your library really worth fighting an epic battle over? Does it really hurt you to have people take your code without following the GPL? Why don't you just take it as a compliment that someone would find your code worth stealing, and move on? Don't you have anything better to do with your energy?
After all, even if these guys did steal your code, your code is still available and open to everyone else. The people who didn't get the source from these violators can still get the source from you, off the web. Are the "victims" really any worse off than they were before?
Anyhow, even *if* you conclude after careful thought, that your answer to (1) is a worthwhile goal, what makes you think you have any leverage to compel the violators to do what you want? After all, releasing the source is a pretty damn easy thing to do. Perhaps they don't understand their obligations, in which case you have to spend your valuable time educating the ignorant. Keep in mind that one has to be pretty willful to be a software engineer and ignorant of the GPL. And most people don't like comparative strangers showing up on their doorstep to "teach." When a Jehovah's Witness shows up on my doorstep wanting to teach me about his faith, I usually just close the door. Folks who do this kind of thing face a lot of disappointment. They are willing to put up with this, because think they are doing it for God, who will reward their suffering. If you worship RMS, perhaps you feel the same way.
Another possibility is that they don't want to release the code, either because it is risky to their business (no one would pay us if they saw they could get the same thing for free..., or trade secrets, or what not). In which case you have to make your solution more attractive to them. How? What's in it for them? The chance to walk in the righteous path of GNU? What possible ways can you persuade them to change their mind?
A third possibility is that they are malicious bastards who stole your code just to make you mad. In which case getting yourself in a tizzy will just entertain them more.
The ideal of Free Software depends on users and writers of software behaving with a certain integrity. It is difficult to force people to behave well unless they are already so inclined.
Before you go to much effort, be sure that the effort really will pay off.
In a related story, Apple reported that
"For the quarter [ended 27 Dec 2003], the Company posted a net profit of $63 million, or $.17 per diluted share. These results compare to a net loss of $8 million, or $.02 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter."
Capitalism. Learn to love it. Hint: net profit = more shiny toys later. net loss = fewer shiny toys.
We are on the edge, roughly, of the Milky way. That means the furthest part of the edge is twice as far as the center.
Take a look: the center is at a little less than 9 kpc (kiloparsecs) and the bulge of the disk edge is at about 20 kpc. Seems OK to me.
The vertical scale is logarithmic.
speaking of Jar-jar, I bet you didn't know he was in :-)
the book of Exodus, did you?
I hate to reply to one person in particular, but this "too many specialized bricks" is a real red herring.
"too many" for what? to build some structure that is in your head? perhaps. But that isn't the only purpose of LEGO.
Lots of play involves things like role-playing and acting out stories. Look at a real seven year old playing with one of these "non-creative" LEGOs. Jar-jar will be playing some role in a story that has very little in common with episode 1. (the real Ep 1 was much worse than an average seven-year-old's story, but I digress...)
One who says Jar-Jar has "no real place other than in a star wars scene" is the one lacking in creativity. Jar-jar can go wherever your imagination takes him. Are you under some sort of Lucas mind-control or Star Wars orthodoxy? Do you feel pain when your Jar-jar story line differs from canon? The whole concept of canon is a restriction on your mind. Let it go! A seven-year old doesn't care.
It's also hard to build the structure of your dream with crayons or a tea set, but that doesn't make crayons or tea sets a bad toy. And even some of the so-called specialized blocks can be used in surprising ways. Look at the the brick testament, for instance.
So I guess the true solution would have been two iPods: one to charge while she was running with the other. :-)
One of them just borrowed my mom's iPod for a 100 mile race she did a few months ago, and she had no complaints.
well, how did she like the battery life? I can't imagine anyone completing a 100-mile race in the battery life of an iPod.
Perfect competition leads to zero *economic* profit. Which is not the same as zero *accounting* profit.
Economic profit also includes compensation for opportunity costs.
The idea is that every factor of production (capital and labor) gets *just enough* compensation to make it worthwhile compared to the other opportunities for which those factors could be used. Any less, and the capital or labor would be used elsewhere; any more, and a competitor could undercut your costs.
One could also say
...
Q: How will your electric company provide power without a [government-regulated] monopoly?
A: More poorly, with more blackouts, more chances for market makers to gouge California, less accountability for system reliability, less incentive to increase generating capacity,
Competitive markets are not a panacea. Where their advantages are useful, and the basic requirements (such as low barriers to entry, good information, low externalities...) are present they provide an efficient mechanism for reaching a Pareto-optimal solution for prices and resource allocation.
But the real world doesn't always correspond to these idealized assumptions.
In any case, Standard Oil could point to an excellent record of low prices for consumers of kerosene. The "offense" was to other oil companies and railroad companies. Not to consumers or to SO stockholders.
But their ASCII is a giant pain-in-the-ass if you want to change it to anything using mark-up. Their ASCII lacks *any* information on how the page is organized. Want to read it in anything more sophisticated than vi? Forget it.
Yes, free-formatted ASCII is the least-common-denominator. The emphasis goes on LEAST. As in the format with the LEAST usable information.
Consider As You Like It. The lines are entered with hard returns at 80 columns. There is no easy way to get a machine to recognize the Scene and Act boundaries, no easy way to get a machine to distinguish between stage directions and dialog and even the character's names. The only navigation is the page-up and page-down key.
Doing anything useful (where "useful" even includes tolerable navigation through the document !) requires going through these texts all by hand.
They punted because the electronic formats are volatile, but there is a huge cost to it, in the extreme loss of essential information.
And is there any particular reason that I would prefer to get my information from FreeRepublic.com? Plus the fact that these alleged warheads were supposed to have been made in Russia???? What kind of sense does that make?
Taiwan is a lot closer than the U.S., and China has PLENTY of missles that can reach Taiwan without being able to reach the U.S. They don't have to use their DongFeng 5 missiles to mess with Taiwan.