If you're looking for some entertainment, read Darl McBride's latest tirade against the GPL. While there are indeed some people who'd really like to get rid of all intellectual property rights, his assertion or at least implication that the GPL itself is aimed at abolishing intellectual property rights is absurd. The purpose of the GPL is to empower copyright owners to give away their work if they want to, while ensuring that their gift to the world is not coopted by people who would profit from it without sharing their contributions too. The GPL is depends on copyright law and uses it to empower copyright owners to control the distribution of their work.
A common misconception about capitalism is that everything is about monetary profits--that money is everyone's motivation. Capitalism is a system that benefits society by reward people who provide others' needs and wants by giving the producers something they want. Most often, the reward is economic, true. But some capitalists are motivated by a desire to give ("philanthropists"), others by a desire for recognition (even if it isn't accompanied by copious amounts of money), others by a desire to do a particular kind of work that they find rewarding (and the money they earn enables them to do that, but the money is just a means to an end).
Darl's letter implies that people who create software for reasons other than earning profit are somehow anti-American, anti-capitalist, and even lawless. This is absurd. He states that "SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws." This is patently false. The GPL PROTECTS the rights of copyright owners who wish to give away their work with certain restrictions on how it can be used. Darl's attempt to abolish the GPL is no more an attack on the rights of copyright owners than the violations that SCO's lawsuit alleges.
Darl's letter overuses references to the Constitution, elected officials, and other terms and phrases obviously aimed at portraying SCO as on the side of legitimacy, American values, and lawfulness. Of course these are legitimate issues for him to make reference to in supporting is position, but sheesh! Darl, you'll sound a lot more credible if your letters don't smack so heavily of propaganda.
I myself have released some software I've created under the GPL. I give some of my work away for a few reasons: to attract people to the non-free versions of the same software, to bring people to my website where I can try to sell them something else, because I know some people will pay me to install it for them, and in some cases, because while useful, some of my products are simple enough that the price they could fetch would hardly be worth collecting. Without the GPL, I might just keep these things to myself. I don't mind people using them for free, nor do I mind them using it to create profits by its use, but I don't like the idea of people making money by selling my work after I gave it to them for free. The GPL is a tool that enables me to give my work away while preventing people from using it in ways that I, the copyright owner, don't want them to.
Does copyright protection of commercial software foster innovation? Of course. Most of the software development I've done would have been done without the profit motive (unless I were independently wealthy). Does free software foster innovation? Of course. Lots of the software I've written depends on free software like Apache, PHP, Perl, and Linux. Without these, I never could have created my software. There's room in the world, and in a capitalist economy for both. The real point is that it's the right of the copyright owner to decide how copyright law will be applied to their work.
Hmm, maybe they could imprison the whole corporation. They could convert the Redmond campus to a federal facility and require all outgoing mail to be stamped with a notice like:
"This mail originated from a federal pententiary. The contents have NOT been checked by any government entity, and you should exercize care in accepting the validity of any claims made herein."
First of all, it was a joke. Second of all,...if this is the ten billionth time, hmm, I guess I haven't been reading every comment carefully enough. I did look for a "SCO" story topic. Forgot to look for "Caldera".
Maybe we need a new slashdot subdomain to shunt all these stories off onto so that we don't have to see them: sco.slashdot.org. Oh, wait, can't do that. SCO would sue OSDN for using their name in the URL.
What would really be nice would be to have a button you could push when a telemarketer calls you that plays a pre-recorded message and then hangs up. It would be helpful for people who have a hard time hanging up on telemarketers because they feel it's rude--an "institutionalized" method like this would be easier for some people.
The phone could come with a message already recorded--something polite like "The person you have just called does not accept telemarketing calls." It would also let you record one or more custom messages. Here are a few possibilities:
Clever: "The number you have just called has just disconnected you. Please hang up, and don't dial again. If you feel that you have recieved this message in error, you have a lot to learn about how much people despise telemarketing."
To the point: "Goodbyyyyeeeee!"
Rude: "..." I'll leave this one to the reader's imagination.
Evil: [a loud blast is heard, resulting in ear surgery for the telemarketer] -- note: as much as I hate telemarketing calls, I would not condone this one.
Every time I hear someone suggest a pay-to-send strategy for email, I cringe. As the owner of a small business that operates primarily online and generates a fair amount of LEGITIMATE email to people who've SIGNED UP with me, this would be a crushing blow. I would shut my sites down and look for a job with The Man. And when I think of that, I cringe again.
Here are my thoughts: 1) If you're willing to pay a penny a message to send, wouldn't you be willing to pay a little for filtering that kept your spam level low enough that it wasn't a problem?
2) If dealing with SPAM is a variable cost based on how much email you send, rather than a fixed cost, you're going to send less email. This will cut into your business. Every message that goes out is going to require an economic decision. At a penny a piece, you're not going to have to submit an email sending permission request for each one, but you're going to have a little nagging voice in your head saying "isn't there something you can do to avoid sending yet another email?" Is the added effort and stress over deciding whether to send email or find another method worth the time saving from not having to filter or delete spam?
3) You're going to force your customers either to pay to receive emails (probably not directly--you'll just raise your prices) or you're going to force THEM to jump through hoops to get information from you in ways that don't require you to send email. And guess what! People who you get email from are going to require the same of you! You'll either pay more for the privilege of receiving email from them, or you're going to have to go through the inconvenience of some other method of receiving information from them...cancelling out the time you saved by not having to delete spam.
Of course there ARE methods available for shifting some information distribution from email to non-spammable methods. For example, a company could put info they used to email out into an RSS feed which their customers could subscribe to. Since not everybody has an RSS reader, they could give customers the choice of whether to receive email or use RSS. Given that you wouldn't have to give out an email address or any other information to subscribe to the RSS feed, people with privacy concerns would likely jump on that method. In case some of the info to be distributed is personalized, the URL of the feed could even contain some sort of identifier--a customer number and password or something--and the feed could have personal items added to it dynamically. I'm sure there are other technologies that could also help. Maybe what we need to do is work on gradually shifting things that can be handled by non-email methods away from email.
Finally, I would much rather go to a white-list system than pay to send emails. For example, if a message comes from someone not on the white-list, they get a message saying "please do such and such to get on my whitelist". Once they do, they're on a tentative white-list. The recipient then periodically either approves the address on the tentative list or moves them to a black-list, in case a spammer actually bothered to get on the tentative list.
The final, and perhaps most important point I'd like to make is that if every person on the internet is going to switch from the current system to something new in order to solve this or any problem, let's all switch to a system that doesn't throw out the benefits of the internet as it is today. Let's not add artificial costs to the system. Let's not make the system less convenient. Even if we can only find partial solutions that are free and easy, I think that's preferable to jumping wholesale onto a solution that creates a new set of problems or negates the benefits we currently enjoy.
Before you grab an "unused IP", you should check whether they have a DHCP server and use it to get a dynamic address if they do. Otherwise, you may be grabbing an IP address that has been assigned to a computer that is turned off or is for some other reason currently off the network. Plus, if they have a DHCP server, it may eventually assign the address to someone else if it doesn't know you're using it.
...is the one about the Microsoft operating system that had no bugs in it, so some were introduced in a service pack to ensure that people would upgrade when the next version was released.
I guess you didn't check my site, because I HAVE documented the installation process, and it is not difficult. But in a world where some computer users struggle to find the switch to turn their computer on, some webmasters are going to need help setting up a script. Some of them could probably figure it out themselves, but either would rather pay then take the time, or lacking any experience with scripts, just don't have the confidence to try.
I've surprised myself recently by making money on some software I released as open source. Last year, I wrote an RSS parser to display news headlines from other sites on a few of mine. I'd taken a quick look at what was available and couldn't find anything that quite did what I want, so I made my own (CaRP - Caching RSS Parser).
Next, I decided I may as well give it away for free to bring more traffic into my site, and eventually decided to release it under the GPL.
At some point, after receiving many emails asking for help installing it (not everyone who knows how to make a web page knows how to set up a PHP script), it occurred to me that I could give people the option of hiring me to install it for them. A number of people have done so, and I've gotten some custom work from some of them too. I also get great ideas for improving the product when people ask to have it do things it can't do yet.
Has this experience convinced me to GPL anything else I've written? No. I do have a few other little things I'm giving away free, but I also have a number of products that I won't be releasing that way. Some I previously distributed as shareware, and found that very few people were willing to pay even a very small registration fee. So I switched to giving away a somewhat crippled demo version and requiring payment for the full version.
I guess the moral of this story is that if a enough users of a product will need someone to set it up for them, and if the price you can charge for setting it up is comparable to what you'd sell it for if you sold it, open sourcing the product can work well. But I don't think open source is the right model for everything--not unless you already have all the money you need and are just developing products for fun.
I must say, when I read the Peter Lynds thing when it was first posted, it seemed a little dubious.
Much to the science world's astonishment, the work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno of Elea's famous motion paradoxes, almost 2500 years after they were originally conceived by the ancient Greek philosopher.
Okay, I'm not up on the details of these paradoxes, but would anyone really still be stumped by them without this astonishing new theory? I wouldn't have thought so.
Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived.
This statement sounded incorrect to me from the start. The Achilles/Tortise paradox is simple enough to resolve so I hardly think it's something that needs some amazing new theory to deal with. To be honest, I don't quite understand why it was ever such a big deal. The tortise starts out 10 meters ahead and runs 1/10 as fast as Achilles. If Achilles runs 10 meters per second, for example, he'll catch up with the tortise in 10/9 seconds. The only way you'd have difficulty calculating the exact time and place where Achilles catches up is if you can't use fractions (10/9 seconds is 1.111111...etc. seconds--impossible to express precisely with a decimal number). Basically this "paradox" just says "if Achilles runs to where the tortise was when he started running, but the tortise moves too, he won't catch up to the tortise no matter how many times they repeat that". Seems kinda obvious when you say it that way.
He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
This was the comment that really seemed ridiculous to me. An "instant" is not an infinitely small slice of time, it is a dimensionless position in time. Just as a point has no dimension at all (not just infinitely small dimensions), a line has no width nor height, and a plane has no height, an instant in space-time has no time in it, not infinitely little time. That there is no motion within an instant is obvious because motion is a space-time concept, and an instant only contains space, not time. And just as you can't stack a bunch of planes and make 3 dimensions, you can't stack a bunch of instants and make space time. When we speak of an instant, we throw out all aspects of reality that have to do with quantities of time, but we can still speak of the position in time where the instant is located.
...hopefully I wrote that in a way that made sense. In summary, the article got me thinking, but only about the reasons why it seemed unimpressive.
Here's a little article I found by someone who doesn't seem very grateful for the services virus writers are providing here.
I'd have to say I agree with the sentiment--these people are losers (I'd use stronger language, but... I don't use stronger language) and we should call them such. The fact that the good guys can make something good come out of something bad, doesn't make that bad thing good, and it certainly doesn't earn the least bit of gratitude for the losers who prefer to create trouble than help fix it.
The people we should be grateful to are the one's who respond to the virus writers--they're the one's that make us stronger.
If your hard drive is wiped out by a virus, if you lose irreplacable data, if you have to waste time removing a virus, are you supposed to smile and say "I'm sure glad I had this opportunity to get stronger"? If these people want to earn ANY gratitude AT ALL, they should be writing COMPLETELY benign virii, if anything--perhaps install something that generates a popup whenever someone's computer launches that tells the person that their computer is vulnerable, and tells them where to find the info/tools to fix it. And don't hog all sorts of bandwidth in the process of spreading the good word. If these people had the decency to carefully construct tools to do this, and ensure that they weren't going to cause problems, you might convince me to be grateful. Till then, they're losers.
I think the burning question in all of our minds, which most of us are afraid to ask for fear of being bombed into oblivion is, if you are elected, will you grant asylum in California to Saddam Hussein? Will you allow him to live in Silicon Valley, or force him to live in L.A.? Will you give him a job? Will you give him a redwood tree? Will you allow him to appear in public in a speedo?
If these questions are too loaded for you to answer, could you at least tell us whether you would have the courage to thumb your nose at George W. Bush, regardless of your views on this burning issue, or will you simply be his puppet, his lap-dog, a feeble echo of The Man?
Yeah, and if you think a lot of jobs will be lost by restricting telemarketing, just think how many would be lost if we outlawed drugs and prostitution! Telemarketers will be the sacrificial lamb that will wake us up to the devastation caused by government interference in the markets before we go too far.
On the flip side, my psychic foresaw that this law will raise the GNP by $57 billion after people sitting at home unmolested by telemarketers get bored and start up home business to kill time.
C++ should really have been called "++C" all along, since the expression "C++" increments C (as intended) but returns the old value, not the new incremented value, but you'd want the expression to evaluate to the new language.
Not so. At least originally, there were no compilers that actually compiled C++. What they did was convert C++ code to C, which was then compiled by a C compiler. So the joke was that you increment it, but it returns the old value.
That also brings up a problem with the name "C+=2"--it's a pre-increment (right?). The appropriate name would be "C++2", where "++" is a user-defined binary post-increment operator (which would require the second operand to be a const in order to distinguish it from 2++C, the user-defined binary pre-increment operator, the first operand of which must be a const.)
This is nothing more than a last ditch effort by SCO to be acquired by IBM. They know they're slowly rotting and becoming worthless, and their first lawsuit didn't convince IBM to buy them out in order to settle, so they've decided to end everything the quick and easy way.
If all goes according to plan, IBM will countersue for malicious prosecution, claiming damages equal to SCO's market value, and the courts will award ownership of SCO to IBM.
Are we to understand that frequent use of a trademark renders it generic?
IANAL, yeah, yeah.
Yes, frequent use as a generic term does render a trademark invalid, at least unless the trademark owner zealously fights againt the generic use of the term. I have a hard time swallowing the argument that the Unix trademark is zealously defended because I always hear the name used generically to describe "Unix-like" operating systems, and this is the first time I remember hearing about anyone complaining about that. It never even occurred to me that "Unix" had been trademarked until recent events brought the issue up.
Of course, I'm just one person, and maybe I just haven't heard of the Open Group's efforts. But from what others have posted here, I'd have to say it sounds like a lot of people consider Unix to be a generic term.
While I'm all for getting free basic cable, I DON'T want that mandated.
If, whenever somebody builds a house (perhaps a long way away from any existing cable), the cable company has to run new cable lines out to them for free, the money to pay for that is going to have to come from SOMEWHERE. The cable companies aren't just going to say "oh, darn. more costs" and do it themselves. They're going to lobby for government subsidies.
And the government isn't just going to print more money to pay for it, they're going to raise taxes or cut programs....well, maybe they will just print money, but that wouldn't be much different from raising taxes to pay for it since it would fuel inflation.
On the other hand, if they can be convinced to cut something that never should have been funded anyway, cutting programs wouldn't be so bad (except that they'd just be cutting one bad program to fund another one). But that's a moot point, because the cuts would come from things that are already underfunded like education.
In short, I think the broadcast spectrum should be left alone.
First of all, who moderated the original comment up in the first place? Give me a break.
Second, the post I'm replying to is correct--"Is Data Mining for Product Pricing Illegal"--no commas--is the correct grammer. (I assume comeone's going to jump on my use of hyphens--fortunately I don't care). "Is it illegal to..." is poor grammer, because you're using a pronoun, "it", before you've mentioned what it refers to. Pronouns should always refer back to something.
On the other hand, who really cares? As long as the point is communicated, little else matters in a situation like this. Were we discussing someone's resume, or sending a business letter, that would matter, because grammer mistakes suggest a lack of professionalism and attention to detail.
Ha, ha! It's Groundhog Day again! You have to read this same story over and over for the next six weeks!
Re:How many bread baskets are there in a VW bug?
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Oops, that's bread BOXES, isn't it. I've seen those.
And oh yeah, "Library of Congresses" is the standard unit. But how big is that? Way too abstract. I prefer Slashdottings, not that I know how much that is, but it FEELS more concrete--"big enough to hurt".
How many bread baskets are there in a VW bug?
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Maybe the reason they compare meteors to VW bugs is because they don't know how many bread baskets there are in a VW bug. I don't know that I've ever seen a bread basket myself, so I don't know how big one is. I've seen plenty of VWs though, so it's much easier for me to estimates sizes in terms of bugs.
This brings up an interesting question: what is the standard unit of measure for estimating internet bandwidth? I thought maybe a "Slashdotting", but that's probably too big--you'd have to estimate most events in terms of fractions of Slashdottings. "XYZ corporation was hit today by a DDoS attack about half the size of a Slashdotting. Fortunately they upgraded their server bandwidth recently, and were able to withstand the attack unscathed."
I have no problem with cheating...IFF!!!
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I don't think cheating is a problem IF AND ONLY IF everyone who's playing agrees that it's okay to cheat. In other words, if one of the rules is "you may use any methods you wish to gain an advantage--if you find a way to hack the game, more power to you", then great! It's a competition between hackers.
I think a partial solution to the problem would be for online game sites to have separate games where cheating is explicitly allowed. Lame-ass cheaters who don't have the guts to match their hacking skills against others will still cheat in the no-cheating games, but at least the cheaters who have confidence in their skills will participate in these games, because winning there will earn them legitimate respect from the community they have the most respect for.
If those who participate in the hacker games make some effort to create a culture that looks down on people who hack in the non-hacking games, that could help too.
People who cheat in games where cheating is not allowed by the rules are lame-ass selfish bastards with no character and a pathetic substitute for self-confidence. If they really feel like they've accomplished something by winning in a way that spoils the game for unsuspecting people who play by the rules, then I feel sorry for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the response I just posted on my blog:
If you're looking for some entertainment, read Darl McBride's latest tirade against the GPL. While there are indeed some people who'd really like to get rid of all intellectual property rights, his assertion or at least implication that the GPL itself is aimed at abolishing intellectual property rights is absurd. The purpose of the GPL is to empower copyright owners to give away their work if they want to, while ensuring that their gift to the world is not coopted by people who would profit from it without sharing their contributions too. The GPL is depends on copyright law and uses it to empower copyright owners to control the distribution of their work.
A common misconception about capitalism is that everything is about monetary profits--that money is everyone's motivation. Capitalism is a system that benefits society by reward people who provide others' needs and wants by giving the producers something they want. Most often, the reward is economic, true. But some capitalists are motivated by a desire to give ("philanthropists"), others by a desire for recognition (even if it isn't accompanied by copious amounts of money), others by a desire to do a particular kind of work that they find rewarding (and the money they earn enables them to do that, but the money is just a means to an end).
Darl's letter implies that people who create software for reasons other than earning profit are somehow anti-American, anti-capitalist, and even lawless. This is absurd. He states that "SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws." This is patently false. The GPL PROTECTS the rights of copyright owners who wish to give away their work with certain restrictions on how it can be used. Darl's attempt to abolish the GPL is no more an attack on the rights of copyright owners than the violations that SCO's lawsuit alleges.
Darl's letter overuses references to the Constitution, elected officials, and other terms and phrases obviously aimed at portraying SCO as on the side of legitimacy, American values, and lawfulness. Of course these are legitimate issues for him to make reference to in supporting is position, but sheesh! Darl, you'll sound a lot more credible if your letters don't smack so heavily of propaganda.
I myself have released some software I've created under the GPL. I give some of my work away for a few reasons: to attract people to the non-free versions of the same software, to bring people to my website where I can try to sell them something else, because I know some people will pay me to install it for them, and in some cases, because while useful, some of my products are simple enough that the price they could fetch would hardly be worth collecting. Without the GPL, I might just keep these things to myself. I don't mind people using them for free, nor do I mind them using it to create profits by its use, but I don't like the idea of people making money by selling my work after I gave it to them for free. The GPL is a tool that enables me to give my work away while preventing people from using it in ways that I, the copyright owner, don't want them to.
Does copyright protection of commercial software foster innovation? Of course. Most of the software development I've done would have been done without the profit motive (unless I were independently wealthy). Does free software foster innovation? Of course. Lots of the software I've written depends on free software like Apache, PHP, Perl, and Linux. Without these, I never could have created my software. There's room in the world, and in a capitalist economy for both. The real point is that it's the right of the copyright owner to decide how copyright law will be applied to their work.
Hmm, maybe they could imprison the whole corporation. They could convert the Redmond campus to a federal facility and require all outgoing mail to be stamped with a notice like:
First of all, it was a joke. Second of all, ...if this is the ten billionth time, hmm, I guess I haven't been reading every comment carefully enough. I did look for a "SCO" story topic. Forgot to look for "Caldera".
Maybe we need a new slashdot subdomain to shunt all these stories off onto so that we don't have to see them: sco.slashdot.org. Oh, wait, can't do that. SCO would sue OSDN for using their name in the URL.
The phone could come with a message already recorded--something polite like "The person you have just called does not accept telemarketing calls." It would also let you record one or more custom messages. Here are a few possibilities:
Every time I hear someone suggest a pay-to-send strategy for email, I cringe. As the owner of a small business that operates primarily online and generates a fair amount of LEGITIMATE email to people who've SIGNED UP with me, this would be a crushing blow. I would shut my sites down and look for a job with The Man. And when I think of that, I cringe again.
Here are my thoughts:
1) If you're willing to pay a penny a message to send, wouldn't you be willing to pay a little for filtering that kept your spam level low enough that it wasn't a problem?
2) If dealing with SPAM is a variable cost based on how much email you send, rather than a fixed cost, you're going to send less email. This will cut into your business. Every message that goes out is going to require an economic decision. At a penny a piece, you're not going to have to submit an email sending permission request for each one, but you're going to have a little nagging voice in your head saying "isn't there something you can do to avoid sending yet another email?" Is the added effort and stress over deciding whether to send email or find another method worth the time saving from not having to filter or delete spam?
3) You're going to force your customers either to pay to receive emails (probably not directly--you'll just raise your prices) or you're going to force THEM to jump through hoops to get information from you in ways that don't require you to send email. And guess what! People who you get email from are going to require the same of you! You'll either pay more for the privilege of receiving email from them, or you're going to have to go through the inconvenience of some other method of receiving information from them...cancelling out the time you saved by not having to delete spam.
Of course there ARE methods available for shifting some information distribution from email to non-spammable methods. For example, a company could put info they used to email out into an RSS feed which their customers could subscribe to. Since not everybody has an RSS reader, they could give customers the choice of whether to receive email or use RSS. Given that you wouldn't have to give out an email address or any other information to subscribe to the RSS feed, people with privacy concerns would likely jump on that method. In case some of the info to be distributed is personalized, the URL of the feed could even contain some sort of identifier--a customer number and password or something--and the feed could have personal items added to it dynamically. I'm sure there are other technologies that could also help. Maybe what we need to do is work on gradually shifting things that can be handled by non-email methods away from email.
Finally, I would much rather go to a white-list system than pay to send emails. For example, if a message comes from someone not on the white-list, they get a message saying "please do such and such to get on my whitelist". Once they do, they're on a tentative white-list. The recipient then periodically either approves the address on the tentative list or moves them to a black-list, in case a spammer actually bothered to get on the tentative list.
The final, and perhaps most important point I'd like to make is that if every person on the internet is going to switch from the current system to something new in order to solve this or any problem, let's all switch to a system that doesn't throw out the benefits of the internet as it is today. Let's not add artificial costs to the system. Let's not make the system less convenient. Even if we can only find partial solutions that are free and easy, I think that's preferable to jumping wholesale onto a solution that creates a new set of problems or negates the benefits we currently enjoy.
Before you grab an "unused IP", you should check whether they have a DHCP server and use it to get a dynamic address if they do. Otherwise, you may be grabbing an IP address that has been assigned to a computer that is turned off or is for some other reason currently off the network. Plus, if they have a DHCP server, it may eventually assign the address to someone else if it doesn't know you're using it.
...is the one about the Microsoft operating system that had no bugs in it, so some were introduced in a service pack to ensure that people would upgrade when the next version was released.
I guess you didn't check my site, because I HAVE documented the installation process, and it is not difficult. But in a world where some computer users struggle to find the switch to turn their computer on, some webmasters are going to need help setting up a script. Some of them could probably figure it out themselves, but either would rather pay then take the time, or lacking any experience with scripts, just don't have the confidence to try.
Next, I decided I may as well give it away for free to bring more traffic into my site, and eventually decided to release it under the GPL.
At some point, after receiving many emails asking for help installing it (not everyone who knows how to make a web page knows how to set up a PHP script), it occurred to me that I could give people the option of hiring me to install it for them. A number of people have done so, and I've gotten some custom work from some of them too. I also get great ideas for improving the product when people ask to have it do things it can't do yet.
Has this experience convinced me to GPL anything else I've written? No. I do have a few other little things I'm giving away free, but I also have a number of products that I won't be releasing that way. Some I previously distributed as shareware, and found that very few people were willing to pay even a very small registration fee. So I switched to giving away a somewhat crippled demo version and requiring payment for the full version.
I guess the moral of this story is that if a enough users of a product will need someone to set it up for them, and if the price you can charge for setting it up is comparable to what you'd sell it for if you sold it, open sourcing the product can work well. But I don't think open source is the right model for everything--not unless you already have all the money you need and are just developing products for fun.
Better be careful--unless this stuff is getting developed in Egypt, the WTO might sue to force them to change the name.
Much to the science world's astonishment, the work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno of Elea's famous motion paradoxes, almost 2500 years after they were originally conceived by the ancient Greek philosopher.
Okay, I'm not up on the details of these paradoxes, but would anyone really still be stumped by them without this astonishing new theory? I wouldn't have thought so.
Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived.
This statement sounded incorrect to me from the start. The Achilles/Tortise paradox is simple enough to resolve so I hardly think it's something that needs some amazing new theory to deal with. To be honest, I don't quite understand why it was ever such a big deal. The tortise starts out 10 meters ahead and runs 1/10 as fast as Achilles. If Achilles runs 10 meters per second, for example, he'll catch up with the tortise in 10/9 seconds. The only way you'd have difficulty calculating the exact time and place where Achilles catches up is if you can't use fractions (10/9 seconds is 1.111111...etc. seconds--impossible to express precisely with a decimal number). Basically this "paradox" just says "if Achilles runs to where the tortise was when he started running, but the tortise moves too, he won't catch up to the tortise no matter how many times they repeat that". Seems kinda obvious when you say it that way.
He comments, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
This was the comment that really seemed ridiculous to me. An "instant" is not an infinitely small slice of time, it is a dimensionless position in time. Just as a point has no dimension at all (not just infinitely small dimensions), a line has no width nor height, and a plane has no height, an instant in space-time has no time in it, not infinitely little time. That there is no motion within an instant is obvious because motion is a space-time concept, and an instant only contains space, not time. And just as you can't stack a bunch of planes and make 3 dimensions, you can't stack a bunch of instants and make space time. When we speak of an instant, we throw out all aspects of reality that have to do with quantities of time, but we can still speak of the position in time where the instant is located.
I'd have to say I agree with the sentiment--these people are losers (I'd use stronger language, but ... I don't use stronger language) and we should call them such. The fact that the good guys can make something good come out of something bad, doesn't make that bad thing good, and it certainly doesn't earn the least bit of gratitude for the losers who prefer to create trouble than help fix it.
The people we should be grateful to are the one's who respond to the virus writers--they're the one's that make us stronger.
If your hard drive is wiped out by a virus, if you lose irreplacable data, if you have to waste time removing a virus, are you supposed to smile and say "I'm sure glad I had this opportunity to get stronger"? If these people want to earn ANY gratitude AT ALL, they should be writing COMPLETELY benign virii, if anything--perhaps install something that generates a popup whenever someone's computer launches that tells the person that their computer is vulnerable, and tells them where to find the info/tools to fix it. And don't hog all sorts of bandwidth in the process of spreading the good word. If these people had the decency to carefully construct tools to do this, and ensure that they weren't going to cause problems, you might convince me to be grateful. Till then, they're losers.
I think the burning question in all of our minds, which most of us are afraid to ask for fear of being bombed into oblivion is, if you are elected, will you grant asylum in California to Saddam Hussein? Will you allow him to live in Silicon Valley, or force him to live in L.A.? Will you give him a job? Will you give him a redwood tree? Will you allow him to appear in public in a speedo?
If these questions are too loaded for you to answer, could you at least tell us whether you would have the courage to thumb your nose at George W. Bush, regardless of your views on this burning issue, or will you simply be his puppet, his lap-dog, a feeble echo of The Man?
Yeah, and if you think a lot of jobs will be lost by restricting telemarketing, just think how many would be lost if we outlawed drugs and prostitution! Telemarketers will be the sacrificial lamb that will wake us up to the devastation caused by government interference in the markets before we go too far.
On the flip side, my psychic foresaw that this law will raise the GNP by $57 billion after people sitting at home unmolested by telemarketers get bored and start up home business to kill time.
Not so. At least originally, there were no compilers that actually compiled C++. What they did was convert C++ code to C, which was then compiled by a C compiler. So the joke was that you increment it, but it returns the old value.
That also brings up a problem with the name "C+=2"--it's a pre-increment (right?). The appropriate name would be "C++2", where "++" is a user-defined binary post-increment operator (which would require the second operand to be a const in order to distinguish it from 2++C, the user-defined binary pre-increment operator, the first operand of which must be a const.)
This is nothing more than a last ditch effort by SCO to be acquired by IBM. They know they're slowly rotting and becoming worthless, and their first lawsuit didn't convince IBM to buy them out in order to settle, so they've decided to end everything the quick and easy way.
If all goes according to plan, IBM will countersue for malicious prosecution, claiming damages equal to SCO's market value, and the courts will award ownership of SCO to IBM.
Devious!
IANAL, yeah, yeah.
Yes, frequent use as a generic term does render a trademark invalid, at least unless the trademark owner zealously fights againt the generic use of the term. I have a hard time swallowing the argument that the Unix trademark is zealously defended because I always hear the name used generically to describe "Unix-like" operating systems, and this is the first time I remember hearing about anyone complaining about that. It never even occurred to me that "Unix" had been trademarked until recent events brought the issue up.
Of course, I'm just one person, and maybe I just haven't heard of the Open Group's efforts. But from what others have posted here, I'd have to say it sounds like a lot of people consider Unix to be a generic term.
While I'm all for getting free basic cable, I DON'T want that mandated.
...well, maybe they will just print money, but that wouldn't be much different from raising taxes to pay for it since it would fuel inflation.
If, whenever somebody builds a house (perhaps a long way away from any existing cable), the cable company has to run new cable lines out to them for free, the money to pay for that is going to have to come from SOMEWHERE. The cable companies aren't just going to say "oh, darn. more costs" and do it themselves. They're going to lobby for government subsidies.
And the government isn't just going to print more money to pay for it, they're going to raise taxes or cut programs.
On the other hand, if they can be convinced to cut something that never should have been funded anyway, cutting programs wouldn't be so bad (except that they'd just be cutting one bad program to fund another one). But that's a moot point, because the cuts would come from things that are already underfunded like education.
In short, I think the broadcast spectrum should be left alone.
Second, the post I'm replying to is correct--"Is Data Mining for Product Pricing Illegal"--no commas--is the correct grammer. (I assume comeone's going to jump on my use of hyphens--fortunately I don't care). "Is it illegal to..." is poor grammer, because you're using a pronoun, "it", before you've mentioned what it refers to. Pronouns should always refer back to something.
On the other hand, who really cares? As long as the point is communicated, little else matters in a situation like this. Were we discussing someone's resume, or sending a business letter, that would matter, because grammer mistakes suggest a lack of professionalism and attention to detail.
Ha, ha! It's Groundhog Day again! You have to read this same story over and over for the next six weeks!
And oh yeah, "Library of Congresses" is the standard unit. But how big is that? Way too abstract. I prefer Slashdottings, not that I know how much that is, but it FEELS more concrete--"big enough to hurt".
This brings up an interesting question: what is the standard unit of measure for estimating internet bandwidth? I thought maybe a "Slashdotting", but that's probably too big--you'd have to estimate most events in terms of fractions of Slashdottings. "XYZ corporation was hit today by a DDoS attack about half the size of a Slashdotting. Fortunately they upgraded their server bandwidth recently, and were able to withstand the attack unscathed."
I think a partial solution to the problem would be for online game sites to have separate games where cheating is explicitly allowed. Lame-ass cheaters who don't have the guts to match their hacking skills against others will still cheat in the no-cheating games, but at least the cheaters who have confidence in their skills will participate in these games, because winning there will earn them legitimate respect from the community they have the most respect for.
If those who participate in the hacker games make some effort to create a culture that looks down on people who hack in the non-hacking games, that could help too.
People who cheat in games where cheating is not allowed by the rules are lame-ass selfish bastards with no character and a pathetic substitute for self-confidence. If they really feel like they've accomplished something by winning in a way that spoils the game for unsuspecting people who play by the rules, then I feel sorry for them.
MS is right--hackers (okay, so it's "crackers") are obsolete, because with Windows, you don't have to be 3133t to break in.