Yeah, now if we can just fix the NIH funding problem. We've gone years now completely ignoring biomedical research in this country.
Completely ignoring? According to the article you researchers are getting $29,000,000,000 of my tax money. I hope you're spending it responsibly. Are you?
A number of "researchers" I know are spending their grant money on things of little research value. Research in general suffers from the problem of political operators out-competing the genuine researchers to get grant money. Until researchers as a group take peer review more seriously and are truly willing to give political operators the boot you're going to continue to see funding decrease simply because the payback for the general population isn't there.
In closing, I believe patents *can* have a legitimate function in spurring innovation. However, the unfortunate truth is, our case is probably an exception, rather than the rule.
Personally, I've got no problem with the idea of patents, it's just that in the real world I don't think it's possible to implement them fairly. I think it's almost entirely an accident that your company is benefiting. There are plenty of other cases where large companies are blocking startups because they've got a bigger collection of patents or some key roadblock patent.
Patents depend on some government bureaucrat arbitrarily deciding whether some idea is truly innovative and thus worthy of protection. Only a scientist working a lifetime in a very narrow field is able to decide that and even then they make mistakes.
There are many other problems with patents as they are currently implemented (e.g. ignoring multiple independent re-invention, arbitrary about what is [not] an idea etc.) but at their core they're based on the flawed principal that it's possible for a small government department to assess all human knowledge for originality.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
You're exaggerating hugely. There are reasons for not releasing open source but most of what you've listed are red herrings.
Vetting software before release to make sure it's clean has to be done for both open and closed source software. Companies do it every day. It's no big deal.
In any case whenever I hear of a company claiming that a piece of software can't be open sourced because it depends on some closed source component I call bullshit; there's nothing stopping them releasing what they have and allowing those with time on their hands to write a substitute for the closed component.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
While S/W patents are... ahem... problematic, patents themselves are a pretty good indicator that a particular person or organization is at least thinking about new and innovative ways to use technology.
My personal experience is there's very little correlation between patents and innovation.
More likely, patents are an indication of an organization with a legal department trying to justify their existence.
Every new law (=patent by another name) is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
But despite documentation and careful training, most calls I get are NOT bugs or problems,
Bugs are often in the eye of the beholder. I've used plenty of programs where the programmer would claim they're bug free while they're actually rife with user interface bugs ("the default is to delete?"), mind reader bugs ("if you were a mind reader you'd know not to click cancel here"), documentation idiocies ("You seriously expect me to read a hundred pages of documentation to get to the 4th line on the 97th page which documents this completely unintuitive and unnecessary silliness?"), documented bugs ("It's documented, it's not a bug"), heisenbugs ("yeah, it only fails one in a hundred times, it's not a bug"), complexity bugs ("It's only 57 steps to enter a correct postcode, you did all those steps perfectly?"), out of touch with reality bugs ("People's names are all upper case, have no accent and are less than x characters long") etc. etc.
The problem is made worse by naive users who blame themselves rather than the program/programmer when something goes wrong.
If I were you I'd look closely in the mirror and think hard about what is and is not a bug. Programs are soft, they can be anything we want them to be and if they're not designed for the actual user it's a programmer problem. In other words if a user's reasonable expectations are not fulfilled it's more likely to be a problem with the programmer, not the user.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Rightfully so. Large code competing with other large code gets pushed out of the level 1+2 memory caches. That can lead up to an order of magnitude slowdown.
I don't know if you've been keeping track, but next year machines will come with 4 gig of ram standard.
Almost irrelevant.
Wasting time optimizing memory usage is just that, wasting time.
Nonsense. Large code usually means slow code and most users do not want their time unnecessarily wasted. Programmers who ignore memory caches and memory usage are usually poor programmers.
In addition large, slow code is slower to debug. It costs development time. Programmers who claim there's a strict development/code performance tradeoff are blowing hot air.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
That's my point. They're very good at "losing" money on every song they make make while still laughing all the way to the bank.
The RIAA may, as an organisation, may technically be losing money, but that says little about much money the RIAA's member companies are making from the RIAA's activities.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
The correct way to correct Carbon emissions are a carbon credit scheme, ditto for urban pollution.
In theory I agree with you. It's the practice that I'm concerned about. Creating a new market (which is basically what carbon credit schemes are) is great but only if all the prerequisites for a functioning and effective market exist. In particular transaction costs, further hidden externalities (just how do you measure general pollution?), assorted fraud and needed regulation may mean that government mandated standards are a more efficient way to do it. There's nothing magic about markets; they're just a tool that in practice may or may not be best for the job depending on the characteristics and general understanding of the thing being traded.
Please explain how CAFE standards are relevant, or efficient here.
I'm not a scientist in the area so I can't evaluate which would be better but it wouldn't surprise me if international carbon trading markets are still very immature (=inefficient) and government standards are the best way to go for a few years yet.
Incidentally, you appear to implicitly believe that markets can function without government regulation. That's silly; markets without government (=one man, one vote about how markets should be structured and run) is just warlordism. Might makes right in other words. Government tries to stop all the ways of competing negatively (e.g. shooting your competitor, engaging in fraud, cartels, buying legislation etc.) while allowing positive competition (e.g. making a better product, competing on price etc.).
So, whether you like it or not government is going to be involved one way or another.
What a sucker you are. Every time M$ reduces the functionality and increases the controls people like you come out of the woodwork and claim it's not hurting. Boiled frog anyone?
The tilt bits alone are enough to show that M$ doesn't care about stability, performance or improving the customer experience. It's all about control.
And please, no nonsense about the music industry "requiring" those controls. M$ voluntarily chose to put them in and take advantage.
---
WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Glad to see that you guys don't let facts get in the way of a good MS bash.
This is not a bash. This is humor. Learn to tell the difference and to cope with alternative points of view.
In particular just because some comment doesn't conform to M$ marketing's incredibly narrow propaganda view of the world doesn't mean the comment is invalid.
Disclaimer: I am a fanboy of many things, including Xbox 360, but not Microsoft in general. I like Windows XP and hate most everything that MS has put out which isn't an OS (i.e. office, internet explorer, etc). I'll definitely not be participating simply because I'm not interested in any of the offerings.
This disclaimer is meaningless. A valid one might be: Disclaimer: I am not paid directly or indirectly by MS.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
3) Deduct credit card monthly. If it's too small in any one month let it roll over to the next month or drop it for the good will. Just like the phone, utility and every other service company on the planet.
4) Pass on any extra costs to the customer, give the customer options and let the customer decide. Just like every mail order company on the planet.
This is not rocket science. This is typical M$ "I don't mind and you don't matter" manipulativeness. No wonder many people detest them.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
it is valid to point out where the hivemind is hypocritical and inconsistent from one opinion to the next
No, you are being hypocritical by deliberately describing/. as a hivemind when there are obviously varied opinions here. Hivemind, by definition, means of the same opinion.
If inidividual posters were being inconsistent then it might mean something. As it is all you've done is demonstrate that you have trouble thinking logically.
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Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
It's bad because somebody comes along and makes a mashup of your work and others that pokes fun at you and others like you. The mashup is funny and is seen by millions and enriches all their lives leading to a vast net benefit because such things are non-rivalrous.
See? I can make arbitrary assertions too.
Please, stop implying benefit to the author is benefit to the general population. They are not the same, no matter how often entrenched interests whine and try to dissemble.
In addition, stop whining about how your business model (publisher makes an advance) is going to die. Many think you are not entitled to legal privileges for your buggy whip business model when things can be efficiently published for cents on the web.
The reality is, whether you like it or not, is there is now sufficient information and fiction overload to last any one individual thousands of lifetimes. The fact that the market price doesn't currently reflect that is telling and suggests that market has failed. No wonder the vast majority of the population, while generally honest, pirates whenever they get the chance.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Beyond the obvious effects of wasted bandwith, time, storage etc. the effects of spam will tend to be random sideeffects which may be good or bad and probably cancel out.
Not unreasonable but I disagree; on average spam will cause more problems than it solves, because on average spam is deceptive junk designed to advantage the spammer and disadvantage the receiver. If the average spam was neutral, non-manipulative and non-deceptive your position would be valid but in general this is not true and the side effects do not cancel out.
spam has a much lower likelihood of ending in death (approximately zero) than armed robbery (some high percentage).
You are ignoring the statistics. Spam affects millions. It is a statistical certainty that some people have been affected in a life threatening way, whether it be a naive person who wastes time on a useless medicine or a person who misses an important life-or-death email because it's been spam-filtered.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
There are a variety of opinions here. You on the other hand have just demonstrated you are a fanatic who can't cope with alternative points of view and resort to name calling instead. No wonder you got mod'ed down.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
If you do not expose your students to tools they are likely to be using in the workplace, you are likely to do them a disservice,
The school is doing the community a disservice if they use taxpayer funds to teach proprietary software products.
This is an illicit company subsidy. Bad enough for any company but even worse if tax payer funds are being used to subsidize one dominant market player.
No problem teaching general principles that apply to any company's products but there should not be even a hint of favoring any one company. This is bad for the community (not thinking long term), bad for the company's competitors (why aren't they being subsidized?) and bad for the student's education (which should be about general principles).
An entirely private school has more choices. If the students/faculty choose to go with a particular company that's just a regular transaction. Their money, their choice. A bad long term choice in my opinion but if that's what they want to do so be it.
The above argument does not apply to open source because open source benefits the entire community, not just the one company. You could make an argument about open source disadvantaging individual companies but that's a bogus argument because it applies to any company in a particular field and so that playing field is level. Individual companies may not like the community being favored over them but that's their problem, not ours.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
The idea that "open source" is magical security pixie dust needs to die.
I know you're joking but nobody says it is, just that open source gives more options. Independent third party review is important, in everything from politics to crime to code.
Enough with the "closed source is inherently superior" propaganda. Whether you like it or not open source for the user is everything that closed source is. Plus the source is available.
The idea that "closed source" is magical security pixie dust needs to die.
this move could 'open a lot of possibilities for the future,' mainly in terms of the speed of the updates and avoiding sloppy and possibly dangerous binary patches.
Ugh. This is just another version of "open source code is more secure because you can review it and compile it yourself."
No, it hasn't. Try to understand that it's not just you reviewing the code but potentially many other parties apart from the originator. Are you trying to tell us independent third party review is not a good idea?
Open source code can be more secure
No, open source is likely to be more secure. Because many independent third parties can review it. Not just a vendor who has a commercial, ego or "not-enough-manhours" incentive to hide mistakes.
, because a qualified individual can conduct a lengthy security audit,
No, because many different individuals with many different levels of expertise can conduct all sorts of audits, security and otherwise, and in addition use the code in ways the the original author[s] never even envisaged.
and maybe catch some malicious or insecure code."
Better than no chance at all.
* virtually nobody that uses the code will be even remotely qualified to even understand how the code works, much less be able to tell if it'll screw up their phone.
So, out of a population of billions that leaves a population of thousands, or more, who are more than qualified to look at it. Think the statistics.
* Opening development to more people makes the chances of someone SUBMITTING (note, I said "submitting", not "successfully getting away with putting malicious code into an official release) go up; now the few people who know what they're doing have to spend a lot of time reviewing code not just for correctness but malicious intent, something they may not be qualified to do.
Malicious code is a strict subset of incorrect code. You check all your code for correctness, right? If you're not qualified to do that then you're not a programmer.
* Releasing the source code now makes it exceptionally easy for people to trojan the code and release a compiled version. The bar has been lowered from "knows assembler and iPhone internals" to "is decent with C."
No, it hasn't. Let me know when you've managed to break code signing and vendor repositories. Every binary package I use was either compiled/signed by the vendor or compiled by myself from vendor signed source code.
Would not surprise me in the slightest if some of the regular "don't worry about it, it's nothing" noise on slashdot is due to lying industry arseholes. Complacency is in part how the US DMCA got through.
Such people should be in jail for fraud.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
For example, it costs billions of dollars to develop a new drug,
Yes, why is drug development so horrendously inefficient?
Yes, I know the hand waving answers but the real underlying reason is the drug companies don't have any strong free market incentives to become more efficient.
It's time they felt the chill winds of the free market.
That means a much less privileged legal position leading to much less concentration of financial power (which in turn leads to political distortion/power), to the extent that maybe even no "IP" protection privilege is the best balance.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Probably because it's not the heart of all these problems. The heart of all these problems is that a billion security-unaware people operate computers that are connected to the internet.
No, the heart of the problem is that windows, despite what M$ claims, was not be designed for those people and as a result those people make mistakes.
Software is soft, it can be anything we want it to be, and assholes who claim that "software can't do software related things" are lying through their teeth.
If thirty odd years ago windows had been designed responsibly we wouldn't have the mess that we have now. Amongst many other things when connected to the net they deliberately confused static data with executables and deliberately ran all programs as administrator. Things that mainframe OS' and Unix had understood and solved decades before. I can remember the very first time I saw a web page with an executable and thinking "you stupid fucking idiots". The ramifications were obvious right from the start; M$ just chose to ignore them.
The marketing parasites, and their patsies, who to this day continue to claim that windows was not a large part of the problem are lying arseholes. M$ is slowly improving their security but they still have a long, long way to go with a culture that still tries to test for security rather than building for it. And yes, despite what some idiots claim, security and user friendliness are not mutually contradictory. In fact they are more complimentary than contradictory with well built security systems helping users to make good choices for their own safety as well as everybody else's.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, now if we can just fix the NIH funding problem. We've gone years now completely ignoring biomedical research in this country.
Completely ignoring? According to the article you researchers are getting $29,000,000,000 of my tax money. I hope you're spending it responsibly. Are you?
A number of "researchers" I know are spending their grant money on things of little research value. Research in general suffers from the problem of political operators out-competing the genuine researchers to get grant money. Until researchers as a group take peer review more seriously and are truly willing to give political operators the boot you're going to continue to see funding decrease simply because the payback for the general population isn't there.
---
Keep your options open!
In closing, I believe patents *can* have a legitimate function in spurring innovation. However, the unfortunate truth is, our case is probably an exception, rather than the rule.
Personally, I've got no problem with the idea of patents, it's just that in the real world I don't think it's possible to implement them fairly. I think it's almost entirely an accident that your company is benefiting. There are plenty of other cases where large companies are blocking startups because they've got a bigger collection of patents or some key roadblock patent.
Patents depend on some government bureaucrat arbitrarily deciding whether some idea is truly innovative and thus worthy of protection. Only a scientist working a lifetime in a very narrow field is able to decide that and even then they make mistakes.
There are many other problems with patents as they are currently implemented (e.g. ignoring multiple independent re-invention, arbitrary about what is [not] an idea etc.) but at their core they're based on the flawed principal that it's possible for a small government department to assess all human knowledge for originality.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
You're exaggerating hugely. There are reasons for not releasing open source but most of what you've listed are red herrings.
Vetting software before release to make sure it's clean has to be done for both open and closed source software. Companies do it every day. It's no big deal.
In any case whenever I hear of a company claiming that a piece of software can't be open sourced because it depends on some closed source component I call bullshit; there's nothing stopping them releasing what they have and allowing those with time on their hands to write a substitute for the closed component.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
While S/W patents are ... ahem... problematic, patents themselves are a pretty good indicator that a particular person or organization is at least thinking about new and innovative ways to use technology.
My personal experience is there's very little correlation between patents and innovation.
More likely, patents are an indication of an organization with a legal department trying to justify their existence.
Every new law (=patent by another name) is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
But despite documentation and careful training, most calls I get are NOT bugs or problems,
Bugs are often in the eye of the beholder. I've used plenty of programs where the programmer would claim they're bug free while they're actually rife with user interface bugs ("the default is to delete?"), mind reader bugs ("if you were a mind reader you'd know not to click cancel here"), documentation idiocies ("You seriously expect me to read a hundred pages of documentation to get to the 4th line on the 97th page which documents this completely unintuitive and unnecessary silliness?"), documented bugs ("It's documented, it's not a bug"), heisenbugs ("yeah, it only fails one in a hundred times, it's not a bug"), complexity bugs ("It's only 57 steps to enter a correct postcode, you did all those steps perfectly?"), out of touch with reality bugs ("People's names are all upper case, have no accent and are less than x characters long") etc. etc.
The problem is made worse by naive users who blame themselves rather than the program/programmer when something goes wrong.
If I were you I'd look closely in the mirror and think hard about what is and is not a bug. Programs are soft, they can be anything we want them to be and if they're not designed for the actual user it's a programmer problem. In other words if a user's reasonable expectations are not fulfilled it's more likely to be a problem with the programmer, not the user.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
You're actually complaining about 65 meg of ram?
Rightfully so. Large code competing with other large code gets pushed out of the level 1+2 memory caches. That can lead up to an order of magnitude slowdown.
I don't know if you've been keeping track, but next year machines will come with 4 gig of ram standard.
Almost irrelevant.
Wasting time optimizing memory usage is just that, wasting time.
Nonsense. Large code usually means slow code and most users do not want their time unnecessarily wasted. Programmers who ignore memory caches and memory usage are usually poor programmers.
In addition large, slow code is slower to debug. It costs development time. Programmers who claim there's a strict development/code performance tradeoff are blowing hot air.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry
Just where is all this innovation going?
Repeat after me: Patents != Innovation.
Patents are just a PTO bureaucrat's way of faking being a scientist who has spent a lifetime learning and extending a narrow field of knowledge.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
That's my point. They're very good at "losing" money on every song they make make while still laughing all the way to the bank.
The RIAA may, as an organisation, may technically be losing money, but that says little about much money the RIAA's member companies are making from the RIAA's activities.
---
DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
The correct way to correct Carbon emissions are a carbon credit scheme, ditto for urban pollution.
In theory I agree with you. It's the practice that I'm concerned about. Creating a new market (which is basically what carbon credit schemes are) is great but only if all the prerequisites for a functioning and effective market exist. In particular transaction costs, further hidden externalities (just how do you measure general pollution?), assorted fraud and needed regulation may mean that government mandated standards are a more efficient way to do it. There's nothing magic about markets; they're just a tool that in practice may or may not be best for the job depending on the characteristics and general understanding of the thing being traded.
Please explain how CAFE standards are relevant, or efficient here.
I'm not a scientist in the area so I can't evaluate which would be better but it wouldn't surprise me if international carbon trading markets are still very immature (=inefficient) and government standards are the best way to go for a few years yet.
Incidentally, you appear to implicitly believe that markets can function without government regulation. That's silly; markets without government (=one man, one vote about how markets should be structured and run) is just warlordism. Might makes right in other words. Government tries to stop all the ways of competing negatively (e.g. shooting your competitor, engaging in fraud, cartels, buying legislation etc.) while allowing positive competition (e.g. making a better product, competing on price etc.).
So, whether you like it or not government is going to be involved one way or another.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
What a sucker you are. Every time M$ reduces the functionality and increases the controls people like you come out of the woodwork and claim it's not hurting. Boiled frog anyone?
The tilt bits alone are enough to show that M$ doesn't care about stability, performance or improving the customer experience. It's all about control.
And please, no nonsense about the music industry "requiring" those controls. M$ voluntarily chose to put them in and take advantage.
---
WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Where does the government come into this?
Marginally reducing the carbon emission (global warming) and urban air pollution externalities.
Markets frequently fail on everything from fraud to pollution to violence and external group mechanisms like government are needed to correct them.
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It's market failure whenever any one player has more than 50% of the market power.
That said, those efforts -- even the legal ones standing alone -- cost much, much more than they raise.
Methinks some typical hollywood accounting is going on here.
They wouldn't do it unless it was worth their while, even if the "loss reduction" scare tactics are all they're profiting from.
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DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
Glad to see that you guys don't let facts get in the way of a good MS bash.
This is not a bash. This is humor. Learn to tell the difference and to cope with alternative points of view.
In particular just because some comment doesn't conform to M$ marketing's incredibly narrow propaganda view of the world doesn't mean the comment is invalid.
Disclaimer: I am a fanboy of many things, including Xbox 360, but not Microsoft in general. I like Windows XP and hate most everything that MS has put out which isn't an OS (i.e. office, internet explorer, etc). I'll definitely not be participating simply because I'm not interested in any of the offerings.
This disclaimer is meaningless. A valid one might be: Disclaimer: I am not paid directly or indirectly by MS.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
3) Deduct credit card monthly. If it's too small in any one month let it roll over to the next month or drop it for the good will. Just like the phone, utility and every other service company on the planet.
4) Pass on any extra costs to the customer, give the customer options and let the customer decide. Just like every mail order company on the planet.
This is not rocket science. This is typical M$ "I don't mind and you don't matter" manipulativeness. No wonder many people detest them.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
it is valid to point out where the hivemind is hypocritical and inconsistent from one opinion to the next
No, you are being hypocritical by deliberately describing /. as a hivemind when there are obviously varied opinions here. Hivemind, by definition, means of the same opinion.
If inidividual posters were being inconsistent then it might mean something. As it is all you've done is demonstrate that you have trouble thinking logically.
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Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
Now, is copyright good or bad?
It's bad because somebody comes along and makes a mashup of your work and others that pokes fun at you and others like you. The mashup is funny and is seen by millions and enriches all their lives leading to a vast net benefit because such things are non-rivalrous.
See? I can make arbitrary assertions too.
Please, stop implying benefit to the author is benefit to the general population. They are not the same, no matter how often entrenched interests whine and try to dissemble.
In addition, stop whining about how your business model (publisher makes an advance) is going to die. Many think you are not entitled to legal privileges for your buggy whip business model when things can be efficiently published for cents on the web.
The reality is, whether you like it or not, is there is now sufficient information and fiction overload to last any one individual thousands of lifetimes. The fact that the market price doesn't currently reflect that is telling and suggests that market has failed. No wonder the vast majority of the population, while generally honest, pirates whenever they get the chance.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Beyond the obvious effects of wasted bandwith, time, storage etc. the effects of spam will tend to be random sideeffects which may be good or bad and probably cancel out.
Not unreasonable but I disagree; on average spam will cause more problems than it solves, because on average spam is deceptive junk designed to advantage the spammer and disadvantage the receiver. If the average spam was neutral, non-manipulative and non-deceptive your position would be valid but in general this is not true and the side effects do not cancel out.
---
Has your software been deliberately crippled?
spam has a much lower likelihood of ending in death (approximately zero) than armed robbery (some high percentage).
You are ignoring the statistics. Spam affects millions. It is a statistical certainty that some people have been affected in a life threatening way, whether it be a naive person who wastes time on a useless medicine or a person who misses an important life-or-death email because it's been spam-filtered.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
I love the groupthink here.
There are a variety of opinions here. You on the other hand have just demonstrated you are a fanatic who can't cope with alternative points of view and resort to name calling instead. No wonder you got mod'ed down.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
If you do not expose your students to tools they are likely to be using in the workplace, you are likely to do them a disservice,
The school is doing the community a disservice if they use taxpayer funds to teach proprietary software products.
This is an illicit company subsidy. Bad enough for any company but even worse if tax payer funds are being used to subsidize one dominant market player.
No problem teaching general principles that apply to any company's products but there should not be even a hint of favoring any one company. This is bad for the community (not thinking long term), bad for the company's competitors (why aren't they being subsidized?) and bad for the student's education (which should be about general principles).
An entirely private school has more choices. If the students/faculty choose to go with a particular company that's just a regular transaction. Their money, their choice. A bad long term choice in my opinion but if that's what they want to do so be it.
The above argument does not apply to open source because open source benefits the entire community, not just the one company. You could make an argument about open source disadvantaging individual companies but that's a bogus argument because it applies to any company in a particular field and so that playing field is level. Individual companies may not like the community being favored over them but that's their problem, not ours.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
The idea that "open source" is magical security pixie dust needs to die.
I know you're joking but nobody says it is, just that open source gives more options. Independent third party review is important, in everything from politics to crime to code.
---
Keep your options open!
Enough with the "closed source is inherently superior" propaganda. Whether you like it or not open source for the user is everything that closed source is. Plus the source is available.
The idea that "closed source" is magical security pixie dust needs to die.
this move could 'open a lot of possibilities for the future,' mainly in terms of the speed of the updates and avoiding sloppy and possibly dangerous binary patches.Ugh. This is just another version of "open source code is more secure because you can review it and compile it yourself."
No, it hasn't. Try to understand that it's not just you reviewing the code but potentially many other parties apart from the originator. Are you trying to tell us independent third party review is not a good idea?
Open source code can be more secure
No, open source is likely to be more secure. Because many independent third parties can review it. Not just a vendor who has a commercial, ego or "not-enough-manhours" incentive to hide mistakes.
, because a qualified individual can conduct a lengthy security audit,
No, because many different individuals with many different levels of expertise can conduct all sorts of audits, security and otherwise, and in addition use the code in ways the the original author[s] never even envisaged.
and maybe catch some malicious or insecure code."
Better than no chance at all.
* virtually nobody that uses the code will be even remotely qualified to even understand how the code works, much less be able to tell if it'll screw up their phone.
So, out of a population of billions that leaves a population of thousands, or more, who are more than qualified to look at it. Think the statistics.
* Opening development to more people makes the chances of someone SUBMITTING (note, I said "submitting", not "successfully getting away with putting malicious code into an official release) go up; now the few people who know what they're doing have to spend a lot of time reviewing code not just for correctness but malicious intent, something they may not be qualified to do.
Malicious code is a strict subset of incorrect code. You check all your code for correctness, right? If you're not qualified to do that then you're not a programmer.
* Releasing the source code now makes it exceptionally easy for people to trojan the code and release a compiled version. The bar has been lowered from "knows assembler and iPhone internals" to "is decent with C."
No, it hasn't. Let me know when you've managed to break code signing and vendor repositories. Every binary package I use was either compiled/signed by the vendor or compiled by myself from vendor signed source code.
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I want a free and open market. Do you?
Way better to be too early rather than too late.
Would not surprise me in the slightest if some of the regular "don't worry about it, it's nothing" noise on slashdot is due to lying industry arseholes. Complacency is in part how the US DMCA got through.
Such people should be in jail for fraud.
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DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
For example, it costs billions of dollars to develop a new drug,
Yes, why is drug development so horrendously inefficient?
Yes, I know the hand waving answers but the real underlying reason is the drug companies don't have any strong free market incentives to become more efficient.
It's time they felt the chill winds of the free market.
That means a much less privileged legal position leading to much less concentration of financial power (which in turn leads to political distortion/power), to the extent that maybe even no "IP" protection privilege is the best balance.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Probably because it's not the heart of all these problems. The heart of all these problems is that a billion security-unaware people operate computers that are connected to the internet.
No, the heart of the problem is that windows, despite what M$ claims, was not be designed for those people and as a result those people make mistakes.
Software is soft, it can be anything we want it to be, and assholes who claim that "software can't do software related things" are lying through their teeth.
If thirty odd years ago windows had been designed responsibly we wouldn't have the mess that we have now. Amongst many other things when connected to the net they deliberately confused static data with executables and deliberately ran all programs as administrator. Things that mainframe OS' and Unix had understood and solved decades before. I can remember the very first time I saw a web page with an executable and thinking "you stupid fucking idiots". The ramifications were obvious right from the start; M$ just chose to ignore them.
The marketing parasites, and their patsies, who to this day continue to claim that windows was not a large part of the problem are lying arseholes. M$ is slowly improving their security but they still have a long, long way to go with a culture that still tries to test for security rather than building for it. And yes, despite what some idiots claim, security and user friendliness are not mutually contradictory. In fact they are more complimentary than contradictory with well built security systems helping users to make good choices for their own safety as well as everybody else's.
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Flash = blink tag = incompetent web designer.