What's with people escalating to the max at the first hint of trouble? Did you a) talk with them first? Try to persuade them their thinking is incorrect? And set things up so they could not make them indispensable? Which is good to do regardless. Then if none of that worked, did you warn them? Or you b) went straight for the throat? Sure sounds like you did b). If workers weren't so damn cheap, disposable and replaceable, you'd quickly change your attitude. Because if you didn't, you wouldn't have anyone left to manage.
Plus, with a different attitude on your part, you might discover that your employees are less inclined to try such things. It would also help immensely if jobs were plentiful, but admittedly there's not much 1 manager can do about that. Still, you could do somewhat so they would feel less pressured and paranoid. So many businesses make the employee-employer relationship so damned adversarial, always act like the average employee is a stupid, light fingered slacker who has to be forced to work for their own good. Micromanaged so they don't screw up or off.
It's easy to slip up. I signed a petition, just once, but that was enough. Got me on a bunch of email lists.
This was also just after a browser upgrade. The new version didn't display the website correctly, so I didn't see any notices saying that I wasn't just signing a petition, I was also opting in to email.
And I really dislike the mailing list. Please set up a forum instead. To use a mailing list, I have to set up another filter, or start another email account as well as registering with the list.
They can ask for impossible and contradictory things. Or cooked things. They want things like a secure operating system that can run all their favorite Windows apps. Some SBIRs I've seen are good examples of what I mean. One wanted a working implementation of quantum data compression. A moment's thought was enough to realize that if I could whip up a quantum computer, data compression would be the least of what I could do. Another SBIR wasn't honest. It wanted image recognition, but had so many extra conditions and unnecessary stipulations that only one particular vendor's software could meet the requirements. Of course that software was much inferior to the state of the art. They do this because they lack expertise, and don't know what is unreasonable and what isn't. They tend towards the unreasonable because they know some vendors are trying to rip them off. They also have to deal with blatant favoritism. You wonder who writes some of the crap you see in SBIRs.
The end result is invariably disappointment. The vendor cheats them. Or it doesn't matter if the vendor cheated or not, because their expectations were insane and couldn't be satisfied. Or the whole thing is one big con from beginning to end, with requirements purposely made impossible so the guys with the inside track don't have to worry about any competition, and some sort of acceptance process that will rubber stamp their fakery. All they have to do is generate enough bull to baffle anyone who isn't an expert.
Boondoggle is the word. Despite the cheating and corruption, they have enough successes to keep it all going. But many people prefer to steer clear of the military and their particular brand of insanity. Hard to get any work done when suspicious and demanding military bureaucrats insist on micromanaging you and twisting your work and time towards useless ends they think will make them look better.
There were large vehicles long before power steering. Just had high ratios on the steering wheel.
Aluminum is not an expensive, exotic material. And we're looking at the practicality of using more magnesium.
I have driven my slow car on the freeway. It's nowhere near as bad as you make out. The average loaded 18 wheeler needs over 60 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 60, would you call that dangerously underpowered? Doesn't sound like you appreciate just how fast 0-60 in 5 seconds is. That's modern muscle car territory. Most newer cars are around 8 seconds, and they're only that fast because power has been steadily creeping up over the years.
You say that the changes I mention aren't significant, that 20 pounds isn't much, and 2% isn't much of an improvement in economy. But that's exactly how you get good economy! A little here, and a little there, and pretty soon you've saved hundreds of pounds and improved fuel economy by 20% or more. And you will get improvements that large.
A 100 mpg car that seats 4 and is comfortable does exist: Edison2. Why did you give up on the idea of a tandem car? I've thought of those as well, and wondered if they could be made long enough to hold 4 people and still fit in a parking spot. Or, could the seating be a little tighter, somewhat like in a bobsled? As for safety, they can be better than standard vehicles. More crush space to work with on the sides.
No, we can't. It's beyond the laws of physics. We're pretty close to the limits of efficiency already.
Do you really believe that? It's true that recent safety regulations have made it more difficult to save weight, but we're nowhere close to exhausting the weight reduction possibilities with cheap materials. No need for exotic, expensive lightweights. For example, all cars still carry spare tires, despite flats being less common. We could change how we handle flats. There is still much in the engine bay that can be reduced. Can toss the power steering and not only save a bit of weight, but eliminate another drag on the engine. Can use even more aluminum in place of iron. Windows are another target for weight savings-- glass is heavy.
Almost every combustion engine uses the Otto cycle, but that's not the most efficient one. Another easy improvement is the turbocharger. Then there is the compression ratio. We compromise there to reduce emissions. And heat makes engines more efficient, yet we waste a great deal of energy on cooling because our materials can't take too much heat. Even so we are too conservative on that, and could run our engines a little hotter than usually done now. Another way to change that is to use a cooler burning fuel such as methanol. Could get by without a water pump.
Then there's aerodynamics. Take a look at the underside of a typical car, and you'll see aerodynamic horror. People wouldn't put up with corrugations, breaks, weld seams, projections, and so forth on any other surface, but the underside is very much out of sight and out of mind. We don't have skirts on the wheels because everyone feels it's ugly. Marketing can't even bear to make the relatively minor change in appearance of reducing the size of the grill opening. Take a look under the hood and see if the opening extends beyond the width of the radiator and condenser coils. On many cars, it does. We could have coefficients of drag under 0.2, but hardly anyone even tries for better than 0.3.
As for 0-60 in 5 seconds, anyone who thinks that is all that useful is spoiled. One of my cars needs 30 seconds to get to 60. Drive a car like that and you'll better appreciate a fact that we've covered for with our jackrabbit starts. We have too many stoplights, and they're brainless. That brings up another way to save: instant engine starts. Letting our engines idle at stops is very wasteful, but we do it because sometimes they can be difficult to start, or we want to keep the A/C on.
Some of what I mentioned really is low hanging fruit.
Suffer? No. We become acclimatized. Supposed to be healthier too. I find 85 F quite comfortable in the summer, and 68 F in the winter is just fine.
The pay back on electric solar panels can be as bad as 80 years. If the panels degrade over time, they may never pay for themselves. I'd like to do it, but after technology brings the prices and risks down a lot more. There's a real possibility that panels could indeed be improved by 100% or more in the next 5 years. Meantime, we can get more bang for those bucks with other measures.
Cars on the other hand are frustrating. We can make huge improvements in the fuel economy, but we don't. I hang on and hang on to the old beaters because the new stuff is not significantly better. 40 mpg? Big deal. I have 90's era cars that do that. Hybrids are significantly better, but also enough more costly that the overall benefit is doubtful. If an automaker were to roll out an X Prize winning 100 mpg car that seats 4, and isn't exceptionally costly, I'd buy it. And I would bike or walk more if I could. But the US is so car centric. For instance, not legal to pedal a bicycle down a freeway, not that I'd want to! I've had plans to walk to the store scotched because on so many overpasses, freeway designers couldn't be bothered to include a sidewalk. When choosing an apartment, I've checked that there were no impediments to walking to work.
Tax assessors around here seem to think home values rise by 20% or more every year. We've made many trips to the tax office to force them to reduce their valuation. Show them reports of the sale prices of similar homes in the neighborhood. You may be right that new windows would go unnoticed, as unlike a pool or a car port, we would not have to clear that with the city.
For drying clothes, I use racks, and keep it indoors so I don't have to worry about rain. Hang the shirts up damp, leave a little space between each one, and leave the closet door open. The dryer is actually more work for me, an extra step between 1) put dirty clothes in washer, and 2) put clean clothes away.
We have gas heat, we're in Texas, and our house is relatively small. Possibly the clutter helps too. A/C is the bigger cost. The biggest savings is from setting the thermostat to 80 F in the summer. I'd go even higher, but the rest of the family whined. I tried sneaking in higher temps, set it up 1 more degree, but they noticed and set it back. Texans are funny about A/C. It's like they want to show off how well the A/C works by cooling to 69 F. I take a jacket on the rare occasions I go to a summer blockbuster movie.
Yes, that's a problem with how America does things. If it can't be used to make huge profits, a perfectly fine idea gets ignored. Businesses would much, much rather sell people on a $1000 "Energy Star" dryer (LOL) than a $5 clothes line. Too much of our economy is about selling us the most expensive fixes for our problems, and making up more problems for us.
Have had half a dozen window sellers try to persuade me to spend $6K to $14K to upgrade all our windows to fancy double or triple pane ones filled with argon gas, etc. They claim it could save up to 50% on the heating and cooling bills. Rather comic how they showed their true colors by always pitching the very most expensive windows first. I looked at the numbers, and figured even the cheapest weren't worth it. We spend about $500 per year on heating and cooling. At that rate, it would take 24 years to pay back $6K. Hate to think how much worse financing would make that. There was the argument that we were making our house more valuable, to which I pointed out that if so, we would have to pay more property tax. Then, suppose they exaggerated, and the windows actually only save 20% on our heating and cooling? There are other ways that maybe aren't as good, but they sure are a lot cheaper: tint, good drapes, and maybe awnings. Probably are worth putting into new houses, but not houses that already have windows, however crappy.
Hot water and light are good uses of solar. Electricity from solar panels is not so good because it isn't that efficient for the cost. Sure don't want to spend $10k on a solar panel installation that may well be obsolete in less than 5 years.
Don't blame the users. More than half the blame lies on those boxes. They're practically full blown computers complete with hard drives and long boot up times of over a minute--- and almost no power management, and that's definitely not the fault of the users. Linux can be booted in 5 seconds, and could be made even faster with things such as the ancient technology known as ROM. No excuse for boxes taking so long to boot, and dodging the problem by just having it always stay on. Long ago, we were introduced to the "Power" button to get around the requirement that "Off" means off, with VCRs that would lose all their programming whenever power was interrupted. The industry has completely punted on this issue.
We could have had a standard for sensing the state of connected hardware so that if the TV is off, and no recording is being made, the box will sleep. Actually, we do have that, but the boxes can just ignore it. Or perhaps we could have more integration, with set top box functionality built into the TV. There are a whole lot of things that could have been done. Lot of cabling is still carrying analog signals. Instead, a top priority in the design of things like HDMI was that users should have to burn even more power on useless anti-piracy measures, such as HDCP.
I have a very simple solution. I don't have cable TV. Saves me a bundle.
Threaten to sue them. Often they cave after receiving a letter from a lawyer. And it has to be from a lawyer, not you. For a relatively small claim the lawyer will get a few hundred dollars for having spent 15 minutes dashing off a form letter, and you'll get your money. For a big claim, you'll probably have to agree to give a lawyer 1/3 (!!!!) of the money you receive, if any. Which means you should factor that in to the size of the settlement you would find acceptable. The lawyer will threaten them, and they'll make a lowball counteroffer, putting you in the position of trying to guess whether you can get more. You should almost never accept the first offer. Once the lawyer has threatened them again, they will make a better offer that may be good enough. Or maybe you'll have to try a 3rd round. Occasionally, they will fight and you'll have to go to court.
This is how insurance works now. Always be prepared to sue. When deciding on whether to insure, factor in the cost of the inevitable delays and fights. Because they will test you. They want to see if you'll roll over and play dead after they've come up with an outrageous reason why your claim is denied. They'll also conveniently undervalue your property, forget details, and generally chip and chisel down the payout. If you call them, they try to wear you down with long holds, and arguments over every little thing. It's like spam. Even if only 0.01% of the insured fall for this, they think it's worth trying. They see it as low cost moves that could save them a lot. When you finally beat through all the barriers they throw up, then they take their sweet time paying. They don't think of the damage to their reputation, only the immediate savings to be had by gaming their customers.
I am absolutely confident i could learn it quickly if i had to.
Of course. Any decent programmer could pick up another programming language easily. FORTRAN is easier than most as its quirks are relatively few. In FORTRAN 77 and older, the main ones are no dynamic allocation, and no complex structures. Just arrays. You have to statically declare up front all the space the program could ever need. Want to use a stack? Then figure out the maximum possible number of items that could ever be in that stack so you know how big to make the arrays for it.
But employers have grown accustomed to dismissing that basic fact of programming languages. HR will immediately throw your resume in the trash if it doesn't have all the magic words. They make it difficult for you to work around their shortsightedness, and will insist that only experience counts. Taking a class or learning and using it on your own free time doesn't count. Giving yourself a crash course on a particular language may not be good enough to pass the kind of trivia test they are apt to give. Depends how obscure they get. I can think of several obscure C/C++ trivia, such as "pascal". Think of the Obfuscated C Code Contests. Such tests completely fail to sort good programmers from bad ones. Then, after they've thrown the babies out with the bathwater, they complain they can't find any good programmers.
Think you have to ask a more basic question. Do women want gaming? Gaming as we know it? I'm not talking just computer games, but sports, races, board games such as chess, and pretty much any kind of competition with clear rules and "fairness". Sure, some will play. They'll even get into some games and really enjoy them, and get very good at them. But we never see as many women playing anything.
Gaming is by its nature competitive in a very direct way, and this is not how women go through life. Yes, they compete. But the style and substance of their competitions is different. They can't physically compete with men, so they don't. For instance, how can you have a fair weight lifting contest between both sexes? You can't, any more than you could have a fair contest between a group of 20 somethings and a group of octogenarians. In other sorts of contests in which the girls can show up the boys, they often prefer not to. Some men are very bad sports about being beat by women, so much so that "winning" is actually rather risky for the girls. In typical games, the goal or victory conditions are really very arbitrary and one dimensional. The ultimate in one dimensionality is the concept of "victory points", or just points, capped with ladder style playoffs in which only one person or team can win. Why do we like such championships so? Why this pressure to scrap the current college football bowl system in favor of a more definitive championship? Why are we so obsessed with anointing someone or some group as the very best? Why does a silver medal, a red ribbon, not feel like a great accomplishment? Even in games that have many directions and unrelated goals, such as an RPG, the designers (men, of course) couldn't resist building in a very linear point based system of advancement, in these cases, "leveling". Money can serve as another goal, but it is still a very rigorous, easily comparable measure. These goals are just not important to the women, or are even to be avoided as possibly dangerous.
I'll try again to explain why the GPL is unnecessary without copyright. I said "make that same improvement" for a reason. Suppose there is no copyright, no GPL, and you don't want to share. Fine, don't share. We'll reverse engineer or reinvent your much vaunted improvement, if we think it worthwhile. We'll probably even improve on it. Without copyright (and without software patents), you have no legal way to stop us from doing that. Also, we can make you wish you had shared. Now, it is easier if you just share it, and that is where the GPL does indeed go a little further. But don't kid yourself that no one else will be able to come up with the same improvements you have, and most definitely don't kid yourself that no one will be able to follow your direction. The main point of the GPL is that you can't use copyright to lock down improvements. Without copyright, you could not do lock downs anyway. It is copyright that enables you to do legal lock downs, and it is copyleft that uses copyright to prevent that.
I don't understand your "makes the original impractical" phrase
A change that genuinely improves software makes the original second rate, does it not? If the change did not do that, then it isn't an improvement. The original is still perfectly usable of course. But it is now obsolete. That's what I mean by impractical. You could take a team of horses and wagons from the Mississippi to the West Coast on the old Oregon Trail. But it is utterly impractical to spend months doing that when you could make that trip in hours with a car or a plane. Now, improvements to software are usually not that severe, and the original is still good enough to be useful. For instance, the ancient compress utility does not compress as well as gzip, but it is not orders of magnitude worse. It is better in one respect. Compress is a little faster than gzip. Yet to continue using compress comes with a cost, puts you at a disadvantage. You will need a little more hard drive space, a little more time to transmit compressed data over a network. A little disadvantage can be enough to sink a business. Not good for the economy or fair to you if the original is your work, and someone else improves on that and then has and employs legal means to forbid you from making the same improvements.
anyone can do anything in isolation and not tell anyone about it.
But in the case of GPL software, you can tell the world about it. And no one will have any legal recourse, so long as you don't distribute.
the converse of "restriction of a restriction" is not a freedom
That is not the argument I'm making. There are genuine restrictions that forbid something to everyone. If no one is allowed to, say, be on a particular mountain, that's a real restriction. There may or may not be good reason for it, but whatever the case with that, the restriction is truly a restriction. Then there are things that are both a restriction and a freedom, and you are seeing only the restriction part. And you ARE playing word games to try to force that viewpoint. It's like the parable of the blind men and an elephant, but you keep on insisting it is only the part you have touched. And think again about the "freedom" to enslave people. Such a freedom cannot be applied equally to everyone because the first person to use it takes it away from someone else.
my entire point is that the GPL requires copyright enforcement. Without copyright, the GPL is invalid
Moot point. Yes, the GPL needs copyright to work. But without copyright, the GPL is unnecessary. Without copyright, entities could not copy publicly available software and "protect" it by slapping a copyright on it, and then take our work away from us by suing everyone for copyright infringement! That's the sort of thing the GPL is designed to stop. The essence of the GPL is that you shall not forbid the sharing of what was shared with you. And you shall not forbid sharing in a backhanded way either, by making an improvement that makes the original impractical, and then refusing to let anyone else have or make that same improvement, all while claiming that you are not stopping anyone from sharing, because the original is still available. The genius of the GPL is that for so long as there is copyright and the ability to abuse it to steal works from the public, there is copyleft. Every move that strengthens copyright also strengthens copyleft.
and anyone can take the software someone has released, change it, and sell it.
You can do all that right now, with software released under the GPL. The GPL explicitly allows sales. All that is required is that you convey the changes to the public.
You also seem to be unaware that in fact the GPL does NOT require that you share your changes. What it requires is that you share your changes IF you distribute something that is based on those changes. You don't have to distribute. If you want, you can keep your modifications all to yourself, and use them internally.
You mentioned one way that a world without copyright could work: commissions. I would not want to rely on only that. I'd want every idea out there, so that while creators would always miss out on compensation from some methods, they won't miss out from all. I'm thinking more of multiple patronage systems, with every possible safeguard to limit the potential for corruption. Some funding could be public, through taxes. And some could be through private donations. We'd have dozens of ways for deciding who should receive money. We have a little of this now, in the form of prizes and awards, things like the Nobel Prize, Hugo and Nebula Awards, the X Prizes, Clay Mathematics Institute Millenium Prizes, Topcoder, and so on. They aren't nearly enough.
It also seems you are trying to make us out as a bunch of hypocrites.
You take the meaning of "restrictions" to contradictory extremes. You might as well say that because you aren't allowed to enslave, imprison, or kill another person, you are being restricted. You are also restricted from leaping a tall building in a single bound, or violating the laws of thermodynamics, or any of infinitely many other acts that are impossible. How can anyone who is in favor of freedom not be in favor of allowing you the freedom to enslave someone? A similar argument was commonly used by the pro slavery faction prior to the US Civil War, whenever a new state was being admitted and they had to decide whether it was to be a slave state or a free state. The pro slavery side disingenuously held that a slave owner ought to have the right to bring slaves with him to free states without them being freed. The owner could even go so far as to demand that the state exert itself to maintain this "freedom", for instance by hunting down, capturing, and returning runaways. If the free states had accepted such arguments, they would have effectively become slave states, as the pro slavery side knew full well.
It also seems you are trying to make us out as a bunch of hypocrites. Your arguments are weak, as you should realize. You're playing word games. Is it truly restriction to restrict what restrictions others may impose? Such wording is not a good way to capture the concept. It ignores the complementary and opposing nature of such rules. That which is a restriction to one so that another may enjoy the complementary freedom, and so that both are equal in the eyes of the law, should not be thought of as only a restriction, because it is more. It's like the old saw about whether half a glass of water should be considered half empty or half full.
Warning: I'm going to spoil your fond remembrances of T2!
Terminator was much better than T2. Terminator had plenty of flaws. (For instance, what is the deal with frickin time travel being so popular? Time travel is such an overused, tired, totally lame plot helper. It's our era's deus ex machina.) But on the whole the story is just plain better. The reason to watch T2 is to enjoy the special effects and action scenes, not the plot. T2 pushes forward the idea that the villanous, evil, unstoppable terminator can be co-opted with the flip of a switch. Urgh. It's like nothing is related, nothing depends on anything else, there is no history. There isn't any reason or logic for anything. Suppose in T3 (which I have not seen), they did the same thing? Just like that, that shape shifting liquid metal terminator is on our side. Or, heck, let's do a brain transplant or implant on young Connor, make him join the terminators, and now Sarah has to undo the conversion. For T2, I understand Schwarzenegger forced them because he wanted to play a good guy, so I don't blame the writers for that part at least. That doesn't absolve them for wanting to do T2 in the first place.
And I found the sacrifices in T2 especially cheesy and obnoxious. They die for... ignorance! Yes, they bravely die to destroy the dangerous knowledge that leads to the creation of the terminators. Yep, that computer "genius" guy, after Sarah tries to murder him, joins her "cause" with astonishing rapidity, and bravely finishes the job by killing himself! The Terminator does likewise at the end. Never mind the logical difficulties and basic stupidities of such thinking.
In contrast, Harry Potter had a pretty good mix of random death and sacrifice. Admittedly, a character like Hedwig the owl had "red shirt" written all over her. Some of the deaths and escapes were a bit too convenient. But mostly, the fatalities are understandable, and except for R.A.B., the sacrifices are not cheesily certain. Life is chancy, and sometimes when people take risks, they pay the ultimate price. That's war.
We have all these wars going on. I don't mean Afghanistan exactly, I mean the Wars on Drugs, Terror, and Piracy (the digital variety). We've even appointed "czars" for some of these. There was a War on Poverty, but we more than gave up on that. We changed sides. Now it's a silent War on the Poor. They're bashing unions, hard, in places like Wisconsin, but the elites won't set any good example. They ask the unions to sacrifice, and far from sacrificing a little themselves for the cause, take what they persuaded and bullied others into giving up! I cannot sympathize with any bashing of the average citizen for greed when our leaders grab everything in sight, and indulge in the grossest, most wasteful conspicuous consumption, and think it's deserved, and that besides it is only natural.
What kind of elite idiot, who, somehow being clever enough to get the money to afford a million dollar home, spends it on sheer size and utterly useless vanity features such as a two story high entrance foyer with chandelier, and 2 or 3 fireplaces and air conditioners? And that while blissfully ignoring that the house is in a flood plain, is oriented all wrong so that the air conditioning and windows are on the west side of the house where they get the full blast of the afternoon sun, sprawls so much that in the winter it loses heat faster than a thin crust pizza at an ice rink, is highly susceptible to fires, termites, and rot thanks to the all wood construction (but at least they've come to their senses about wood shingles and stopped using them), has single pane windows, a weak slab foundation that will crack in the first 5 years, and not so much as a solar water heater for hot water, no insulation of the hot water pipes, etc. A million is more than enough to build a house that can function without the grid. Instead, these houses are so wasteful that they can easily run up utility bills of over $500 per month. And then this cad of a homeowner has the gall to denigrate the poor as "trailer park trash", "hippies", and "union members".
We should drop the dumbest of these wars, and switch to a War on Greed.
Xiph chose to focus on a small part of the problem: how patents make it hard to create standards. They gave a number of examples and scenarios. Then they suggest a few small reforms that may help a little bit. Rather than advocate against the patenting of software, they aim for more modest changes that they hope make it impossible to hold a standard hostage years later with submarine patents. Surface immediately, or lose all right to challenge the standard.
Is Xiph's recommendation a good idea? I don't know. Sounds good as far as it goes. But I think they do not go far enough. I fear clever legal experts will find ways around Xiph's solutions. And that they will turn those solution against us. Large companies could use Xiph's proposed mechanism to make an end run around any number of patents. Just make up another standard, and never mind whether the standard is ever adopted, as the point is to quash related patents. Would little folk be able to use this technique? And who decides what is a standard, what the requirements are to create a standard? Are we going to appoint ISO as our new overlords to decide that? MS's OOXML campaign springs to mind as an example of what could go wrong. In contrast, if we simply eliminate the patenting of software, we don't have those issues.
I'll write to my Rep. He's a Republican, so I'll put it in terms I think will resonate. Patents are government interference! Get the government out of my business!
But I want to go much further than a mere bill. I want to remove the "exclusive" part of both patents and copyrights. No more monopolies. To do that would, I believe, require a constitutional amendment. I'd like to change to a permissive system, in which anyone can use anyone else's work without explicit permission, payment, or anything else burdensome. As matters stand, the default is "no". If you can't contact the rights holder, and negotiate an acceptable agreement with them, then you have to do something else. They don't have to be reasonable. They don't have to deal. Or you do it anyway and risk a lawsuit. In practice, so many things are patented that you are stepping on many toes whenever you do anything at all. Totally impractical to determine whether you are violating thousands of patents, let alone track down hundreds of rights holders. Your only real choices are to risk the lawsuits, or do nothing.
Let's change that default to "yes". Make it so inventors want their inventions used. If someone else uses an idea you patented, you can apply for money from various funds set aside for this purpose. In short, the replacement system would be an updated, modernized form of patronage.
I've been hacking up a draft for the "Freedom of Knowledge" Amendment, as I've been calling it. Not at all satisfied with it, yet. I think such a proposal, if it went anywhere, would really light a fire under the owner class in our society.
No. MS does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Their reputation precedes them.
As to the argument, it is basically this: the graphics hardware does not have any mechanism to stop programs from accessing each other's data. And webGL doesn't provide any. Well, neither does anything else. The next point is that that matters because webGL executes code directly from the Internet. Ok, so this could be a security problem. But it is a problem common to every similar platform. So why is MS singling out webGL? Is trying to rework webGL the right approach to handling the problem? I would say no. That's the job of the OS, with help from the hardware.
Now, what do you think the arguments are? Or didn't you familiarize yourself with them?
What they mean by "security" is not what everyone else means. Security is just the biggest argument in the FUD arsenal. They mean control, to secure their bottom line.
For 25 plus years, that's been MS's real goal. They tried to kill off Ogg Vorbis over "insecurity"-- the supposed insecurity of no built in DRM. Security was probably one of the arguments they used to push OOXML over ODF when they were trying to maintain their file format lockdown. Talk about an outdated tactic, but then, MS has been slipping for some time now. They would have tried the old line suggesting no one would maintain the software without a large company backing it, another FUD favorite, but even they must see no one would buy that any more. And yet, they can't see the uselessness of the entire Windows Genuine Advantage program.
What specifically could they be trying to promote in place of webGL? Silverlight?
I am a US citizen, and this action angers and embarrasses me. I'm wondering what I can do about it. That's my tax money being wasted on this bull.
Call up the ICE to complain? No good. I should like to know who is behind this extradition. Could I get ICE to cough up some names? Unlikely. And yet, FOIA just might mean they have to spill. Scream at my representative, with a letter if not over the phone? Maybe. How about a public protest? Doubt anyone else cares enough about it to bother. What about the EFF and ACLU?
Hope this gets some attention, and makes the involved parties look very, very bad.
You mention Harper's Ferry. Are you an American citizen? If yes, will you go back to Britain, change your citizenship, and swear allegiance to the crown? Because the American Revolution was illegal. The rebels committed thousands of illegal acts. If you won't disown your American citizenship, then I guess you condone acts such as the Boston Tea Party, the meeting of the First Continental Congress to plead for royal intervention, which the king declared treasonous after it had happened, and finally the Declaration of Independence.
I suppose you have too much to lose by saying anything else. But really, how else do we get bad laws changed? For the radical stuff, going through proper channels takes too long and is too likely to fail. Almost certainly some of the power brokers will cheat in an attempt to bury the issues, and stifle the dissent. They should hear these issues, instead they abuse their power to manipulate the technicalities of our system to ignore it all. What do you do then? Sometimes they get stupid, and pull stunts such as the imprisonment of Sklyarov, and police raids on businesses such as Steve Jackson Games. That gives us an opportunity to force some changes. But mostly, they manage to hold the line, and constantly push back with garbage like ACTA. The issues remain unsettled. Should Terry Childs not be in prison? Even the hacker community has doubts on that one. He should never have been in the position he was put. I don't mean his job, I mean being the only one with the Keys to the Kingdom. That was a huge policy failure on the part of his employer, and they covered their mistakes by railroading him. All the easier because he made mistakes too.
Someone has to make the first noise, make us heard. Squeaky wheel, you know. After the Revolution, the Brits saw what idiots they had been in their handling of the colonies, and took a much softer approach to Canada and Australia. It was also a loud demonstration of the flaws of their monarchist government, as many of the provocations had been initiated by George III himself. He was perhaps the biggest hawk of them all, wanting to fight on after 1783.
Yeah, I'd like to do more, but they sure don't make it easy.
We could have much, much more efficient conventional cars. We had some in the 90's-- cars that got around 50 to 60 mpg. We can do 100 mpg, and we can do it cheaply and in comfort, no need for exotic lightweight alloys, rare earth magnets, cramped seating, and all that. But currently the best thing I can get only does 40 mpg? Not one, NOT ONE, manufacturer has stepped up and sold a nice little conventional gas sipper in the US at a reasonable price, or any price at all. Europeans have dozens of cars that do better than 50 mpg, and we in the US get nothing. WTF? Or I have to try out the dubious benefits of hybrid drives. It's not green if you have to replace a thousand dollars worth of batteries every 2 or 4 years. And ethanol? Please.
Alternatives like walking and cycling are hard. The US is extravagantly car oriented. Pedestrians and cyclists get crap treatment. As if walking isn't already slow enough, we are forced to go around obstacle after obstacle that didn't need to be there, and wait and wait for cars, cars, cars. And people sneer at us because the only reason to walk is that we can't afford a car. My brother was once run off the road by a crazy old lady who didn't think bicycles had a right to be on a street. After she'd forced him to wipe out to avoid being run over, she rolled her window down to yell at him for using the street!
It's the same story with housing. Our houses could be so much better. But what did we spend money on? McMansions, not green housing.
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What's with people escalating to the max at the first hint of trouble? Did you a) talk with them first? Try to persuade them their thinking is incorrect? And set things up so they could not make them indispensable? Which is good to do regardless. Then if none of that worked, did you warn them? Or you b) went straight for the throat? Sure sounds like you did b). If workers weren't so damn cheap, disposable and replaceable, you'd quickly change your attitude. Because if you didn't, you wouldn't have anyone left to manage.
Plus, with a different attitude on your part, you might discover that your employees are less inclined to try such things. It would also help immensely if jobs were plentiful, but admittedly there's not much 1 manager can do about that. Still, you could do somewhat so they would feel less pressured and paranoid. So many businesses make the employee-employer relationship so damned adversarial, always act like the average employee is a stupid, light fingered slacker who has to be forced to work for their own good. Micromanaged so they don't screw up or off.
It doesn't have to be a web forum. There is Usenet.
It's easy to slip up. I signed a petition, just once, but that was enough. Got me on a bunch of email lists.
This was also just after a browser upgrade. The new version didn't display the website correctly, so I didn't see any notices saying that I wasn't just signing a petition, I was also opting in to email.
And I really dislike the mailing list. Please set up a forum instead. To use a mailing list, I have to set up another filter, or start another email account as well as registering with the list.
They can ask for impossible and contradictory things. Or cooked things. They want things like a secure operating system that can run all their favorite Windows apps. Some SBIRs I've seen are good examples of what I mean. One wanted a working implementation of quantum data compression. A moment's thought was enough to realize that if I could whip up a quantum computer, data compression would be the least of what I could do. Another SBIR wasn't honest. It wanted image recognition, but had so many extra conditions and unnecessary stipulations that only one particular vendor's software could meet the requirements. Of course that software was much inferior to the state of the art. They do this because they lack expertise, and don't know what is unreasonable and what isn't. They tend towards the unreasonable because they know some vendors are trying to rip them off. They also have to deal with blatant favoritism. You wonder who writes some of the crap you see in SBIRs.
The end result is invariably disappointment. The vendor cheats them. Or it doesn't matter if the vendor cheated or not, because their expectations were insane and couldn't be satisfied. Or the whole thing is one big con from beginning to end, with requirements purposely made impossible so the guys with the inside track don't have to worry about any competition, and some sort of acceptance process that will rubber stamp their fakery. All they have to do is generate enough bull to baffle anyone who isn't an expert.
Boondoggle is the word. Despite the cheating and corruption, they have enough successes to keep it all going. But many people prefer to steer clear of the military and their particular brand of insanity. Hard to get any work done when suspicious and demanding military bureaucrats insist on micromanaging you and twisting your work and time towards useless ends they think will make them look better.
There were large vehicles long before power steering. Just had high ratios on the steering wheel.
Aluminum is not an expensive, exotic material. And we're looking at the practicality of using more magnesium.
I have driven my slow car on the freeway. It's nowhere near as bad as you make out. The average loaded 18 wheeler needs over 60 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 60, would you call that dangerously underpowered? Doesn't sound like you appreciate just how fast 0-60 in 5 seconds is. That's modern muscle car territory. Most newer cars are around 8 seconds, and they're only that fast because power has been steadily creeping up over the years.
You say that the changes I mention aren't significant, that 20 pounds isn't much, and 2% isn't much of an improvement in economy. But that's exactly how you get good economy! A little here, and a little there, and pretty soon you've saved hundreds of pounds and improved fuel economy by 20% or more. And you will get improvements that large.
A 100 mpg car that seats 4 and is comfortable does exist: Edison2. Why did you give up on the idea of a tandem car? I've thought of those as well, and wondered if they could be made long enough to hold 4 people and still fit in a parking spot. Or, could the seating be a little tighter, somewhat like in a bobsled? As for safety, they can be better than standard vehicles. More crush space to work with on the sides.
I'll stick to just the automotive issues.
No, we can't. It's beyond the laws of physics. We're pretty close to the limits of efficiency already.
Do you really believe that? It's true that recent safety regulations have made it more difficult to save weight, but we're nowhere close to exhausting the weight reduction possibilities with cheap materials. No need for exotic, expensive lightweights. For example, all cars still carry spare tires, despite flats being less common. We could change how we handle flats. There is still much in the engine bay that can be reduced. Can toss the power steering and not only save a bit of weight, but eliminate another drag on the engine. Can use even more aluminum in place of iron. Windows are another target for weight savings-- glass is heavy.
Almost every combustion engine uses the Otto cycle, but that's not the most efficient one. Another easy improvement is the turbocharger. Then there is the compression ratio. We compromise there to reduce emissions. And heat makes engines more efficient, yet we waste a great deal of energy on cooling because our materials can't take too much heat. Even so we are too conservative on that, and could run our engines a little hotter than usually done now. Another way to change that is to use a cooler burning fuel such as methanol. Could get by without a water pump.
Then there's aerodynamics. Take a look at the underside of a typical car, and you'll see aerodynamic horror. People wouldn't put up with corrugations, breaks, weld seams, projections, and so forth on any other surface, but the underside is very much out of sight and out of mind. We don't have skirts on the wheels because everyone feels it's ugly. Marketing can't even bear to make the relatively minor change in appearance of reducing the size of the grill opening. Take a look under the hood and see if the opening extends beyond the width of the radiator and condenser coils. On many cars, it does. We could have coefficients of drag under 0.2, but hardly anyone even tries for better than 0.3.
As for 0-60 in 5 seconds, anyone who thinks that is all that useful is spoiled. One of my cars needs 30 seconds to get to 60. Drive a car like that and you'll better appreciate a fact that we've covered for with our jackrabbit starts. We have too many stoplights, and they're brainless. That brings up another way to save: instant engine starts. Letting our engines idle at stops is very wasteful, but we do it because sometimes they can be difficult to start, or we want to keep the A/C on.
Some of what I mentioned really is low hanging fruit.
Suffer? No. We become acclimatized. Supposed to be healthier too. I find 85 F quite comfortable in the summer, and 68 F in the winter is just fine.
The pay back on electric solar panels can be as bad as 80 years. If the panels degrade over time, they may never pay for themselves. I'd like to do it, but after technology brings the prices and risks down a lot more. There's a real possibility that panels could indeed be improved by 100% or more in the next 5 years. Meantime, we can get more bang for those bucks with other measures.
Cars on the other hand are frustrating. We can make huge improvements in the fuel economy, but we don't. I hang on and hang on to the old beaters because the new stuff is not significantly better. 40 mpg? Big deal. I have 90's era cars that do that. Hybrids are significantly better, but also enough more costly that the overall benefit is doubtful. If an automaker were to roll out an X Prize winning 100 mpg car that seats 4, and isn't exceptionally costly, I'd buy it. And I would bike or walk more if I could. But the US is so car centric. For instance, not legal to pedal a bicycle down a freeway, not that I'd want to! I've had plans to walk to the store scotched because on so many overpasses, freeway designers couldn't be bothered to include a sidewalk. When choosing an apartment, I've checked that there were no impediments to walking to work.
Tax assessors around here seem to think home values rise by 20% or more every year. We've made many trips to the tax office to force them to reduce their valuation. Show them reports of the sale prices of similar homes in the neighborhood. You may be right that new windows would go unnoticed, as unlike a pool or a car port, we would not have to clear that with the city.
For drying clothes, I use racks, and keep it indoors so I don't have to worry about rain. Hang the shirts up damp, leave a little space between each one, and leave the closet door open. The dryer is actually more work for me, an extra step between 1) put dirty clothes in washer, and 2) put clean clothes away.
We have gas heat, we're in Texas, and our house is relatively small. Possibly the clutter helps too. A/C is the bigger cost. The biggest savings is from setting the thermostat to 80 F in the summer. I'd go even higher, but the rest of the family whined. I tried sneaking in higher temps, set it up 1 more degree, but they noticed and set it back. Texans are funny about A/C. It's like they want to show off how well the A/C works by cooling to 69 F. I take a jacket on the rare occasions I go to a summer blockbuster movie.
Yes, that's a problem with how America does things. If it can't be used to make huge profits, a perfectly fine idea gets ignored. Businesses would much, much rather sell people on a $1000 "Energy Star" dryer (LOL) than a $5 clothes line. Too much of our economy is about selling us the most expensive fixes for our problems, and making up more problems for us.
Have had half a dozen window sellers try to persuade me to spend $6K to $14K to upgrade all our windows to fancy double or triple pane ones filled with argon gas, etc. They claim it could save up to 50% on the heating and cooling bills. Rather comic how they showed their true colors by always pitching the very most expensive windows first. I looked at the numbers, and figured even the cheapest weren't worth it. We spend about $500 per year on heating and cooling. At that rate, it would take 24 years to pay back $6K. Hate to think how much worse financing would make that. There was the argument that we were making our house more valuable, to which I pointed out that if so, we would have to pay more property tax. Then, suppose they exaggerated, and the windows actually only save 20% on our heating and cooling? There are other ways that maybe aren't as good, but they sure are a lot cheaper: tint, good drapes, and maybe awnings. Probably are worth putting into new houses, but not houses that already have windows, however crappy.
Hot water and light are good uses of solar. Electricity from solar panels is not so good because it isn't that efficient for the cost. Sure don't want to spend $10k on a solar panel installation that may well be obsolete in less than 5 years.
Don't blame the users. More than half the blame lies on those boxes. They're practically full blown computers complete with hard drives and long boot up times of over a minute--- and almost no power management, and that's definitely not the fault of the users. Linux can be booted in 5 seconds, and could be made even faster with things such as the ancient technology known as ROM. No excuse for boxes taking so long to boot, and dodging the problem by just having it always stay on. Long ago, we were introduced to the "Power" button to get around the requirement that "Off" means off, with VCRs that would lose all their programming whenever power was interrupted. The industry has completely punted on this issue.
We could have had a standard for sensing the state of connected hardware so that if the TV is off, and no recording is being made, the box will sleep. Actually, we do have that, but the boxes can just ignore it. Or perhaps we could have more integration, with set top box functionality built into the TV. There are a whole lot of things that could have been done. Lot of cabling is still carrying analog signals. Instead, a top priority in the design of things like HDMI was that users should have to burn even more power on useless anti-piracy measures, such as HDCP.
I have a very simple solution. I don't have cable TV. Saves me a bundle.
Threaten to sue them. Often they cave after receiving a letter from a lawyer. And it has to be from a lawyer, not you. For a relatively small claim the lawyer will get a few hundred dollars for having spent 15 minutes dashing off a form letter, and you'll get your money. For a big claim, you'll probably have to agree to give a lawyer 1/3 (!!!!) of the money you receive, if any. Which means you should factor that in to the size of the settlement you would find acceptable. The lawyer will threaten them, and they'll make a lowball counteroffer, putting you in the position of trying to guess whether you can get more. You should almost never accept the first offer. Once the lawyer has threatened them again, they will make a better offer that may be good enough. Or maybe you'll have to try a 3rd round. Occasionally, they will fight and you'll have to go to court.
This is how insurance works now. Always be prepared to sue. When deciding on whether to insure, factor in the cost of the inevitable delays and fights. Because they will test you. They want to see if you'll roll over and play dead after they've come up with an outrageous reason why your claim is denied. They'll also conveniently undervalue your property, forget details, and generally chip and chisel down the payout. If you call them, they try to wear you down with long holds, and arguments over every little thing. It's like spam. Even if only 0.01% of the insured fall for this, they think it's worth trying. They see it as low cost moves that could save them a lot. When you finally beat through all the barriers they throw up, then they take their sweet time paying. They don't think of the damage to their reputation, only the immediate savings to be had by gaming their customers.
I am absolutely confident i could learn it quickly if i had to.
Of course. Any decent programmer could pick up another programming language easily. FORTRAN is easier than most as its quirks are relatively few. In FORTRAN 77 and older, the main ones are no dynamic allocation, and no complex structures. Just arrays. You have to statically declare up front all the space the program could ever need. Want to use a stack? Then figure out the maximum possible number of items that could ever be in that stack so you know how big to make the arrays for it.
But employers have grown accustomed to dismissing that basic fact of programming languages. HR will immediately throw your resume in the trash if it doesn't have all the magic words. They make it difficult for you to work around their shortsightedness, and will insist that only experience counts. Taking a class or learning and using it on your own free time doesn't count. Giving yourself a crash course on a particular language may not be good enough to pass the kind of trivia test they are apt to give. Depends how obscure they get. I can think of several obscure C/C++ trivia, such as "pascal". Think of the Obfuscated C Code Contests. Such tests completely fail to sort good programmers from bad ones. Then, after they've thrown the babies out with the bathwater, they complain they can't find any good programmers.
Think you have to ask a more basic question. Do women want gaming? Gaming as we know it? I'm not talking just computer games, but sports, races, board games such as chess, and pretty much any kind of competition with clear rules and "fairness". Sure, some will play. They'll even get into some games and really enjoy them, and get very good at them. But we never see as many women playing anything.
Gaming is by its nature competitive in a very direct way, and this is not how women go through life. Yes, they compete. But the style and substance of their competitions is different. They can't physically compete with men, so they don't. For instance, how can you have a fair weight lifting contest between both sexes? You can't, any more than you could have a fair contest between a group of 20 somethings and a group of octogenarians. In other sorts of contests in which the girls can show up the boys, they often prefer not to. Some men are very bad sports about being beat by women, so much so that "winning" is actually rather risky for the girls. In typical games, the goal or victory conditions are really very arbitrary and one dimensional. The ultimate in one dimensionality is the concept of "victory points", or just points, capped with ladder style playoffs in which only one person or team can win. Why do we like such championships so? Why this pressure to scrap the current college football bowl system in favor of a more definitive championship? Why are we so obsessed with anointing someone or some group as the very best? Why does a silver medal, a red ribbon, not feel like a great accomplishment? Even in games that have many directions and unrelated goals, such as an RPG, the designers (men, of course) couldn't resist building in a very linear point based system of advancement, in these cases, "leveling". Money can serve as another goal, but it is still a very rigorous, easily comparable measure. These goals are just not important to the women, or are even to be avoided as possibly dangerous.
I'll try again to explain why the GPL is unnecessary without copyright. I said "make that same improvement" for a reason. Suppose there is no copyright, no GPL, and you don't want to share. Fine, don't share. We'll reverse engineer or reinvent your much vaunted improvement, if we think it worthwhile. We'll probably even improve on it. Without copyright (and without software patents), you have no legal way to stop us from doing that. Also, we can make you wish you had shared. Now, it is easier if you just share it, and that is where the GPL does indeed go a little further. But don't kid yourself that no one else will be able to come up with the same improvements you have, and most definitely don't kid yourself that no one will be able to follow your direction. The main point of the GPL is that you can't use copyright to lock down improvements. Without copyright, you could not do lock downs anyway. It is copyright that enables you to do legal lock downs, and it is copyleft that uses copyright to prevent that.
I don't understand your "makes the original impractical" phrase
A change that genuinely improves software makes the original second rate, does it not? If the change did not do that, then it isn't an improvement. The original is still perfectly usable of course. But it is now obsolete. That's what I mean by impractical. You could take a team of horses and wagons from the Mississippi to the West Coast on the old Oregon Trail. But it is utterly impractical to spend months doing that when you could make that trip in hours with a car or a plane. Now, improvements to software are usually not that severe, and the original is still good enough to be useful. For instance, the ancient compress utility does not compress as well as gzip, but it is not orders of magnitude worse. It is better in one respect. Compress is a little faster than gzip. Yet to continue using compress comes with a cost, puts you at a disadvantage. You will need a little more hard drive space, a little more time to transmit compressed data over a network. A little disadvantage can be enough to sink a business. Not good for the economy or fair to you if the original is your work, and someone else improves on that and then has and employs legal means to forbid you from making the same improvements.
anyone can do anything in isolation and not tell anyone about it.
But in the case of GPL software, you can tell the world about it. And no one will have any legal recourse, so long as you don't distribute.
the converse of "restriction of a restriction" is not a freedom
That is not the argument I'm making. There are genuine restrictions that forbid something to everyone. If no one is allowed to, say, be on a particular mountain, that's a real restriction. There may or may not be good reason for it, but whatever the case with that, the restriction is truly a restriction. Then there are things that are both a restriction and a freedom, and you are seeing only the restriction part. And you ARE playing word games to try to force that viewpoint. It's like the parable of the blind men and an elephant, but you keep on insisting it is only the part you have touched. And think again about the "freedom" to enslave people. Such a freedom cannot be applied equally to everyone because the first person to use it takes it away from someone else.
my entire point is that the GPL requires copyright enforcement. Without copyright, the GPL is invalid
Moot point. Yes, the GPL needs copyright to work. But without copyright, the GPL is unnecessary. Without copyright, entities could not copy publicly available software and "protect" it by slapping a copyright on it, and then take our work away from us by suing everyone for copyright infringement! That's the sort of thing the GPL is designed to stop. The essence of the GPL is that you shall not forbid the sharing of what was shared with you. And you shall not forbid sharing in a backhanded way either, by making an improvement that makes the original impractical, and then refusing to let anyone else have or make that same improvement, all while claiming that you are not stopping anyone from sharing, because the original is still available. The genius of the GPL is that for so long as there is copyright and the ability to abuse it to steal works from the public, there is copyleft. Every move that strengthens copyright also strengthens copyleft.
and anyone can take the software someone has released, change it, and sell it.
You can do all that right now, with software released under the GPL. The GPL explicitly allows sales. All that is required is that you convey the changes to the public.
You also seem to be unaware that in fact the GPL does NOT require that you share your changes. What it requires is that you share your changes IF you distribute something that is based on those changes. You don't have to distribute. If you want, you can keep your modifications all to yourself, and use them internally.
You mentioned one way that a world without copyright could work: commissions. I would not want to rely on only that. I'd want every idea out there, so that while creators would always miss out on compensation from some methods, they won't miss out from all. I'm thinking more of multiple patronage systems, with every possible safeguard to limit the potential for corruption. Some funding could be public, through taxes. And some could be through private donations. We'd have dozens of ways for deciding who should receive money. We have a little of this now, in the form of prizes and awards, things like the Nobel Prize, Hugo and Nebula Awards, the X Prizes, Clay Mathematics Institute Millenium Prizes, Topcoder, and so on. They aren't nearly enough.
It also seems you are trying to make us out as a bunch of hypocrites.
Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to do.
You admit it. What's your bitch anyway?
You take the meaning of "restrictions" to contradictory extremes. You might as well say that because you aren't allowed to enslave, imprison, or kill another person, you are being restricted. You are also restricted from leaping a tall building in a single bound, or violating the laws of thermodynamics, or any of infinitely many other acts that are impossible. How can anyone who is in favor of freedom not be in favor of allowing you the freedom to enslave someone? A similar argument was commonly used by the pro slavery faction prior to the US Civil War, whenever a new state was being admitted and they had to decide whether it was to be a slave state or a free state. The pro slavery side disingenuously held that a slave owner ought to have the right to bring slaves with him to free states without them being freed. The owner could even go so far as to demand that the state exert itself to maintain this "freedom", for instance by hunting down, capturing, and returning runaways. If the free states had accepted such arguments, they would have effectively become slave states, as the pro slavery side knew full well.
It also seems you are trying to make us out as a bunch of hypocrites. Your arguments are weak, as you should realize. You're playing word games. Is it truly restriction to restrict what restrictions others may impose? Such wording is not a good way to capture the concept. It ignores the complementary and opposing nature of such rules. That which is a restriction to one so that another may enjoy the complementary freedom, and so that both are equal in the eyes of the law, should not be thought of as only a restriction, because it is more. It's like the old saw about whether half a glass of water should be considered half empty or half full.
Warning: I'm going to spoil your fond remembrances of T2!
Terminator was much better than T2. Terminator had plenty of flaws. (For instance, what is the deal with frickin time travel being so popular? Time travel is such an overused, tired, totally lame plot helper. It's our era's deus ex machina.) But on the whole the story is just plain better. The reason to watch T2 is to enjoy the special effects and action scenes, not the plot. T2 pushes forward the idea that the villanous, evil, unstoppable terminator can be co-opted with the flip of a switch. Urgh. It's like nothing is related, nothing depends on anything else, there is no history. There isn't any reason or logic for anything. Suppose in T3 (which I have not seen), they did the same thing? Just like that, that shape shifting liquid metal terminator is on our side. Or, heck, let's do a brain transplant or implant on young Connor, make him join the terminators, and now Sarah has to undo the conversion. For T2, I understand Schwarzenegger forced them because he wanted to play a good guy, so I don't blame the writers for that part at least. That doesn't absolve them for wanting to do T2 in the first place.
And I found the sacrifices in T2 especially cheesy and obnoxious. They die for ... ignorance! Yes, they bravely die to destroy the dangerous knowledge that leads to the creation of the terminators. Yep, that computer "genius" guy, after Sarah tries to murder him, joins her "cause" with astonishing rapidity, and bravely finishes the job by killing himself! The Terminator does likewise at the end. Never mind the logical difficulties and basic stupidities of such thinking.
In contrast, Harry Potter had a pretty good mix of random death and sacrifice. Admittedly, a character like Hedwig the owl had "red shirt" written all over her. Some of the deaths and escapes were a bit too convenient. But mostly, the fatalities are understandable, and except for R.A.B., the sacrifices are not cheesily certain. Life is chancy, and sometimes when people take risks, they pay the ultimate price. That's war.
We have all these wars going on. I don't mean Afghanistan exactly, I mean the Wars on Drugs, Terror, and Piracy (the digital variety). We've even appointed "czars" for some of these. There was a War on Poverty, but we more than gave up on that. We changed sides. Now it's a silent War on the Poor. They're bashing unions, hard, in places like Wisconsin, but the elites won't set any good example. They ask the unions to sacrifice, and far from sacrificing a little themselves for the cause, take what they persuaded and bullied others into giving up! I cannot sympathize with any bashing of the average citizen for greed when our leaders grab everything in sight, and indulge in the grossest, most wasteful conspicuous consumption, and think it's deserved, and that besides it is only natural.
What kind of elite idiot, who, somehow being clever enough to get the money to afford a million dollar home, spends it on sheer size and utterly useless vanity features such as a two story high entrance foyer with chandelier, and 2 or 3 fireplaces and air conditioners? And that while blissfully ignoring that the house is in a flood plain, is oriented all wrong so that the air conditioning and windows are on the west side of the house where they get the full blast of the afternoon sun, sprawls so much that in the winter it loses heat faster than a thin crust pizza at an ice rink, is highly susceptible to fires, termites, and rot thanks to the all wood construction (but at least they've come to their senses about wood shingles and stopped using them), has single pane windows, a weak slab foundation that will crack in the first 5 years, and not so much as a solar water heater for hot water, no insulation of the hot water pipes, etc. A million is more than enough to build a house that can function without the grid. Instead, these houses are so wasteful that they can easily run up utility bills of over $500 per month. And then this cad of a homeowner has the gall to denigrate the poor as "trailer park trash", "hippies", and "union members".
We should drop the dumbest of these wars, and switch to a War on Greed.
I read it. Yes, it's complicated.
Xiph chose to focus on a small part of the problem: how patents make it hard to create standards. They gave a number of examples and scenarios. Then they suggest a few small reforms that may help a little bit. Rather than advocate against the patenting of software, they aim for more modest changes that they hope make it impossible to hold a standard hostage years later with submarine patents. Surface immediately, or lose all right to challenge the standard.
Is Xiph's recommendation a good idea? I don't know. Sounds good as far as it goes. But I think they do not go far enough. I fear clever legal experts will find ways around Xiph's solutions. And that they will turn those solution against us. Large companies could use Xiph's proposed mechanism to make an end run around any number of patents. Just make up another standard, and never mind whether the standard is ever adopted, as the point is to quash related patents. Would little folk be able to use this technique? And who decides what is a standard, what the requirements are to create a standard? Are we going to appoint ISO as our new overlords to decide that? MS's OOXML campaign springs to mind as an example of what could go wrong. In contrast, if we simply eliminate the patenting of software, we don't have those issues.
I'll write to my Rep. He's a Republican, so I'll put it in terms I think will resonate. Patents are government interference! Get the government out of my business!
But I want to go much further than a mere bill. I want to remove the "exclusive" part of both patents and copyrights. No more monopolies. To do that would, I believe, require a constitutional amendment. I'd like to change to a permissive system, in which anyone can use anyone else's work without explicit permission, payment, or anything else burdensome. As matters stand, the default is "no". If you can't contact the rights holder, and negotiate an acceptable agreement with them, then you have to do something else. They don't have to be reasonable. They don't have to deal. Or you do it anyway and risk a lawsuit. In practice, so many things are patented that you are stepping on many toes whenever you do anything at all. Totally impractical to determine whether you are violating thousands of patents, let alone track down hundreds of rights holders. Your only real choices are to risk the lawsuits, or do nothing.
Let's change that default to "yes". Make it so inventors want their inventions used. If someone else uses an idea you patented, you can apply for money from various funds set aside for this purpose. In short, the replacement system would be an updated, modernized form of patronage.
I've been hacking up a draft for the "Freedom of Knowledge" Amendment, as I've been calling it. Not at all satisfied with it, yet. I think such a proposal, if it went anywhere, would really light a fire under the owner class in our society.
No. MS does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Their reputation precedes them.
As to the argument, it is basically this: the graphics hardware does not have any mechanism to stop programs from accessing each other's data. And webGL doesn't provide any. Well, neither does anything else. The next point is that that matters because webGL executes code directly from the Internet. Ok, so this could be a security problem. But it is a problem common to every similar platform. So why is MS singling out webGL? Is trying to rework webGL the right approach to handling the problem? I would say no. That's the job of the OS, with help from the hardware.
Now, what do you think the arguments are? Or didn't you familiarize yourself with them?
What they mean by "security" is not what everyone else means. Security is just the biggest argument in the FUD arsenal. They mean control, to secure their bottom line.
For 25 plus years, that's been MS's real goal. They tried to kill off Ogg Vorbis over "insecurity"-- the supposed insecurity of no built in DRM. Security was probably one of the arguments they used to push OOXML over ODF when they were trying to maintain their file format lockdown. Talk about an outdated tactic, but then, MS has been slipping for some time now. They would have tried the old line suggesting no one would maintain the software without a large company backing it, another FUD favorite, but even they must see no one would buy that any more. And yet, they can't see the uselessness of the entire Windows Genuine Advantage program.
What specifically could they be trying to promote in place of webGL? Silverlight?
I am a US citizen, and this action angers and embarrasses me. I'm wondering what I can do about it. That's my tax money being wasted on this bull.
Call up the ICE to complain? No good. I should like to know who is behind this extradition. Could I get ICE to cough up some names? Unlikely. And yet, FOIA just might mean they have to spill. Scream at my representative, with a letter if not over the phone? Maybe. How about a public protest? Doubt anyone else cares enough about it to bother. What about the EFF and ACLU?
Hope this gets some attention, and makes the involved parties look very, very bad.
You mention Harper's Ferry. Are you an American citizen? If yes, will you go back to Britain, change your citizenship, and swear allegiance to the crown? Because the American Revolution was illegal. The rebels committed thousands of illegal acts. If you won't disown your American citizenship, then I guess you condone acts such as the Boston Tea Party, the meeting of the First Continental Congress to plead for royal intervention, which the king declared treasonous after it had happened, and finally the Declaration of Independence.
I suppose you have too much to lose by saying anything else. But really, how else do we get bad laws changed? For the radical stuff, going through proper channels takes too long and is too likely to fail. Almost certainly some of the power brokers will cheat in an attempt to bury the issues, and stifle the dissent. They should hear these issues, instead they abuse their power to manipulate the technicalities of our system to ignore it all. What do you do then? Sometimes they get stupid, and pull stunts such as the imprisonment of Sklyarov, and police raids on businesses such as Steve Jackson Games. That gives us an opportunity to force some changes. But mostly, they manage to hold the line, and constantly push back with garbage like ACTA. The issues remain unsettled. Should Terry Childs not be in prison? Even the hacker community has doubts on that one. He should never have been in the position he was put. I don't mean his job, I mean being the only one with the Keys to the Kingdom. That was a huge policy failure on the part of his employer, and they covered their mistakes by railroading him. All the easier because he made mistakes too.
Someone has to make the first noise, make us heard. Squeaky wheel, you know. After the Revolution, the Brits saw what idiots they had been in their handling of the colonies, and took a much softer approach to Canada and Australia. It was also a loud demonstration of the flaws of their monarchist government, as many of the provocations had been initiated by George III himself. He was perhaps the biggest hawk of them all, wanting to fight on after 1783.
Yeah, I'd like to do more, but they sure don't make it easy.
We could have much, much more efficient conventional cars. We had some in the 90's-- cars that got around 50 to 60 mpg. We can do 100 mpg, and we can do it cheaply and in comfort, no need for exotic lightweight alloys, rare earth magnets, cramped seating, and all that. But currently the best thing I can get only does 40 mpg? Not one, NOT ONE, manufacturer has stepped up and sold a nice little conventional gas sipper in the US at a reasonable price, or any price at all. Europeans have dozens of cars that do better than 50 mpg, and we in the US get nothing. WTF? Or I have to try out the dubious benefits of hybrid drives. It's not green if you have to replace a thousand dollars worth of batteries every 2 or 4 years. And ethanol? Please.
Alternatives like walking and cycling are hard. The US is extravagantly car oriented. Pedestrians and cyclists get crap treatment. As if walking isn't already slow enough, we are forced to go around obstacle after obstacle that didn't need to be there, and wait and wait for cars, cars, cars. And people sneer at us because the only reason to walk is that we can't afford a car. My brother was once run off the road by a crazy old lady who didn't think bicycles had a right to be on a street. After she'd forced him to wipe out to avoid being run over, she rolled her window down to yell at him for using the street!
It's the same story with housing. Our houses could be so much better. But what did we spend money on? McMansions, not green housing.