Well, of course, when I say "timestamp" I mean something reliable. Modern databases have more than solved this problem; a (sequence/timestamp) pair, for instance, would resolve any issues you might have.
Even that is excessive. Tag each table entry with a timestamp, and never issue deletes or updates -- just a new insert which either declares an old value to be considered deleted or changed. Want to roll back to $GIVEN_DATE? Just delete everything added since that time.
That said, this wouldn't be practical in this case, just because the amount of rearchitecting that would be needed to implement it.
So you are saying that someone saying: "Version 2.0 of this technology is free of patents, so let's use version 3.5" would be in his right? I'd call this someone a fool.
If I've written a reimplementation of V2.0, and someone points out that my implementation doesn't support (say) long file names, I'm not going to spend time pondering the legality of supporting FAT32's long file name mechanism -- I'm going to damn well write it. One of the ways software patents are counterproductive is just what you describe -- the need to research the legality of every little technique or feature that one might use or add.
IANAL, but in terms of using anyone else's technology, I would never rely on something implied. Anyone doing that, I'd call a fool (once again).
If it's a strong enough implication that a judge can be convinced of its meaning, and one makes a decision depending on it such that financial harm would be done by reversal of that, then there's a common law principal that an implied contract is formed even in the lack of consideration -- whereas asking for permission might result in a simple answer of "no", where no such implied contract can be found to exist. An individual relying on this principal is not necessarily a fool.
I feel a little redundant here, but only a fool would base the technology of his company on the fact that BillionDollarCorp never enforces its patents.
But not a fellow who's basing the technology of his hobby project. And as for the engineer who bases the technology of his company on someone else's hobby project who assumes that the hobby project is legal -- I think "fool" is a bit strong, particularly given the conspictuous lack of any notice given to the fellow writing the hobby project.
Well, if you base your legal claim on that, I know who is going to win in court...
Don't be so sure. As I said, an implied contract can be found to have formed when one relies on someone else's assertion such that the reversal of that assertion causes harm. It's the same legal principal that makes volunteering a donation to a charity legally enforceable. If the company gave others reason to believe that these patents would not be enforced (and the implication was not all that "vague"), a judge could very easily make such a finding in this case.
When FAT was first created, software patents weren't as common as they are now; it was actually reasonable to believe that a completely independant (clean-room) reimplementation would be entirely in the clear. Note IBM's BIOS -- if they'd had patents applying to it, Compaq, and consequently the PC clones as a whole, never would have gotten started. Likewise, there are no patents applying to the original, unextended FAT16 spec; a cleanroom implementation of these would be entirely in the clear, and an individual aware of such could easily (though erroniously) presume that more modern versions of the spec are likewise unencumbered.
Since its creation, the FAT32 spec has also been published under terms implying that Microsoft did not seek to enforce the relevant patents -- until now, when they *do*. (Whether the prior publication will prevent them from enforcing their patent terms now... well, we'll see when someone takes it to court).
And finally, Microsoft has a history of using patents strictly for defense and cross-licensing purposes -- in short, of avoiding offensive patent suits. Any lawsuits they engaged in prosecuting others for unlicensed sale, creation or use of a FAT implementation, therefore, will be a break from this prior policy.
For these reasons, a person performing an independent implementation of FAT could be reasonably confident that they would not be prosecuted for performing or distributing such work -- until now.
[BTW, IANAL. I'm also fairly fuzzy on patent law, though my knowledge of contract law and copyright are reasonably good for being NAL].
You have seriously got to be kidding me, right? Microsoft invented, developped and maintained FAT for many many years. Why should they allow people to use it for free?
Nobody is asking to use their implementation for free -- and I wouldn't expect Microsoft to engage in such generosity, either. Rather, they're telling folks they can't use completely different implementations that they themselves developed -- and they didn't say this up front.
Software patents are bad. Submarine patents are bad. Submarine software patents, legal though they may be, are imoral as hell.
Per subject. In a CVS-based project, only trusted committers are permitted write access to the repository -- giving it out blindly is asking for someone to exploit pserver's many security holes -- and many operations (such as submission and merging of 3rd-party patches) need to be handled manually.
I far prefer Arch, as it is largely designed to model the development process used for Free Software. (BitKeeper's distributed functionality permits it to be used in a similar manner). Anonymous contributors can create their own private branch, held on their own computer, and commit to that branch or merge submissions from others into it; they then can request that the project maintainer merge from this private branch into his or her own (which is presumably used for cutting release builds).
The distributed development model has use in other situations as well -- it means a developer on a commercial product can create a private branch on his or her laptop and work offline while still keeping changes revision controlled; arch similarly makes it trivial for a company to maintain a branch for changesets (yes, *changesets*, not *file revisions*) which have succesfully passed their automated testing process or the QA department's scrutiny.
CVS does poorly at modeling such processes, and I think it unfortunate that its name has become synonymous with OSS development.
(And yes, I'm a bit biased. For that matter, I'm currently the sometimes-maintainer of a piece of software, cscvs, which among other things has the ability to build changesets from a CVS repository and import them into Arch).
Yeah, people who have no respect for commercial products will definitely respect the GPL/LGPL. Countries with no respect for human rights or even copyright will definitely honor the GPL/LGPL, too.
Sure they will, because it makes economic sense to do so.
So, you're building your own linux distribution (or piece of embedded hardware, or whatever). You want to use Samba, but you need to write a few patches. Fine. You write your patches, and then you have two choices:
- Pay your programmers to port your patches to work against a newer samba every time one comes out
- Release your patches back to the Samba project and let *them* front-port your patches for you.
Guess which one is cheaper? No, really.
Most (not all, but most) commercial compliance with the terms of the GPL happens not because it's the legal thing to do, but because it makes good economic sense.
What does this have to do with their sampling method? I seriously doubt that their scanning system is some guy randonly typing websites into that box and writing down the results. The back end code which actually performs the server detection could work just fine and still produce and error during display.
In this kind of code, the web-based frontend is typically the more trivial component -- and thus the one that's not likely to break. If something breaks, the safer presumption is that it's the place where most of the complexity is -- and that's the backend.
If I'm at a polling booth and a textual description of what and who I voted for scrolls down on a little piece of paper (behind a glass pane) and a I'm asked to press a button to record this vote or destroy it... well, yes, I'm going to read what the paper says.
Anyhow, it takes very few people where the paper doesn't match their selections to demonstrate that something's amiss, and the increased risk of discovery is likely to deter many cases of fraud which as it stands may well occur.
It's not a secret if nobody knows it in the first place.
Seriously: There's a lot of work and overhead involved in tracking elections as they occur. Keeping this information away from the public isn't a matter of keeping it "secret" -- it's a matter of simply not compiling it in the first place .
Evolution is the official GNOME mailer. GAIM is the official GNOME IM client.
What, would you expect someone to modify every single GNOME mailer and every GNOME IM client to claim this bounty? After all, just coming up with an integration mechanism is a quite small part of the battle.
While this whole idealistic "I want every single mailer to talk to every single IM client" bit may be nice, one of the nice things about the goals here is that they're things that can get done Real Soon Now, without a huge amount of 3rd-party involvement.
The socialist idea that we will all do our best with no compensation other then the ability to use other people's work, has holes....and describing that as a tenent of Free Software has even more holes.
This model of idea weather applied to software or to government always makes the mistake of not accounting for human weaknesses. Free software works, to the degree that it does, based on the profit motive of ego.
Really? Probably more of half of the work I've done on Free Software has been not because of ego but because I needed to get some work done (and someone was paying me). That includes a whole bunch of porting and packaging back at MontaVista Software, some fixes to GNOME (which my current employer uses as the desktop environment on our programming stations), and lots of assorted other miscellany (like porting the losetup crypto patches to work with more modern util-linux sources, which I just did two days ago in connection with a project I'm doing for work).
It puts into question weather open source software can ever produce a product that is better then a for profit alternative.
Since when was open source software ever not for profit? It's a cost sharing mechanism -- a way to minimize ones' cost centers such that one doesn't spend so much of the money made by ones' core business on silly things like operating systems, word processors or compilers, by spreading out the cost of developing these tools with other users of the same.
You're building up and attacking a complete strawman -- an "open source" environment which is composed of nothing but noncommercial contributions, and a "free software" culture which is innately broken if it cannot survive without commercial support. Nothing could be further from the truth: Open source is made up largely of commercial contributions from companies whose best interests are served (in terms of reducing their software costs) by making these contributions, and the Free Software culture thrives in the presence of commercial users who, in helping themselves, are obliged to assist others as well.
We evaluated JiCal at my workplace for a bit. I even wrote some patches to it (JBoss 3.x support, regenerating only free/busy files that *needed* regenerating, a bit of robustification and bug fixage), but even with these things fixed we decided against the thing -- too few features, too much brittleness. And I doubt the evolution folks would accept a patch which makes them dependent on Java.
Just curious, are you using any variety of nontraditional filesystem (particularly, AFS)? I've seen such problems related to old sessions of GConfd, bonobo-activation-server and the like losing their tickets (because they don't exit as soon as the user logs out, but rather stick around a few minutes more -- by which time they've lost the ability to write to the user's home directory because the user, in logging out, unlogged their token).
Fixing that such that these daemons exit as soon as the last client disconnects is a TODO, as I understand it -- but it'd certainly be nice if it became higher-priority.
As any economics student could tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Of course. There are, however, nonmonetary benefits. One of the niftiest things about the open source model is that a great deal of progress is made because of some individual or organization making a change for their own purposes -- and the community as a whole benefitting -- without the necessity of money changing hands (except, of course, towards the employee who actually carried out a change made by a company).
Folks paying other folks to make improvements to Free Software is certainly a very good thing, and I doubt the parent poster argues with this. What I think the parent is arguing to be an unfortunate thing would be if the flow of improvements made for non-monetary reasons were to stop.
Of course, I don't see this as a very likely course of events -- unless it becomes almost universally cheaper to pay a 3rd party to make an improvement than to DIY. Perhaps outsourcing improvoments on OSS to $COUNTRY_WITH_LOW_COST_OF_LABOR might become popular? Of course, if this comes to pass, then all the better! Developers in $COUNTRY_WITH_LOW_COST_OF_LABOR will profit, and Free Software will receive improvements which might not have been fundable (with either time or money) if one had to pay the opportunity cost of DIY'ing rather than being able to pay a lower price to outsource.
What's the problem with making $200/hr to write Free software?
Why is this even a relevant thing to post, except that it's an argument that can be made by Free Software advocates to the effect that creating Free Software can, in fact, be profitable?
There are lots of people making better counterarguments to your original post than me. Frankly, I'd rather see those arguments answered rather than draw this praticular discussion thread on further.
Ahh, yup -- that's a valid definition of straw man I was previously unaware of. Thanks.
And, yeah, I must be imagining all those suicide bombers. They can't do it for free, it's not a good business model!
The suicide bombers themselves may operate for free. A larger terrorist organization, however, most certainly doesn't. Acquiring weapons, fake documentation and passports, bribing law enforcement, recruiting -- all these things take money.
If terrorism didn't require funding, would you hear about the funds of those suspected of providing the multiple millions involved being frozen?
You mean "front men", not "straw men". Nonetheless -- any purchase that's large enough to make a substantial amount of profit is large enough to raise the price enough to get attention. Spreading out who put in the cash is only good to a point -- it means more people involved (who could possibly rat), more overhead (administrative and otherwise) and generally more hassle.
As for (B), what's your point? Financing a terrorist organization takes real money, not $100 here or there. If the organization only gets $100 out of an investment in its upcoming actions, then the time and risk involved are more expensive than the return.
And frankly -- do you expect this thing would be running without a quiet background investigation of those who place winning bets, particularly those who aren't known foreign policy analysts? If the paper trail is analyzed properly, the extra evidence that $100 winning results in (who *are* the front men for this organization, anyhow?) is more than worth the payout.
Okay, using your wider definition of OC, I'll grant your argument to the effect that several OC groups are not particularly intent upon avoiding civilian casualties. (I don't entirely agree with this -- civilian causalties are bad policy, as they tend to bring down law enforcement, and there's typically no need for them unless the civilian is in some way involved with said group -- and thus no longer a civilian).
I honestly know where you're going with the 9/11 / Arabs, Turks or old Europeans / $10K thing. Are you trying to take the perspective that CIA agents are highly corruptible? Sure, I'll gladly stipulate that point if you like -- but whether the CIA needs to be fixed is entirely irrelevant to whether a futures market is an effective means of predicting, and thus responding to, likely terrorist events.
Anyhow, you haven't responded to the more substantial point -- particularly, that for anyone to make a substantial amount of money off "predicting" a given future which they then cause to occur, they need to invest enough money in it to raise the price and, in doing so, bringing down scrutiny on themselves and heightening the security efforts intended to prevent the event. Hence, this market is unsuitable for any such unsavory group -- and could easily lead to the capture of those involved in an attack if they're so stupid as to use it.
Would it be more convincing to you if I also pointed out that the US Mafia is typically fairly regional in operational scope -- and that the middle east is rather outside said scope? What if I reiterated that the Middle East the only place whose events this program was proposing to sell futures on? (And no, organized crime doesn't kill innocents much -- especially not on purpose. You want to argue that point? Go find data!)
"Completely missing" 9/11 is also much, much less severe than demonstrating that one believes some event likely (by investing in it) and still failing to respond to it professionally. I can think of at least a few criminal charges that would almost certainly apply; the DOJ's lawyers could no doubt do better.
The terrorists win big only at the risk of revealing their identities and/or plans -- as they invest in cash in something they intend to do, they cause the price to rise, which informs the authorities to guard against that event (not to mention raising a huge red flag over the relevant investor). With regard to the mafia, the additional disincentive applies that the "killing-innocents" thing would be quite severely out-of-character. As for the spectre of CIA agents not doing their job, I'd expect that the risk of losing their pension plans would be more than sufficient disincentive to avoid attempting to augment them in a manner leaving them open to not only enforced unemployment but prosecution as well.
In any event, remember that this program only covered middle-east (as opposed to domestic) events; nobody could have used it to make money off the twin towers falling.
Listen, would you be at all offended if me and a couple guys 'set up a futures market' (bet) for "elusive human threats" to your family? You know, things like your kids being kidnapped, your wife getting murdered, your mother having a heart attack? Or more to the point, would you be offended if I collected my ten grand because some mugger killed your wife for $20 and jewelry?
Actually, no, I wouldn't be upset about you collecting your $10K -- presuming, of course, that you hadn't actually had a hand in the event.
If the futures market in question was part of a program to prevent muggings such as that which harmed my wife, then the (very personal) example of the severity of the problem it seeks to resolve (ie. muggings) would make me even more of a supporter.
Maybe I'm missing some wiring -- but my "repugnant" sense isn't going of at all. The acts themselves, repugnant, no doubt. Being rewarded for effectively predicting them (and, in doing so, making it easier for efforts to prevent such acts to be effectively focused), though? I simply don't see (or feel in my gut) anything wrong with it at all.
After reviewing the responses I have decided that you get the award for best straight man.
Why, thanks!
Your mod points are well deserved.
*shrug*. There are mod points I earn by coming up with some insightful technical post, and there are mod points I get from coming up with decent-sounding arguments that support the current groupthink. If I hadn't been capped (since the cap was implemented), I'd be calling myself a whore right now. Not that I don't believe in the position I just took -- but it's hard to make an informed argument in its favor and not get modded up.
What I find funny (or perhaps sad) are the people who respond to a post by someone who was *clearly* taking a devil's-advocate position with "you're an idiot" style responses. *sigh*...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, of course, when I say "timestamp" I mean something reliable. Modern databases have more than solved this problem; a (sequence/timestamp) pair, for instance, would resolve any issues you might have.
Even that is excessive. Tag each table entry with a timestamp, and never issue deletes or updates -- just a new insert which either declares an old value to be considered deleted or changed. Want to roll back to $GIVEN_DATE? Just delete everything added since that time.
That said, this wouldn't be practical in this case, just because the amount of rearchitecting that would be needed to implement it.
So you are saying that someone saying: "Version 2.0 of this technology is free of patents, so let's use version 3.5" would be in his right? I'd call this someone a fool.
If I've written a reimplementation of V2.0, and someone points out that my implementation doesn't support (say) long file names, I'm not going to spend time pondering the legality of supporting FAT32's long file name mechanism -- I'm going to damn well write it. One of the ways software patents are counterproductive is just what you describe -- the need to research the legality of every little technique or feature that one might use or add.
IANAL, but in terms of using anyone else's technology, I would never rely on something implied. Anyone doing that, I'd call a fool (once again).
If it's a strong enough implication that a judge can be convinced of its meaning, and one makes a decision depending on it such that financial harm would be done by reversal of that, then there's a common law principal that an implied contract is formed even in the lack of consideration -- whereas asking for permission might result in a simple answer of "no", where no such implied contract can be found to exist. An individual relying on this principal is not necessarily a fool.
I feel a little redundant here, but only a fool would base the technology of his company on the fact that BillionDollarCorp never enforces its patents.
But not a fellow who's basing the technology of his hobby project. And as for the engineer who bases the technology of his company on someone else's hobby project who assumes that the hobby project is legal -- I think "fool" is a bit strong, particularly given the conspictuous lack of any notice given to the fellow writing the hobby project.
Well, if you base your legal claim on that, I know who is going to win in court...
Don't be so sure. As I said, an implied contract can be found to have formed when one relies on someone else's assertion such that the reversal of that assertion causes harm. It's the same legal principal that makes volunteering a donation to a charity legally enforceable. If the company gave others reason to believe that these patents would not be enforced (and the implication was not all that "vague"), a judge could very easily make such a finding in this case.
When FAT was first created, software patents weren't as common as they are now; it was actually reasonable to believe that a completely independant (clean-room) reimplementation would be entirely in the clear. Note IBM's BIOS -- if they'd had patents applying to it, Compaq, and consequently the PC clones as a whole, never would have gotten started. Likewise, there are no patents applying to the original, unextended FAT16 spec; a cleanroom implementation of these would be entirely in the clear, and an individual aware of such could easily (though erroniously) presume that more modern versions of the spec are likewise unencumbered.
Since its creation, the FAT32 spec has also been published under terms implying that Microsoft did not seek to enforce the relevant patents -- until now, when they *do*. (Whether the prior publication will prevent them from enforcing their patent terms now... well, we'll see when someone takes it to court).
And finally, Microsoft has a history of using patents strictly for defense and cross-licensing purposes -- in short, of avoiding offensive patent suits. Any lawsuits they engaged in prosecuting others for unlicensed sale, creation or use of a FAT implementation, therefore, will be a break from this prior policy.
For these reasons, a person performing an independent implementation of FAT could be reasonably confident that they would not be prosecuted for performing or distributing such work -- until now.
[BTW, IANAL. I'm also fairly fuzzy on patent law, though my knowledge of contract law and copyright are reasonably good for being NAL].
You have seriously got to be kidding me, right? Microsoft invented, developped and maintained FAT for many many years. Why should they allow people to use it for free?
Nobody is asking to use their implementation for free -- and I wouldn't expect Microsoft to engage in such generosity, either. Rather, they're telling folks they can't use completely different implementations that they themselves developed -- and they didn't say this up front.
Software patents are bad. Submarine patents are bad. Submarine software patents, legal though they may be, are imoral as hell.
Per subject. In a CVS-based project, only trusted committers are permitted write access to the repository -- giving it out blindly is asking for someone to exploit pserver's many security holes -- and many operations (such as submission and merging of 3rd-party patches) need to be handled manually.
I far prefer Arch, as it is largely designed to model the development process used for Free Software. (BitKeeper's distributed functionality permits it to be used in a similar manner). Anonymous contributors can create their own private branch, held on their own computer, and commit to that branch or merge submissions from others into it; they then can request that the project maintainer merge from this private branch into his or her own (which is presumably used for cutting release builds).
The distributed development model has use in other situations as well -- it means a developer on a commercial product can create a private branch on his or her laptop and work offline while still keeping changes revision controlled; arch similarly makes it trivial for a company to maintain a branch for changesets (yes, *changesets*, not *file revisions*) which have succesfully passed their automated testing process or the QA department's scrutiny.
CVS does poorly at modeling such processes, and I think it unfortunate that its name has become synonymous with OSS development.
(And yes, I'm a bit biased. For that matter, I'm currently the sometimes-maintainer of a piece of software, cscvs, which among other things has the ability to build changesets from a CVS repository and import them into Arch).
So, you're building your own linux distribution (or piece of embedded hardware, or whatever). You want to use Samba, but you need to write a few patches. Fine. You write your patches, and then you have two choices:
- Pay your programmers to port your patches to work against a newer samba every time one comes out
- Release your patches back to the Samba project and let *them* front-port your patches for you.
Guess which one is cheaper? No, really.
Most (not all, but most) commercial compliance with the terms of the GPL happens not because it's the legal thing to do, but because it makes good economic sense.
What does this have to do with their sampling method? I seriously doubt that their scanning system is some guy randonly typing websites into that box and writing down the results. The back end code which actually performs the server detection could work just fine and still produce and error during display.
In this kind of code, the web-based frontend is typically the more trivial component -- and thus the one that's not likely to break. If something breaks, the safer presumption is that it's the place where most of the complexity is -- and that's the backend.
I would like it, however, if they included Python & Ruby scripting...preferably using the copies of python & ruby that are in my path
FYI, I've seen that mentioned as a possible upcoming feature; see the the "product concept" document for OpenOfice 2.
If I'm at a polling booth and a textual description of what and who I voted for scrolls down on a little piece of paper (behind a glass pane) and a I'm asked to press a button to record this vote or destroy it... well, yes, I'm going to read what the paper says.
Anyhow, it takes very few people where the paper doesn't match their selections to demonstrate that something's amiss, and the increased risk of discovery is likely to deter many cases of fraud which as it stands may well occur.
It's not a secret if nobody knows it in the first place.
Seriously: There's a lot of work and overhead involved in tracking elections as they occur. Keeping this information away from the public isn't a matter of keeping it "secret" -- it's a matter of simply not compiling it in the first place .
Evolution is the official GNOME mailer. GAIM is the official GNOME IM client.
What, would you expect someone to modify every single GNOME mailer and every GNOME IM client to claim this bounty? After all, just coming up with an integration mechanism is a quite small part of the battle.
While this whole idealistic "I want every single mailer to talk to every single IM client" bit may be nice, one of the nice things about the goals here is that they're things that can get done Real Soon Now, without a huge amount of 3rd-party involvement.
The socialist idea that we will all do our best with no compensation other then the ability to use other people's work, has holes. ...and describing that as a tenent of Free Software has even more holes.
This model of idea weather applied to software or to government always makes the mistake of not accounting for human weaknesses. Free software works, to the degree that it does, based on the profit motive of ego.
Really? Probably more of half of the work I've done on Free Software has been not because of ego but because I needed to get some work done (and someone was paying me). That includes a whole bunch of porting and packaging back at MontaVista Software, some fixes to GNOME (which my current employer uses as the desktop environment on our programming stations), and lots of assorted other miscellany (like porting the losetup crypto patches to work with more modern util-linux sources, which I just did two days ago in connection with a project I'm doing for work).
It puts into question weather open source software can ever produce a product that is better then a for profit alternative.
Since when was open source software ever not for profit? It's a cost sharing mechanism -- a way to minimize ones' cost centers such that one doesn't spend so much of the money made by ones' core business on silly things like operating systems, word processors or compilers, by spreading out the cost of developing these tools with other users of the same.
You're building up and attacking a complete strawman -- an "open source" environment which is composed of nothing but noncommercial contributions, and a "free software" culture which is innately broken if it cannot survive without commercial support. Nothing could be further from the truth: Open source is made up largely of commercial contributions from companies whose best interests are served (in terms of reducing their software costs) by making these contributions, and the Free Software culture thrives in the presence of commercial users who, in helping themselves, are obliged to assist others as well.
*hack* *cough*
We evaluated JiCal at my workplace for a bit. I even wrote some patches to it (JBoss 3.x support, regenerating only free/busy files that *needed* regenerating, a bit of robustification and bug fixage), but even with these things fixed we decided against the thing -- too few features, too much brittleness. And I doubt the evolution folks would accept a patch which makes them dependent on Java.
Just curious, are you using any variety of nontraditional filesystem (particularly, AFS)? I've seen such problems related to old sessions of GConfd, bonobo-activation-server and the like losing their tickets (because they don't exit as soon as the user logs out, but rather stick around a few minutes more -- by which time they've lost the ability to write to the user's home directory because the user, in logging out, unlogged their token).
Fixing that such that these daemons exit as soon as the last client disconnects is a TODO, as I understand it -- but it'd certainly be nice if it became higher-priority.
As any economics student could tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Of course. There are, however, nonmonetary benefits. One of the niftiest things about the open source model is that a great deal of progress is made because of some individual or organization making a change for their own purposes -- and the community as a whole benefitting -- without the necessity of money changing hands (except, of course, towards the employee who actually carried out a change made by a company).
Folks paying other folks to make improvements to Free Software is certainly a very good thing, and I doubt the parent poster argues with this. What I think the parent is arguing to be an unfortunate thing would be if the flow of improvements made for non-monetary reasons were to stop.
Of course, I don't see this as a very likely course of events -- unless it becomes almost universally cheaper to pay a 3rd party to make an improvement than to DIY. Perhaps outsourcing improvoments on OSS to $COUNTRY_WITH_LOW_COST_OF_LABOR might become popular? Of course, if this comes to pass, then all the better! Developers in $COUNTRY_WITH_LOW_COST_OF_LABOR will profit, and Free Software will receive improvements which might not have been fundable (with either time or money) if one had to pay the opportunity cost of DIY'ing rather than being able to pay a lower price to outsource.
What's the problem with making $200/hr to write Free software?
Why is this even a relevant thing to post, except that it's an argument that can be made by Free Software advocates to the effect that creating Free Software can, in fact, be profitable?
There are lots of people making better counterarguments to your original post than me. Frankly, I'd rather see those arguments answered rather than draw this praticular discussion thread on further.
Ahh, yup -- that's a valid definition of straw man I was previously unaware of. Thanks.
And, yeah, I must be imagining all those suicide bombers. They can't do it for free, it's not a good business model!
The suicide bombers themselves may operate for free. A larger terrorist organization, however, most certainly doesn't. Acquiring weapons, fake documentation and passports, bribing law enforcement, recruiting -- all these things take money.
If terrorism didn't require funding, would you hear about the funds of those suspected of providing the multiple millions involved being frozen?
You mean "front men", not "straw men". Nonetheless -- any purchase that's large enough to make a substantial amount of profit is large enough to raise the price enough to get attention. Spreading out who put in the cash is only good to a point -- it means more people involved (who could possibly rat), more overhead (administrative and otherwise) and generally more hassle.
As for (B), what's your point? Financing a terrorist organization takes real money, not $100 here or there. If the organization only gets $100 out of an investment in its upcoming actions, then the time and risk involved are more expensive than the return.
And frankly -- do you expect this thing would be running without a quiet background investigation of those who place winning bets, particularly those who aren't known foreign policy analysts? If the paper trail is analyzed properly, the extra evidence that $100 winning results in (who *are* the front men for this organization, anyhow?) is more than worth the payout.
Okay, using your wider definition of OC, I'll grant your argument to the effect that several OC groups are not particularly intent upon avoiding civilian casualties. (I don't entirely agree with this -- civilian causalties are bad policy, as they tend to bring down law enforcement, and there's typically no need for them unless the civilian is in some way involved with said group -- and thus no longer a civilian).
I honestly know where you're going with the 9/11 / Arabs, Turks or old Europeans / $10K thing. Are you trying to take the perspective that CIA agents are highly corruptible? Sure, I'll gladly stipulate that point if you like -- but whether the CIA needs to be fixed is entirely irrelevant to whether a futures market is an effective means of predicting, and thus responding to, likely terrorist events.
Anyhow, you haven't responded to the more substantial point -- particularly, that for anyone to make a substantial amount of money off "predicting" a given future which they then cause to occur, they need to invest enough money in it to raise the price and, in doing so, bringing down scrutiny on themselves and heightening the security efforts intended to prevent the event. Hence, this market is unsuitable for any such unsavory group -- and could easily lead to the capture of those involved in an attack if they're so stupid as to use it.
Would it be more convincing to you if I also pointed out that the US Mafia is typically fairly regional in operational scope -- and that the middle east is rather outside said scope? What if I reiterated that the Middle East the only place whose events this program was proposing to sell futures on? (And no, organized crime doesn't kill innocents much -- especially not on purpose. You want to argue that point? Go find data!)
"Completely missing" 9/11 is also much, much less severe than demonstrating that one believes some event likely (by investing in it) and still failing to respond to it professionally. I can think of at least a few criminal charges that would almost certainly apply; the DOJ's lawyers could no doubt do better.
The terrorists win big only at the risk of revealing their identities and/or plans -- as they invest in cash in something they intend to do, they cause the price to rise, which informs the authorities to guard against that event (not to mention raising a huge red flag over the relevant investor). With regard to the mafia, the additional disincentive applies that the "killing-innocents" thing would be quite severely out-of-character. As for the spectre of CIA agents not doing their job, I'd expect that the risk of losing their pension plans would be more than sufficient disincentive to avoid attempting to augment them in a manner leaving them open to not only enforced unemployment but prosecution as well.
In any event, remember that this program only covered middle-east (as opposed to domestic) events; nobody could have used it to make money off the twin towers falling.
Listen, would you be at all offended if me and a couple guys 'set up a futures market' (bet) for "elusive human threats" to your family? You know, things like your kids being kidnapped, your wife getting murdered, your mother having a heart attack? Or more to the point, would you be offended if I collected my ten grand because some mugger killed your wife for $20 and jewelry?
Actually, no, I wouldn't be upset about you collecting your $10K -- presuming, of course, that you hadn't actually had a hand in the event.
If the futures market in question was part of a program to prevent muggings such as that which harmed my wife, then the (very personal) example of the severity of the problem it seeks to resolve (ie. muggings) would make me even more of a supporter.
Maybe I'm missing some wiring -- but my "repugnant" sense isn't going of at all. The acts themselves, repugnant, no doubt. Being rewarded for effectively predicting them (and, in doing so, making it easier for efforts to prevent such acts to be effectively focused), though? I simply don't see (or feel in my gut) anything wrong with it at all.
Why, thanks!
Your mod points are well deserved.
*shrug*. There are mod points I earn by coming up with some insightful technical post, and there are mod points I get from coming up with decent-sounding arguments that support the current groupthink. If I hadn't been capped (since the cap was implemented), I'd be calling myself a whore right now. Not that I don't believe in the position I just took -- but it's hard to make an informed argument in its favor and not get modded up.
What I find funny (or perhaps sad) are the people who respond to a post by someone who was *clearly* taking a devil's-advocate position with "you're an idiot" style responses. *sigh*...