Sorry, how is this any different than any other encyclopedia.
This is different from Brittanica and other encyclopedias mainly on the scale of operations. Brittanica only had a few hundred people, at the most, who were involved with actual article writing. And in terms of developing style guides and establishing editorial policies, including deciding if somebody was "worthy" of being included in the article development process, it involved a comparatively small committee of just a few people... a dozen at the most.
Instead, Wikipedia is attempting to do with with nearly 100,000 active and fairly regular contributors that all in theory have not only a contributory role, but are also on this editorial board and can make decisions about what is allowed and what is tossed out. And unfortunately the social structures for dealing with all of these people who are involved with this process simply aren't in place, or they are breaking down under the weight of having this many people all trying to come to something resembling a "consensus". I don't think you can ever get a "consensus" of 100,000 people on any topic at all.
There are some examples of trying to deal with a community this large, but you have to look at human government organizations to make a real comparison. And 100,000 people is what you see in a medium-sized city.
There are some things that Wikipedia has done to try and cope, including the creation of "Wikiprojects" (to allow specialization on certain topics), the "ArbCom" (the judicial arm of Wikipedia), and the "Signpost"... which is essentially a newspaper about Wikipedia. I'm sure that in time other interesting structures will develop, and I've even heard suggestions of representative policy making specialists (aka a legislative body). This even exists, in a way (The WMF board of trustees), but there are some weird relationships between the WMF and Wikipedia and the WMF board is far too small to be really representative of Wikipedia users.
From a political science perspective, the organization and governance of Wikipedia is certainly an interesting experiement. That something is actually being developed (the on-line encyclopedia) is even more remarkable, not to mention that a group of individual volunteers this large is not only willing to come together for a common cause. It is also remarkable that any volunteer organization is able to accept and assimilate a group this large, and be able to handle as many new volunteers as Wikipedia is able to bring in. For every person banned or thrown out, there are dozens or hundreds of new users who come into the project.
What is also interesting is that while Wikipedia is now standard fare for geeks and the typical/. crowd, it still has yet to make significant inroad into academia and some of the more traditional groups of people that would typically be involved with writing encyclopedias. The mainstream English-speaking society is only just becoming aware of Wikipedia even existing, much less understanding what it actually is. Surprisingly, other world cultures (notably the German-speaking societies) have embraced Wikipedia in ways that English-speakers are only just beginning to realize. All that more remarkable that English was the first language and by far the largest edition of Wikipedia.
The reasons this is controversial is not so much the use of the mailing list as a means to discuss the various topics and even to talk about individual users, but how the list users were using this list to form "official" policy and to make decisions about some users away from public forums that had lasting and even detrimental consequences.
Both of these activities are things on Wikipedia should have been done in a much more public place, and technically have "official" pages on Wikipedia where they are supposed to happen where, in theory, everybody's opinion is taken into account.
This is also one of my concerns about the wikimedia IRC channels, where decisions like this are often made as well with the cliquish group that hangs out in that communication channel. But at least the IRC channels are public (for the most part...there are some exceptions). The reason this creates problems is that the contributors don't know what is said about them in these forums, and can't defend themselves.
While not a perfect example here, it is something akin to a bunch of police officers sitting around a water cooler in the station making judgments about citizens, making the arrest, and telling the citizen they just arrested that they have just been convicted in a "trial" they weren't even aware of even happening. Only the trial isn't even mentioned, just the sentence. In the case of Wikipedia, the user is banned, including an IP block (quite often). Or a policy decision is reached and the group "announces" the major policy shift as a done deal without seeking input from the community...under the guise that it still is a democratic decision even though the decision has been made.
It is for this precise reason that in normal society (unlike Wiki society) that there are public meeting laws that prohibit legislative bodies (like city councils and state legislatures) from gathering together in a non-public forum, especially if they can form a "quorum" that in theory could make a decision. This can get particularly tough in small town city councils, where a gathering of 3 city council members outside of the official meetings is technically illegal under such laws. The mainstream news media is especially justified to express outrage (or to show citizens in outrage) when these "closed meetings" make sweeping policy decisions.
Along the same lines, the hard formalism that is seen in a judicial proceeding is there for many reasons, not the least of which is to protect the innocent. While not perfect, it is intended to be a public forum where at least in theory every citizen has the opportunity to witness every decision as it is being made.
This is where the group of admins crossed the line on this mailing list. If they merely talked about the various issues among themselves, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the list. Again, going back to the police analogy, it would be like a bunch of officers talking about an ongoing trial that they were involved with. There is nothing wrong with that, only upon taking action and reaching decisions outside of the official forums. This isn't to say that cops/prosecutors/judges don't sometimes abuse the system they are involved with either, but there are checks on that sort of activity, and laws that can ultimately be invoked to stop such a rogue system when it gets out of hand.
It doesn't matter why... just that I do. The rest is legal semantics and squabbling over details that is for a hard core evangelist of the GFDL, which I'm not. I just am stating that I prefer the license, and apparently you don't. So what? But I still have legal standing even if every other Wikipedia editor/contributor insists on the switch. And I know I'm not the only one who prefers the GFDL over CC-BY-SA.
This may be true of what you are saying about Sourceforge. And most of those are useless little apps that are mostly experiments or something worthy of some computer science assignment.... perhaps a senior project but not more.
If, on the other hand, you have an application which is running a mission critical function in your company (and I've seen this far more often than you can image), you can at least hire a professional developer through a contract agency even if you don't have full time programmers and get the software updated or to fix bugs that you've identified after months or even years of using the software.
The business case here for open source software is nearly unmatched, and at least some sort of revert clause to a GPL license (or some other FOSS license) ought to be in every software contract if you are unable to locate the original software devleoper/publisher. Defined as a certified letter or some other legitimate legal means to attempt to locate the publisher and lacking the ability to find them that can be documented in court and make sense to a judge that you've made a strong attempt to work with the publisher.
You still haven't answered what your standing is to reject a GFDL whose text is the CC-by-sa. Remember that "or later"?
I responded before about the "or later clause", but here is why I "have standing" on this issue:
I have 1000+ edits on Wikipedia, and 5000+ edits on Wikibooks. Those contributions are released under the terms of the GFDL, and I intend to enforce that copyright license. That makes me a stakeholder in this issue, and I know that I'm not alone with this attitude. And I'm not the largest stakeholder (by any means) that wants to keep the GFDL so far as it is.
BTW, while Mike and Jimbo say that the GFDL can be simply replaced by the CC-BY-SA, I have deep reservations that this is in fact the case. Certainly the Free Software Foundation hasn't said that this is in fact the next version of the GFDL. In a strict interpretation of things, that isn't even what Jimbo said happened with the GFDL, even though he has all but made the licensing on Wikipedia CC-BY-SA 3.0 with no room to object.
Wikipedia is still licensed under the terms of the GFDL at the moment, and pretending that it isn't anymore is very, very wishful thinking. Any contributions added at the moment under just the CC license will be technically in violation of the terms of the GFDL until the GFDL itself is formally changed, and that announcement comes from the Free Software Foundation.
How much of the draft version of the GFDL have you read on gnu.org? Any at all?
The draft version of the GFDL that I saw a couple of weeks ago was going off to other directions and introduced some interesting new clauses, and tried to streamline the invariant section portion of the license. It also tried to deal with the mandatory inclusion of the GFDL in smaller works... which I thought was an admirable goal.
It certainly isn't CC-BY-SA.
If you are asking me to do a point by point analysis of both the CC-BY-SA 2.0 and GFDL 1.2, and point at what a harmonized license might be like (since neither one of the merged licenses is "official" yet), well, that is going to take more than a/. post. I might try to do something like that on Meta, if somebody else hasn't beat me to the punch. And besides, I'm running out of steam and my heart really isn't into trying to evangelize any further. If you like the CC-BY-SA license so much, have fun! Use it! I encourage you to do so! Just don't tell me where to shove it and tell me not to use the GFDL because I don't follow your religion that Creative Commons is the most awesome thing in the world.
Let's just say that I like the GFDL, and leave it for that right now. I'm not in the mood to argue the fine points.
As I asked on the list, and which you didn't answer there - what the hell were you thinking each and every time you clicked to agree with "or later"?
Asking this question multiple times to me here on/. is hardly productive, and is a waste of both your and my time, as well as reasonable readers of/. as well. The spam alone has made me feel I should leave this alone, but I think I might just bite here.
Just because you ask the question, I don't need to answer it. You aren't my employer, supervisor, parent, or in any position of authority over me. Expecting me to answer such nearly trollish question really shows some nerve. Especially when the question is posed with nearly offensive language and a condescending tone as this one is.
I also thought I answered this question rather completely on the Foundation-l mailing list, and this specific e-mail post that you made was just one of hundreds thrown around, many of which were asking me what I thought of switching to the CC-BY-SA license. I many not have answered explicitly this particular question, but I certainly felt that the copyright to content I added would be honored and not ignored.
I also expected that when I saw the "or later version" clause that it would be something that came from the Free Software Foundation, and not Jimbo Wales. I know Jimbo is still a board member of the WMF, but I wasn't aware that he could be speaking formally on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation like he did with this "announcement". He isn't the chairman anymore, as I thought Florance got that job.
Getting more into who speaks for the FSF, I thought it would be Richard Stallman who would make some sort of announcement regarding a major change in the GFDL. I have been reading some of the proposed changes to the GFDL on gnu.org, and harmonization with any Creative Commons license didn't seem to be anything more than a crackpot background thought. I guess I was mistaken here. I also expected that RMS wouldn't be selling out like it seems he is here. I'm waiting for the "other shoe to drop" here, which will be an official pronouncement about this update to the GFDL by RMS. That hasn't happened yet, and his take on this whole thing is far more important than what Jimbo or Mike Godwin think is going to happen.
And since you used the word yourself in the question.....I sure as hell didn't think there would be any possible way for the WMF to "switch licenses" from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA even assuming there was some sort of harmonization that allowed co-mingling of the content licensed under the two philosophies. This "pronouncement" by an official WMF press release and by Jimbo is simply over the top, and something that is going to reverberate for a very long time on Wikimedia projects, and is going to be a loss of trust on the part of a great many toward Florance in particular and perhaps with the whole of the WMF board of trustees. While Mike may be a pretty damn good lawyer, I'm not really sure that what he has proposed here is even legal. I know it won't be if the Free Software Foundation isn't 100% in agreement with Jimbo/Mike that this is something which can be done. I certainly don't see the Free Software Foundation completely giving up on the GFDL and simply declaring that GFDL 2.0 is now CC-BY-SA 3.0. Harmonization is not identity, which is what Mike seems to be spouting off on his replies on Foundation-l right now.
I know Jimbo has a huge ego, but I think the ego of RMS is even bigger. I've had quite a bit of interaction with both of these individuals. I've met RMS personally and even caused RMS to change his mind on a couple of interesting points. I've dealt with Jimbo not only on Foundation-l, but also in the management of some of the project, most notably with Wikibooks. The final word hasn't been spoken here, and it will be RMS who has the final say, not the WMF board of trustees. I awa
There needs to be an open source license that gives you everything the GPL does, but only to people who paid for the software. Anyone who has a license for the software can modify it all they want, give out their modifications and even complete modified versions, but only to others who have a license for the software.
Hmmm... This is a good thought here.
The closest that I've seen to something like this is what the old Borland did with the original Delphi source code. It still belonged to Borland, but they gave you the complete source code for nearly the entire compiler, and in theory you were permitted to share changes to that source code with anybody else who bought a licensed copy of that compiler. It in fact was a fairly common practice among Delphi programmers.
They also did something that was fairly unusual for compiler writers (although fairly common now): They explicitly granted license for the libraries for you to use in any way you wanted... as long as you gave them only others who paid for the license. And the binaries were completely free of copyright restrictions for the end-user (meaning the software developer/publisher). You don't worry about this with GCC, but other major compilers did have some pretty profound restrictions on how you were "allowed" to redistribute your software once it ran through their compiler... or be required to pay some sort of licensing fee for the library files needed to run your software.
An "open source" license like you are talking about still doesn't deal with what happens to abandonware, which IMHO is one of the real strengths of the GPL: If MySQL A.B. goes completely out of business, the MySQL software will still be available from many sources, and you will even be able to find people willing to make patches for the software and make future updates and releases. There is no GPL'd abandonware, other than the thought that a particular development group has disbanded (like the ReiserFS group run by Han Reiser).
Requiring somebody to purchase a license from a single entity of some sort gives a worry that the people collecting the money from the licenses may not be available if you don't have the license and really need the software. Under this sort of arrangement, how would you solve this problem without resorting to something like the GPL?
What he dislikes is the tendency of people to look at CC as one license, when it's really just a bunch of separate licenses. Your saying "the Create Commons license" indicates that he has a good point. So when people talk about a work being under "Creative Commons", they're not saying anything at all about how free or unfree it is.
You know, this is exactly the problem I have with Creative Commons licenses. You get tripped up with them in so many ways...even if you think you have a good idea of what you are talking about... that going for the fine points of each license is hard to grasp. And there are so many different CC licenses that only somebody who is an ultra hardcore CC-promoter/fan would really know the subtle difference.
I'm sure a hardcore fan of the CC suite would be able to explain the differences between the CC-BY license, the CC-BY-SA license, and the CC-SA license. All three allow commercial re-usage (unlike the CC-SA-NC license... or is that the CC-BY-SA-NC... or simply CC-NC?) And these aren't the only Creative Commons licenses that are released by this group.
I realize that this is about a specific Creative Commons license (the CC-BY-SA license) being adapted to work closer to the GFDL, but it can get very confusing if you don't pay attention to these little details. I don't know how a professional journalist in the mainstream media is going to cope with trying to sort all of this out... presuming that they even make a reasonable attempt to try and figure this out. There is no doubt something this big will eventually make its way into the mainstream press media.
That's just like saying Jimmy Wales should never have started Wikipedia in the first place because it would attract trolls and vandals.
This is putting words in my mouth that I didn't say here. I did suggest that the WMF is out of touch with their user base, and I still believe that to be the case. I'm not saying that there is any easy way for Florance to get the input that she needs to really be responsive to Wikimedia users, as the numbers are so huge and speak so many languages that I don't know how nearly anybody could really do more than simply try to do your best and hope that you don't piss too many people off. The voting method used to select WMF board members has some interesting biases that would be fun to look at from a political science viewpoint, and it does influence the kind of people who get elected. Again, I'm not saying that they are horrible people, but they do tend to come with a certain set of baggage and viewpoints that would be different if there were other voting methods used.
The problem is that this announcement is a very core issue to all of the Wikimedia projects, and goes as deep as trying to determine the actual copyright status of nearly every edit that has occurred on Wikipedia and the other sister projects. I don't know of any single issue that has come up which would affect each and every Wikimedia user, past, present, and future, to this extent.
In going through all of this, however, I am not hearing what the Free Software Foundation thinks of all this attention. I'm sure that by Monday... Friday at the most... that RMS will offer up some sort of reply to this and tell it from his viewpoint. Perhaps even going so far as telling Jimbo where to shove it (not likely, but that is characteristic of RMS), but more likely trying to diffuse this whole thing and let everybody know that the GFDL is not becoming CC-BY-SA 3.0, as Jimbo seemed to indicate here with this "announcement".
Of the draft version of the GFDL 2.0 (or whatever version they intend to actually give the thing) that I've seen on gnu.org, I haven't seen anything to indicate such a drastic action, so I'm giving more room to RMS to come out and suggest where this all might be headed.
This is a classic Jimbo action, however, where a broad announcement is made that is a major policy announcement, but leaving the details to everybody else to try and figure out how to make this happen. Unfortunately, Jimbo is going up against RMS on this one, and in this regard I'm not sure who will "win" in these kind of P.R. games. RMS is much more of a detail person, and does know how to get his hands dirty on stuff like this... which is also why I think an announcement by RMS is going to be the more important one here.
I don't believe that any good-faith Wikipedia contributor who has read and understood both licenses will reject CC-BY-SA in favor of GFDL.
I am a Wikipedia contributor (you can decide for yourself if I edit in good faith) and have a fairly substantial body of contributions. There are many with more edits than I have, but I'm not exactly a nobody either.
And I do reject the CC-BY-SA in favor of the GFDL.
It isn't anything personal against the Creative Commons folks, and I think there is some good work done by good people using the CC-BY-SA license. But I think there are some strengths in the GFDL that might be ignored as well if there is going to be true harmonization between the two licenses.
More to the point... I contribute to Wikipedia because it is licensed under the terms of the GFDL. And I don't contribute to many wiki projects that use the CC-BY-SA license in any large degree. I look at it more like trying to decide on your favorite cola drink: Coke or Pepsi. They each have fans and you will find some people who like one and snob those who choose the other. But in the end you get nearly the very same thing.
I have a personal preference, but in the grand scheme of things this is fighting over petty nothings.
If, on the other hand, this makes the CC-BY-SA to be more compatible with the GFDL.... well, I guess I still don't see why this is even necessary. That to me is like trying to make Coke taste more like Pepsi. If you can't tell the difference, it probably isn't really important anyway, but for those who do care it can be a big deal.
GFDL requires that so-called "Invariant Sections" (talking about the author and their relationship to the subject matter) be carried forward into future versions unchanged. Wikipedia articles don't have Invariant Sections, but you could take a Wikipedia article, change it, and then add an invariant section; everybody who wanted to use your changes would then have to keep the invariant section intact.
GFDL also requires that the title of the work be changed after every modification, and that sections titled "Acknowledgment" and "Dedication" be kept intact. Nobody really cares about these clauses, and Wikipedia has long ignored them.
If you add an invariant section, the legal requirement for keeping those invariant sections is only to those whom you distribute that new version of the content after this modification. It doesn't apply to earlier versions...and Wikipedia would as a matter of custom delete any invariant sections and material that would have to be kept.
But on the whole, you are largely correct that Wikipedia does ignore this section of the GFDL by simply prohibiting as a matter of policy the creation of any invariant sections. There may be some GFDL'd content that was added to Wikipedia which contained invariant sections... and that content would either have to be deleted, or be in technical violation of the terms of the GFDL. The problem here is that there is, comparatively speaking, so little actual content outside of Wikimedia projects written using the GFDL that this is usually not a problem for copyright violation situations.
If you want to redistribute a (modified) version of a work, the GFDL also requires that you accompany it with a copy of the GFDL and list at least five of the principal authors of the work on its title page. That's also widely ignored, by Wikipedia and others.
I've complained about how the terms of this requirement might actually be met using the current interface on Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software. All of the raw information necessary to meet this requirement is kept on the servers, but it is not very easy to access and a pain to try and obtain. There is also no simple mechanism to distinguish between a vandal whose edits have been completely removed, and a serious contributor who has added some very real meat to the articles. Most lists of authors on Wikipedia articles include not only the "principal authors" but also vandals, crackpots, sysops (who clean up the mess from vandals), and people stopping by to fix the spelling of just one or two words.
The GFDL is also very weak in its formal definition over what might even constitute an author at all, and it is very possible that Willy on Wheels (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know him) could get equal credit with RMS on the article regarding the Free Software Foundation. But that is a problem with the GFDL, not Wikipedia.
This is, however, something I've paid careful attention to when I've distributed Wikimedia content outside of the Wikimedia projects themselves. And that is something I have done... not just talked about.
Richard Stallman has given up some of the goals of the GFDL by doing this. I have no doubt about that.
BTW, it was Mike Godwin who was telling me that I could remove my contributions, after a long and drawn out thread where I simply said that I insist that my contributions remain under the GFDL, and not a CC license.
As for RMS being a money grubber... I know that seems out of character here. It certainly seems rather bizzare that it would be Jimbo Wales making this announcement instead of RMS that one of the key FSF licenses is undergoing a major change. Where is RMS in all of this? It is also very much out of character for him (RMS) to stay quiet about something this major coming from the FSF. Perhaps that will be the next/. posting about this topic.
I've had some deep reservations about some of the actions of Jimbo based on how he is operating his very much for-profit Wikia organization. My major concern is how he has been squashing Wikimedia projects that might be in competition with his for-profit websites, and killing some rather interesting and creative concepts that have risen through the muck to become likely sister Wikimedia projects.
I guess I'm concerned that this is a done deal, and not trying to float a suggestion that perhaps it would be a good idea to merge the two licenses to gague what the community opinions on this would be. I heard about discussions were going on a couple of weeks ago, but I thought those would take quite a bit more time to resolve the fine points.
A back-room deal, even with the very best of intentions, is still a back-room deal. While many of the philosophies of this particular CC license are along parallel paths to the GFDL in many ways, there still are some substantial goals of the GFDL that are being given up. And I'm still not completely sure what is being gained here by harmonization. That is something I really don't see here, other than they have gone and suddenly dual-licensed Wikimedia content that was previously available only under one type of content license. And dual-licensing that content without really getting input from those who have contributed that content in any major form.
This is not just a tweak of the GFDL to help clean up some of the very real problems of the GFDL, and there are some very real problems that do need to be resolved.
There really isn't too much I can do about this right now anyway, so I'll have to "wait and see" what the political fallout is going to be. There will be some, of that I have no doubt.
Actually, what happened here is that Jimbo Wales basically said "We, Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, represent 90% of all GFDL content. Here is what I (note the change in noun case here) want the GFDL to read!"
So Mr. Wales and Mike Godwin strong-armed the Free Software Foundation into using the "or later version" clause of the GFDL to change it to one of the Creative Commons licenses... more or less.
This would be like (well, not quite like, but this gets close to the point) the Free Software Foundation changing the GPL to be "more compatable with the Microsoft EULA". And RMS gets his own private space station paid for by Gates, and sent into space by a Paul Allen spacecraft.
Yeah, that's real freedom alright!
Trust me when I say that the shit has just hit the proverbial fan right now, and it isn't going to be pretty to see what the fallout of this is going to be like. I'm going to have to unsubscribe from the Foundation mailing list as this one announcement is going to reverberate with negative feelings from many Wikimedia users like there is no tomorrow.
I know this is a good intention on the part of everybody involved, but the Wikimedia Foundation is very much out of touch with their main user base, and has been for some time. Mike Godwin told me that my contributions may be removed from Wikipedia (all 1400 or so edits... I have no idea how that is going to be accomplished) if I object to this new license arrangement. It will be interesting to see what is going to happen.
It might be enough to cause a major fork of Wikipedia if this isn't dealt with in a judicious manner.
I think the Hormel corporate attorneys know quite a bit more about commercial trademark law than you do.
There is no doubt that the term for the electronic version of spam is referencing the luncheon meat at least on some level. The word "Spam" is also not a generic word like "Windows" or "Oracle" that had independent meanings outside the respective trademarks prior to its usage as a trademark. In this regard, what has happened is a recent generic coinage of a word that originally started as a formal and legally registered trademark, and how a company who encounters a situation like this can attempt to defend its trademark.
In addition, there is nothing in trademark law that prohibits Hormel from using the term "Spam" in a context other than with their mainstream product. Not that I'd necessarily buy it, but "Spam" brand T-shirt, or a "Spamobile" are product lines that Hormel could get involved with that have nothing at all to do with food. It is an original trademark that they came up with to begin with, and the use of the term in a commercial product certainly seems to imply that Hormel as a company is endorsing that commercial product. If the software publisher had included something like a can of meat on the packaging of their product as a sort of parody and play on the word "Spam", it would be even more apparent that this is perhaps an infringing use of the trademark.
While not necessarily the Nazgul of IBM, Hormel certainly has deep pockets to try and defend this trademark, and a very experienced and capable corporate legal team, many of them with company salaries instead of a private practice. I even met some of them (as I grew up in Austin, MN). I have no doubt that this is going to be appealed. I don't know about the specifics of this case, but this issue may even be one for the U.S. Supreme Court, as it does have precedent setting potential in commercial law. That is why this is even newsworthy to be talked about here on/. in the first place.
So instead of their lawyers going back to school, they may in fact be writing the textbooks for the next generation of law students.
BTW, I wouldn't be quite so sure that Hormel hasn't produced a software product with the Spam trademark. I'm not certain, but they don't exactly have a tiny IT department either, and have had full-time software engineers on staff for well over 40 years. They aren't exactly clueless about computer technology, and I wouldn't doubt some of them are regular/. readers. Most of their software, however, is for internal development and not for commercial publication.
At the peak, what will be the ration between retired people, and people paying income tax?
I've heard numbers as low as 1.5 workers per retiree to perhaps as low as 1:1 ratio. That is not healthy and sustainable, and certainly is much lower than the original 32:1 ratio back when Social Security was first started.
The incoming immigrants are laying the base for a continued population growth in America.
I'm more for closing the border even more than it is, but beside that... even if continuing the current levels of immigration (both illegal and legal), the U.S. population is projected by the U.S. Census Bureau to start declining sometime in the next 10-20 years. Expanded immigration is going to lead to a whole bunch of other problems, not the least of which is increased social services programs and hugely increased crime levels where those new immigrants list. This isn't even a new phenomena for America, and one of the reasons why America tends to have higher levels of crime and larger prison populations than many other 1st world countries.
BTW, if you are "undocumented" and largely living in a black economy anyway (talking about illegal immigrants and how they are paid for their labor), they aren't contributing to Social Security either. Some are, but they are also depressing the wages, and providing excuses for industries to not automate process that due to cheap labor are uneconomical to automate.
Right now illegal immigrants pay into the system, and won't draw out of it.
That is not the "party line" with the Democratic Party in the USA. For those that do "pay into the system" (note that not all of them do, for fear they might get caught by a computer check), there have been suggestions to issue these workers a separate Social Security number and "transfer" their earning figures from those whose identity they stole. Many of the bills before congress have been to allow non-citizens to get money from the Social Security Trust Fund as well.
For myself, I think if somebody has stolen your identity for employment purposes, you should get the benefit of keeping the value generated from that extra income in retirement. There are so many ways you get screwed over by the legal system from identity theft that this one "perk" is comparatively minor... but I digress here.
The only real concession that has made any real difference is to push back mandatory retirement from 65 to 70... which isn't going to come into effect until well after the Baby Boomers have all gone into retirement. It's the GenX'ers that are going to have to foot this bill, along with those who are younger.
I guess I'm a bit younger than you are, although I'm curious about what you are using as a definition of the Baby Boomers... especially to get it nailed down to within a week. I like to use the definition of Baby Boomers to be those people who were born after V-J day and before enlisted personnel were sent in large numbers into Vietnam from the USA. Gen X'ers are more easily defined as those who were born during the Vietnam War (which is why they didn't serve in that war).
To throw a bit of personal information out here on the web, I was born on the day that Ed White decided to leave his Gemini capsule and do the first human EVA (extra-vehicular activity)... also called at the time a spacewalk. If you are into space trivia, you can find that date easily enough. It also make me one of the older guys here on/., but I guess you outrank me on that sort of stat if you consider yourself a Baby Boomer.
Something to still think about, if you compare the change of technology from 1900 to 1950, and then compare 1950 to 2000, the difference in the 2nd half of the 20th Century wasn't nearly so dramatic... at least in terms of what 1st world countries had to deal with. Most of the 2nd half of the 20th Century was mainly the industrial revolution catching up to the rest of the world, most notably India and China, in terms of the impact on humanity as a whole.
One thing that would be unique and new for spaceflight would be the development of genuine spaceships. So far everything that has gone into space is a spacecraft. Using the wet navy terms for craft and ship, a craft is an auxillary vessel that is meant for temporary transit to and from a destination, and generally is much smaller...holding just a few people. The Space Shuttle perhaps qualifies marginally as a ship, as it does have multiple decks, and the "captain" (or "commander" in NASA-speak) has real authority over a real crew. Even so, the Shuttle is not intended to have a long-duration stay in space, but is really just a "shuttle" between LEO and the ground.
I hope to live long enough to see some genuine spaceships fly between the planets, which are intended to operate exclusively in the realm of space and have long term quarters for its crew. I don't see NASA in all its infinite wisdom trying to come up with something like this, but instead want something they can throw away once they get back to the Earth.
Right, so lets hold off on the Mars trip for now until we have some practical means of more efficient propulsion to get there other than chemical rockets and ion drives.
You mean nuclear rocketry? I'm not talking fancy Polywell or Ramjet fusion tech here, I'm just talking a more or less conventional nuclear submarine-type nuclear reactor with a pile of water to be super-heated as a propellant. That isn't even new technology, other than trying to figure out how to build the individual nozzles that will allow steam to escape into a vacuum efficiently. The steam generation bit is actually 19th Century tech for the most part, and indeed was written about by Jules Verne.
Mars will still be there when we get around to it.
So will California...or Oregon for that matter. Those places still exist, but Oregon is not a part of Mexico because Mexico didn't take the initiative to try and get there, and to develop it in any reasonable fashion. They also ignored California as a frontier province of little importance. And Spanish-governed Mexico has a nearly 200 year "head start" to get to Oregon if they had bothered trying. So is California a place to ignore, and an economic backwater of little significance? What about Oregon?
The question to me is not if somebody is going to get to Mars, but whom and what sort of economic/cultural/political advantage that society that has the balls to get there first will have over everybody else. The benefits that America earned from going to the Moon have in many ways driven the U.S. economy over the past 30 years in ways that were unimaginable. And that is with just applying the technology used to get to the Moon in the first place...not actually getting anything from the Moon other than some dust samples. It doesn't take somebody with much intelligence to realize that the GDP of extra-terrestrial worlds has the potential to dwarf the economy of the Earth...all countries combined. It is just a matter of how that may happen and who does it.
If we were to go anytime soon then it would be a quick there and back mission. At the very least we need to develop better and more efficient long term life support systems which are self sustaining.
First of all, going to Mars is more than simply a "touch and go" type of proposition. The time involved is something more akin to a voyage of discovery in the 16th Century, where there will be many months of travel (even with improved inter-planetary propulsion techs), and many months that will have to be spent on Mars simply to get a "cheap" launch window to get back to the Earth.
As far as efficient long-term life support systems needed for maintaining a sustained environment off of the Earth, these have already been developed to a significant degree. Ignoring obvious mistakes like the Biosphere2 project, there have been several laboratory experiments, using people (paid "volunteers" even), that have been living independently from the main environment of the Earth. Most military nuclear submarines are able to "create" their fresh water and even the air they breathe from their local environment (deep seawater). Other even more "closed systems" have been developed by NASA to test the necessary components of what would be needed to send people to Mars, and even simulated "missions to Mars" have been conducted with participants spending several years at a time with completely closed water, air, and food resources to sustain the "crew". The only exception was that this lab experiment occurred on the Earth instead of in orbit or on the surface of Mars...and they did exchange crew in the module through air locks from time to time.
More to the point, there are well documented solutions to all of these "problems" you are mentioning, and the only thing missing is the political will necessarily to either allow this to happen through private industry, or to ramp up funding for this to happen as a governmen
I know this is the "ideal" method of sending a manned expedition to Mars in terms of getting people there cheaply, and may be the only way to get to Mars using chemical propulsion methods, but there are other propulsion methods that can get people to Mars much faster and don't require such windows of opportunity such as when one of these transfer orbit opportunities becomes available.
Also, these opportunities to travel to Mars happen about once every couple of years, so there isn't really anything special about 2031. It certainly isn't the "next time Mars and the Earth will be in the right position". I do admit that when you can travel to Mars is restricted, but not nearly as much as you suggest. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Launch_windows for specific details.
The "next" opportunity to do a Hohmann transfer orbit is December 2009, not 2031. The last window was just last month, surprisingly enough. I somehow doubt that NASA is going to have a manned spacecraft ready by 2009 that can get to Mars, so it is reasonable to say that the timing of the launch windows is irrelevant to actually getting hardware put together. Several launch windows will pass before NASA gets their act together and can figure out what they are going to do... if NASA even gets to Mars first.
BTW, I've suggested elsewhere that NASA is going to be greeted on Mars by a welcoming committee of people who beat them to the surface, with live televised images coming from CNN and other news agencies who sent their reporters to cover the event.
I can't agree with you any more. It would be one thing if some actual flying hardware was being tested, or some genuine planning teams beyond a few white paper studies were in development, but absolutely nothing is even being worked upon that has any realistic way of getting to Mars at the moment.
The only real news here is that something resembling a basic mission concept has been chosen in terms of how NASA may be getting to Mars. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), this was one of the concepts that was thrown up back in the 1950's in terms of how we could get to the Moon... at least in outline form. All it looks like here is that original white paper from the 1950's has been updated to include references to technology built in the last 50 years. Yes, I'm talking about a concept developed during the Eisenhower administration. Think about that real carefully here for how strange it sounds to even say that. Kennedy just took credit for suggesting we should go to the moon, but the plans were already in place when he was elected, and even actual hardware was being built. Remember, Project Mercury was an Eisenhower administration project.
I'm still not convinced that the Ares I, much less the Ares V, is ever going to even be something more than an expensive test vehicle. NASA, since the mid 1970's (when the Space Shuttle was being built), has an absolutely dismal record of getting a vehicle design from concept to flying hardware. Dozens of designs have been proposed beyond just a mere white paper, and in some cases some real flying hardware was even built (such as the DC-X). All of this spinning wheels looking busy and not really accomplishing anything makes me strongly believe that it will be more of the same in the next 30 years, given the current track record by NASA. In 5 years, when the Shuttle is going to be retired (and Congress simply won't allow another shuttle to be built), NASA is going to be completely without anything resembling a manned spacecraft of any kind. They won't even be able to duplicate the original Mercury missions, much less get to Mars.
At least Burton Rutan (with some help from friends) has been able to accomplish that, and is building a spacecraft that may be flying soon and is in the process of actually being built. Elon Musk (with SpaceX) is building the Dragon spacecraft.... and that is being done with his own dime for the most part. The COTS money is not so much for the lanuch vehicle but for the spacecraft hardware itself that is the payload on top of the Falcon 9, and even that is only partially funded by NASA. It is worth it for Musk to hire a couple of paper pushers to earn a little extra money from NASA, but it is not the primary justification for building the spacecraft.
You are doing double talk here. First you say it doesn't matter what is responsible for global warming, and then you go of and say that we are responsible for it. So which is it? Does it matter? I guess you are saying it does matter. If so, why do you say it doesn't matter?
BTW, if you can show me the satellite telemetry from the 9th Century that you are comparing to similar data collected in the 20th Century, I might be a little bit more convinced. Oh, but wait, that doesn't exist... does it?
I can also give you some real horror stories where I strongly question some of the data collected after 1970 that is being used as "proof" that recent human activities are responsible for most of the global warming.
As I said, I agree that there is global warming. I just don't believe there is anthroprogenic factors as a primary cause of the effect, nor do I accept the philosophy that we must immediately and irrevokably modify our political and economic systems to account for this wild religious belief in global warming. And this is a religious belief under any sort of definition other than the fact that it isn't something most hard-core greens would admit to on a survey of theological belief. I'm just not a part of this religion...and that makes hard-core adherants pissed at me, thinking I'm spouting some sort of blaspheme. So what has really changed in the last 1000 years, other than the religion here?
For the record, I strongly believe (here is the word again) that the influence of solar radiation activity is strongly under-represented, and there have been other non-human environmental factors that are not even being looked at with the temperature and weather models that are being used to describe global warming. I've seen the models and talked with the "researchers", and the more I see, the more I'm convinced this is a religious/political concept and not something established by any real science. I understand the scientific methods, and what proports to be climatology is often developed under practices that would make most social scientists cringe with horror in terms of statistical controls over the data. And I don't think too highly of social scientists either and their scientific methodologies.
One of the most telling examples to me is a suggestion that modern American cities are far more polluted now than they were in the past, specifically citing air pollution. Los Angeles of the 1970's and 1960's was far worse than Los Angeles of the 1st decade of the 21st Century, and Pittsburgh, PA is many orders of magnitude better than it was in the 1890's. Yes, the late 19th Century is what I'm talking about here.... where you couldn't even see to the end of the block in most parts of that city. London has also significantly improved in terms of particulate matter as well as simple CO2 from nearly a century ago as well. Yet such successes at improving vehicle and industrial efficiency for all of these cities is openly dismissed completely as if no effort is being done at all. Or fictional things like a super-secret carborator allowing gasoline vehicles to travel at 200 mpg or better effeciency is being hidden by "Big Oil" and/or major automakers.
In short, I don't think "we" are contributing to global warming as bad as many (or you) are suggesting, and it doesn't have to be dealt with "immediately". Do I think we need to make some changes as to how we are providing energy sources for vehicles and industries? Yes. Do I think we need to be responsible stewards in regards to how we can treat the environment in which we live? Yes. I just don't think stupid scams more worthy of a Nigerian 419 advance fee scam (like Carbon tax credits) are necessarily the way to go, and that there are some suggestions on how to improve the envronment that are simply wacked out and are not going through political and scientific review because it makes people "feel good" that they are helping the environment.
I happen to believe that life is much more resilient than what you are suggesting here, and that not only will "life" continue... meaning 50%+ of all current large animal & plant species living for another 1000 years or more, but that changes to the climate are even anticipated within the DNA of nearly all of these creatures. By large I mean something that can fit into your hand or larger.
As for the methane being trapped in tundra, yeah, I can see that happening. But temperatures have been warmer than today even in historic times (going back 10,000 years). Greenland has a triving and growing community before 1000 A.D., but died off because of Global cooling. It seems as though this is merely a return to that climate which existed during the time of Leif Erikson. Please explain to me what is different today than in 800 A.D. in terms of overall temperatures and ground conditions... and why a methane-induced runaway global warming didn't occur then? Were we (or our ancestors from 1000 years ago) simply lucky?
BTW, I have to agree with you that there is global warming, but I strongly disagree that there is much, if anything, that we as ordinary humans can do to either encourage or stop it from happening. I certainly don't think a massive crash restructuring of the economy and government is necessary to "prevent global warming".
I'd love the see the DoD truly staffed by an all-volunteer force.
This is an AC troll trying to goad me, but for the sake of argument here (and because this is so incredibly inept that it deserves are response), I'd like to point out something here:
The U.S. Army is staffed completely by people who have voluntarily joined its ranks. They have stepped up to the recruiter and signed up on their own, without any government program that "forces" them to be there.
In most other countries of the world, including much of Europe, soldiers are "drafted" into the service and are conscripts, not volunteers. This is a huge difference between how the U.S. military is organized compared to those of other countries.... and a reason why the U.S. Army does comparatively better on the battlefield: The soldiers have personal motivations above and beyond the gun pointed at them by their own government to serve.
On top of everything else, the purpose of a decent military organization is to scare the hell out of anybody who wants to challenge that country's military... in other words, peace through strength. It also is the final line of civil defense if for some reason local police can no longer maintain civil control. In theory, if you challenge the police with automatic weapons and RPGs, the police can call in the military to deal with your challenge to the government. And it has happened on a few occasions. Generally this role is performed by the National Guard units, but active duty Army units can also get involved (or more likely Marine units) if the Guardsmen are overwhelmed.
BTW, the reason why completely cutting the DoD spending wouldn't have any real impact is that I have no doubt that existing federal departments and programs could easily grow to use that same money.... and more than likely would. A national health care system, to use a recent political example, is one of those that could easily grow to completely consume current defense spending and be begging for much more.
While I don't understand the idea of why the USA is defending the west Germans from the east Germans (now that west and east are lower case and there is no border between the two parts of Germany), I generally agree with you on what you are talking about.
BTW, perhaps the most concerning to me is the re-arming of Japan to the point that if the USA were to go away, that Japan can pretty much take care of itself. Explicitly, Japan spends nearly as much on national defense as the United Kingdom, and just ahead of Germany, being the sixth largest military organization in the world. Any significant increase by Japanese defense spending would put them ahead of Russia and might even make them the #2 military power in the world. Go Japan!
Now I'm not seeing a Japanese-American conflict in the near future, but the post WWII philosophy of the USA providing the military protection over Japan to make sure they can't wage a war against the USA has disappeared a long time ago. I'm not saying that the Japanese don't have some strong concerns over national defense, being neighbors to China, Russia, and Korea (both North and South). At this point, it is more of a mutual understanding between Japan and the USA to help each other if that part of the world blows up into open warfare.
Or to put it another way, Japanese military spending compared to the USA is nearly identical to what it was like prior to World War II, even if compared to the GDP of both countries it is significantly lower.
And yes, I'm aware of the legislation in 1938 to disband the U.S. Army.
BTW, your comment about paying each terrorist $10 million is a good one. While in a perfect world, I would agree with you that sending them to Las Vegas would be both a better jobs program for helping poor people (those who work in the hospitality industries of Nevada) and have given these terrorists their 100 virgins in this lifetime instead of a future life to come, I don't see a realistic way to actually make that happen. Still, it is an excellent thought, and I wish these terrorists would have thought about it before killing their fellow muslim brothers (and a few Americans along the way).
While I am in no way trying to disparage what you are trying to say (in fact, it needed to be said), let's get one thing clear:
In 2010, Geroge W. Bush will not be President of the United States of America. Period.
The U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits him from even holding office after that... unless he wants to run for the U.S. House of Representatives again. I have no doubt that the people of Texas might even support that idea, even if Laura might not like the thought.
This isn't a question of what the results of the next election is going to be, because Bush isn't even running for office. He simply can't. Or more to the point, I support the removal of George W. Bush from office under the grounds of the 22nd Article of Amendment of the Constitution: He has served his two terms honorably and it is time for somebody else to take the flak of idiots like the one who insists that Bush get impeached. It took over two years for Clinton to get impeached...when there was even support for the idea. Two years from now, Bush won't even be President.
BTW, a part of me really does want to see Hillary run against George W. Bush. And from a political strategy viewpoint, I think it is incredible that she has organized her campaign explicitly along the lines to run against Bush when he isn't even running.
Slashdot Mirror
This is different from Brittanica and other encyclopedias mainly on the scale of operations. Brittanica only had a few hundred people, at the most, who were involved with actual article writing. And in terms of developing style guides and establishing editorial policies, including deciding if somebody was "worthy" of being included in the article development process, it involved a comparatively small committee of just a few people... a dozen at the most.
Instead, Wikipedia is attempting to do with with nearly 100,000 active and fairly regular contributors that all in theory have not only a contributory role, but are also on this editorial board and can make decisions about what is allowed and what is tossed out. And unfortunately the social structures for dealing with all of these people who are involved with this process simply aren't in place, or they are breaking down under the weight of having this many people all trying to come to something resembling a "consensus". I don't think you can ever get a "consensus" of 100,000 people on any topic at all.
There are some examples of trying to deal with a community this large, but you have to look at human government organizations to make a real comparison. And 100,000 people is what you see in a medium-sized city.
There are some things that Wikipedia has done to try and cope, including the creation of "Wikiprojects" (to allow specialization on certain topics), the "ArbCom" (the judicial arm of Wikipedia), and the "Signpost"... which is essentially a newspaper about Wikipedia. I'm sure that in time other interesting structures will develop, and I've even heard suggestions of representative policy making specialists (aka a legislative body). This even exists, in a way (The WMF board of trustees), but there are some weird relationships between the WMF and Wikipedia and the WMF board is far too small to be really representative of Wikipedia users.
From a political science perspective, the organization and governance of Wikipedia is certainly an interesting experiement. That something is actually being developed (the on-line encyclopedia) is even more remarkable, not to mention that a group of individual volunteers this large is not only willing to come together for a common cause. It is also remarkable that any volunteer organization is able to accept and assimilate a group this large, and be able to handle as many new volunteers as Wikipedia is able to bring in. For every person banned or thrown out, there are dozens or hundreds of new users who come into the project.
What is also interesting is that while Wikipedia is now standard fare for geeks and the typical
The reasons this is controversial is not so much the use of the mailing list as a means to discuss the various topics and even to talk about individual users, but how the list users were using this list to form "official" policy and to make decisions about some users away from public forums that had lasting and even detrimental consequences.
Both of these activities are things on Wikipedia should have been done in a much more public place, and technically have "official" pages on Wikipedia where they are supposed to happen where, in theory, everybody's opinion is taken into account.
This is also one of my concerns about the wikimedia IRC channels, where decisions like this are often made as well with the cliquish group that hangs out in that communication channel. But at least the IRC channels are public (for the most part...there are some exceptions). The reason this creates problems is that the contributors don't know what is said about them in these forums, and can't defend themselves.
While not a perfect example here, it is something akin to a bunch of police officers sitting around a water cooler in the station making judgments about citizens, making the arrest, and telling the citizen they just arrested that they have just been convicted in a "trial" they weren't even aware of even happening. Only the trial isn't even mentioned, just the sentence. In the case of Wikipedia, the user is banned, including an IP block (quite often). Or a policy decision is reached and the group "announces" the major policy shift as a done deal without seeking input from the community...under the guise that it still is a democratic decision even though the decision has been made.
It is for this precise reason that in normal society (unlike Wiki society) that there are public meeting laws that prohibit legislative bodies (like city councils and state legislatures) from gathering together in a non-public forum, especially if they can form a "quorum" that in theory could make a decision. This can get particularly tough in small town city councils, where a gathering of 3 city council members outside of the official meetings is technically illegal under such laws. The mainstream news media is especially justified to express outrage (or to show citizens in outrage) when these "closed meetings" make sweeping policy decisions.
Along the same lines, the hard formalism that is seen in a judicial proceeding is there for many reasons, not the least of which is to protect the innocent. While not perfect, it is intended to be a public forum where at least in theory every citizen has the opportunity to witness every decision as it is being made.
This is where the group of admins crossed the line on this mailing list. If they merely talked about the various issues among themselves, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the list. Again, going back to the police analogy, it would be like a bunch of officers talking about an ongoing trial that they were involved with. There is nothing wrong with that, only upon taking action and reaching decisions outside of the official forums. This isn't to say that cops/prosecutors/judges don't sometimes abuse the system they are involved with either, but there are checks on that sort of activity, and laws that can ultimately be invoked to stop such a rogue system when it gets out of hand.
It doesn't matter why... just that I do. The rest is legal semantics and squabbling over details that is for a hard core evangelist of the GFDL, which I'm not. I just am stating that I prefer the license, and apparently you don't. So what? But I still have legal standing even if every other Wikipedia editor/contributor insists on the switch. And I know I'm not the only one who prefers the GFDL over CC-BY-SA.
This may be true of what you are saying about Sourceforge. And most of those are useless little apps that are mostly experiments or something worthy of some computer science assignment.... perhaps a senior project but not more.
If, on the other hand, you have an application which is running a mission critical function in your company (and I've seen this far more often than you can image), you can at least hire a professional developer through a contract agency even if you don't have full time programmers and get the software updated or to fix bugs that you've identified after months or even years of using the software.
The business case here for open source software is nearly unmatched, and at least some sort of revert clause to a GPL license (or some other FOSS license) ought to be in every software contract if you are unable to locate the original software devleoper/publisher. Defined as a certified letter or some other legitimate legal means to attempt to locate the publisher and lacking the ability to find them that can be documented in court and make sense to a judge that you've made a strong attempt to work with the publisher.
I responded before about the "or later clause", but here is why I "have standing" on this issue:
I have 1000+ edits on Wikipedia, and 5000+ edits on Wikibooks. Those contributions are released under the terms of the GFDL, and I intend to enforce that copyright license. That makes me a stakeholder in this issue, and I know that I'm not alone with this attitude. And I'm not the largest stakeholder (by any means) that wants to keep the GFDL so far as it is.
BTW, while Mike and Jimbo say that the GFDL can be simply replaced by the CC-BY-SA, I have deep reservations that this is in fact the case. Certainly the Free Software Foundation hasn't said that this is in fact the next version of the GFDL. In a strict interpretation of things, that isn't even what Jimbo said happened with the GFDL, even though he has all but made the licensing on Wikipedia CC-BY-SA 3.0 with no room to object.
Wikipedia is still licensed under the terms of the GFDL at the moment, and pretending that it isn't anymore is very, very wishful thinking. Any contributions added at the moment under just the CC license will be technically in violation of the terms of the GFDL until the GFDL itself is formally changed, and that announcement comes from the Free Software Foundation.
How much of the draft version of the GFDL have you read on gnu.org? Any at all?
/. post. I might try to do something like that on Meta, if somebody else hasn't beat me to the punch. And besides, I'm running out of steam and my heart really isn't into trying to evangelize any further. If you like the CC-BY-SA license so much, have fun! Use it! I encourage you to do so! Just don't tell me where to shove it and tell me not to use the GFDL because I don't follow your religion that Creative Commons is the most awesome thing in the world.
The draft version of the GFDL that I saw a couple of weeks ago was going off to other directions and introduced some interesting new clauses, and tried to streamline the invariant section portion of the license. It also tried to deal with the mandatory inclusion of the GFDL in smaller works... which I thought was an admirable goal.
It certainly isn't CC-BY-SA.
If you are asking me to do a point by point analysis of both the CC-BY-SA 2.0 and GFDL 1.2, and point at what a harmonized license might be like (since neither one of the merged licenses is "official" yet), well, that is going to take more than a
Let's just say that I like the GFDL, and leave it for that right now. I'm not in the mood to argue the fine points.
Asking this question multiple times to me here on /. is hardly productive, and is a waste of both your and my time, as well as reasonable readers of /. as well. The spam alone has made me feel I should leave this alone, but I think I might just bite here.
I know Jimbo has a huge ego, but I think the ego of RMS is even bigger. I've had quite a bit of interaction with both of these individuals. I've met RMS personally and even caused RMS to change his mind on a couple of interesting points. I've dealt with Jimbo not only on Foundation-l, but also in the management of some of the project, most notably with Wikibooks. The final word hasn't been spoken here, and it will be RMS who has the final say, not the WMF board of trustees. I awa
Hmmm... This is a good thought here.
The closest that I've seen to something like this is what the old Borland did with the original Delphi source code. It still belonged to Borland, but they gave you the complete source code for nearly the entire compiler, and in theory you were permitted to share changes to that source code with anybody else who bought a licensed copy of that compiler. It in fact was a fairly common practice among Delphi programmers.
They also did something that was fairly unusual for compiler writers (although fairly common now): They explicitly granted license for the libraries for you to use in any way you wanted... as long as you gave them only others who paid for the license. And the binaries were completely free of copyright restrictions for the end-user (meaning the software developer/publisher). You don't worry about this with GCC, but other major compilers did have some pretty profound restrictions on how you were "allowed" to redistribute your software once it ran through their compiler... or be required to pay some sort of licensing fee for the library files needed to run your software.
An "open source" license like you are talking about still doesn't deal with what happens to abandonware, which IMHO is one of the real strengths of the GPL: If MySQL A.B. goes completely out of business, the MySQL software will still be available from many sources, and you will even be able to find people willing to make patches for the software and make future updates and releases. There is no GPL'd abandonware, other than the thought that a particular development group has disbanded (like the ReiserFS group run by Han Reiser).
Requiring somebody to purchase a license from a single entity of some sort gives a worry that the people collecting the money from the licenses may not be available if you don't have the license and really need the software. Under this sort of arrangement, how would you solve this problem without resorting to something like the GPL?
You know, this is exactly the problem I have with Creative Commons licenses. You get tripped up with them in so many ways...even if you think you have a good idea of what you are talking about... that going for the fine points of each license is hard to grasp. And there are so many different CC licenses that only somebody who is an ultra hardcore CC-promoter/fan would really know the subtle difference.
I'm sure a hardcore fan of the CC suite would be able to explain the differences between the CC-BY license, the CC-BY-SA license, and the CC-SA license. All three allow commercial re-usage (unlike the CC-SA-NC license... or is that the CC-BY-SA-NC... or simply CC-NC?) And these aren't the only Creative Commons licenses that are released by this group.
I realize that this is about a specific Creative Commons license (the CC-BY-SA license) being adapted to work closer to the GFDL, but it can get very confusing if you don't pay attention to these little details. I don't know how a professional journalist in the mainstream media is going to cope with trying to sort all of this out... presuming that they even make a reasonable attempt to try and figure this out. There is no doubt something this big will eventually make its way into the mainstream press media.
This is putting words in my mouth that I didn't say here. I did suggest that the WMF is out of touch with their user base, and I still believe that to be the case. I'm not saying that there is any easy way for Florance to get the input that she needs to really be responsive to Wikimedia users, as the numbers are so huge and speak so many languages that I don't know how nearly anybody could really do more than simply try to do your best and hope that you don't piss too many people off. The voting method used to select WMF board members has some interesting biases that would be fun to look at from a political science viewpoint, and it does influence the kind of people who get elected. Again, I'm not saying that they are horrible people, but they do tend to come with a certain set of baggage and viewpoints that would be different if there were other voting methods used.
The problem is that this announcement is a very core issue to all of the Wikimedia projects, and goes as deep as trying to determine the actual copyright status of nearly every edit that has occurred on Wikipedia and the other sister projects. I don't know of any single issue that has come up which would affect each and every Wikimedia user, past, present, and future, to this extent.
In going through all of this, however, I am not hearing what the Free Software Foundation thinks of all this attention. I'm sure that by Monday... Friday at the most... that RMS will offer up some sort of reply to this and tell it from his viewpoint. Perhaps even going so far as telling Jimbo where to shove it (not likely, but that is characteristic of RMS), but more likely trying to diffuse this whole thing and let everybody know that the GFDL is not becoming CC-BY-SA 3.0, as Jimbo seemed to indicate here with this "announcement".
Of the draft version of the GFDL 2.0 (or whatever version they intend to actually give the thing) that I've seen on gnu.org, I haven't seen anything to indicate such a drastic action, so I'm giving more room to RMS to come out and suggest where this all might be headed.
This is a classic Jimbo action, however, where a broad announcement is made that is a major policy announcement, but leaving the details to everybody else to try and figure out how to make this happen. Unfortunately, Jimbo is going up against RMS on this one, and in this regard I'm not sure who will "win" in these kind of P.R. games. RMS is much more of a detail person, and does know how to get his hands dirty on stuff like this... which is also why I think an announcement by RMS is going to be the more important one here.
I am a Wikipedia contributor (you can decide for yourself if I edit in good faith) and have a fairly substantial body of contributions. There are many with more edits than I have, but I'm not exactly a nobody either.
And I do reject the CC-BY-SA in favor of the GFDL.
It isn't anything personal against the Creative Commons folks, and I think there is some good work done by good people using the CC-BY-SA license. But I think there are some strengths in the GFDL that might be ignored as well if there is going to be true harmonization between the two licenses.
More to the point... I contribute to Wikipedia because it is licensed under the terms of the GFDL. And I don't contribute to many wiki projects that use the CC-BY-SA license in any large degree. I look at it more like trying to decide on your favorite cola drink: Coke or Pepsi. They each have fans and you will find some people who like one and snob those who choose the other. But in the end you get nearly the very same thing.
I have a personal preference, but in the grand scheme of things this is fighting over petty nothings.
If, on the other hand, this makes the CC-BY-SA to be more compatible with the GFDL.... well, I guess I still don't see why this is even necessary. That to me is like trying to make Coke taste more like Pepsi. If you can't tell the difference, it probably isn't really important anyway, but for those who do care it can be a big deal.
If you add an invariant section, the legal requirement for keeping those invariant sections is only to those whom you distribute that new version of the content after this modification. It doesn't apply to earlier versions...and Wikipedia would as a matter of custom delete any invariant sections and material that would have to be kept.
But on the whole, you are largely correct that Wikipedia does ignore this section of the GFDL by simply prohibiting as a matter of policy the creation of any invariant sections. There may be some GFDL'd content that was added to Wikipedia which contained invariant sections... and that content would either have to be deleted, or be in technical violation of the terms of the GFDL. The problem here is that there is, comparatively speaking, so little actual content outside of Wikimedia projects written using the GFDL that this is usually not a problem for copyright violation situations.
I've complained about how the terms of this requirement might actually be met using the current interface on Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software. All of the raw information necessary to meet this requirement is kept on the servers, but it is not very easy to access and a pain to try and obtain. There is also no simple mechanism to distinguish between a vandal whose edits have been completely removed, and a serious contributor who has added some very real meat to the articles. Most lists of authors on Wikipedia articles include not only the "principal authors" but also vandals, crackpots, sysops (who clean up the mess from vandals), and people stopping by to fix the spelling of just one or two words.
The GFDL is also very weak in its formal definition over what might even constitute an author at all, and it is very possible that Willy on Wheels (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know him) could get equal credit with RMS on the article regarding the Free Software Foundation. But that is a problem with the GFDL, not Wikipedia.
This is, however, something I've paid careful attention to when I've distributed Wikimedia content outside of the Wikimedia projects themselves. And that is something I have done... not just talked about.
Richard Stallman has given up some of the goals of the GFDL by doing this. I have no doubt about that.
/. posting about this topic.
BTW, it was Mike Godwin who was telling me that I could remove my contributions, after a long and drawn out thread where I simply said that I insist that my contributions remain under the GFDL, and not a CC license.
As for RMS being a money grubber... I know that seems out of character here. It certainly seems rather bizzare that it would be Jimbo Wales making this announcement instead of RMS that one of the key FSF licenses is undergoing a major change. Where is RMS in all of this? It is also very much out of character for him (RMS) to stay quiet about something this major coming from the FSF. Perhaps that will be the next
I've had some deep reservations about some of the actions of Jimbo based on how he is operating his very much for-profit Wikia organization. My major concern is how he has been squashing Wikimedia projects that might be in competition with his for-profit websites, and killing some rather interesting and creative concepts that have risen through the muck to become likely sister Wikimedia projects.
I guess I'm concerned that this is a done deal, and not trying to float a suggestion that perhaps it would be a good idea to merge the two licenses to gague what the community opinions on this would be. I heard about discussions were going on a couple of weeks ago, but I thought those would take quite a bit more time to resolve the fine points.
A back-room deal, even with the very best of intentions, is still a back-room deal. While many of the philosophies of this particular CC license are along parallel paths to the GFDL in many ways, there still are some substantial goals of the GFDL that are being given up. And I'm still not completely sure what is being gained here by harmonization. That is something I really don't see here, other than they have gone and suddenly dual-licensed Wikimedia content that was previously available only under one type of content license. And dual-licensing that content without really getting input from those who have contributed that content in any major form.
This is not just a tweak of the GFDL to help clean up some of the very real problems of the GFDL, and there are some very real problems that do need to be resolved.
There really isn't too much I can do about this right now anyway, so I'll have to "wait and see" what the political fallout is going to be. There will be some, of that I have no doubt.
Actually, what happened here is that Jimbo Wales basically said "We, Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, represent 90% of all GFDL content. Here is what I (note the change in noun case here) want the GFDL to read!"
So Mr. Wales and Mike Godwin strong-armed the Free Software Foundation into using the "or later version" clause of the GFDL to change it to one of the Creative Commons licenses... more or less.
This would be like (well, not quite like, but this gets close to the point) the Free Software Foundation changing the GPL to be "more compatable with the Microsoft EULA". And RMS gets his own private space station paid for by Gates, and sent into space by a Paul Allen spacecraft.
Yeah, that's real freedom alright!
Trust me when I say that the shit has just hit the proverbial fan right now, and it isn't going to be pretty to see what the fallout of this is going to be like. I'm going to have to unsubscribe from the Foundation mailing list as this one announcement is going to reverberate with negative feelings from many Wikimedia users like there is no tomorrow.
I know this is a good intention on the part of everybody involved, but the Wikimedia Foundation is very much out of touch with their main user base, and has been for some time. Mike Godwin told me that my contributions may be removed from Wikipedia (all 1400 or so edits... I have no idea how that is going to be accomplished) if I object to this new license arrangement. It will be interesting to see what is going to happen.
It might be enough to cause a major fork of Wikipedia if this isn't dealt with in a judicious manner.
I think the Hormel corporate attorneys know quite a bit more about commercial trademark law than you do.
There is no doubt that the term for the electronic version of spam is referencing the luncheon meat at least on some level. The word "Spam" is also not a generic word like "Windows" or "Oracle" that had independent meanings outside the respective trademarks prior to its usage as a trademark. In this regard, what has happened is a recent generic coinage of a word that originally started as a formal and legally registered trademark, and how a company who encounters a situation like this can attempt to defend its trademark.
In addition, there is nothing in trademark law that prohibits Hormel from using the term "Spam" in a context other than with their mainstream product. Not that I'd necessarily buy it, but "Spam" brand T-shirt, or a "Spamobile" are product lines that Hormel could get involved with that have nothing at all to do with food. It is an original trademark that they came up with to begin with, and the use of the term in a commercial product certainly seems to imply that Hormel as a company is endorsing that commercial product. If the software publisher had included something like a can of meat on the packaging of their product as a sort of parody and play on the word "Spam", it would be even more apparent that this is perhaps an infringing use of the trademark.
While not necessarily the Nazgul of IBM, Hormel certainly has deep pockets to try and defend this trademark, and a very experienced and capable corporate legal team, many of them with company salaries instead of a private practice. I even met some of them (as I grew up in Austin, MN). I have no doubt that this is going to be appealed. I don't know about the specifics of this case, but this issue may even be one for the U.S. Supreme Court, as it does have precedent setting potential in commercial law. That is why this is even newsworthy to be talked about here on
So instead of their lawyers going back to school, they may in fact be writing the textbooks for the next generation of law students.
BTW, I wouldn't be quite so sure that Hormel hasn't produced a software product with the Spam trademark. I'm not certain, but they don't exactly have a tiny IT department either, and have had full-time software engineers on staff for well over 40 years. They aren't exactly clueless about computer technology, and I wouldn't doubt some of them are regular
I've heard numbers as low as 1.5 workers per retiree to perhaps as low as 1:1 ratio. That is not healthy and sustainable, and certainly is much lower than the original 32:1 ratio back when Social Security was first started.
I'm more for closing the border even more than it is, but beside that... even if continuing the current levels of immigration (both illegal and legal), the U.S. population is projected by the U.S. Census Bureau to start declining sometime in the next 10-20 years. Expanded immigration is going to lead to a whole bunch of other problems, not the least of which is increased social services programs and hugely increased crime levels where those new immigrants list. This isn't even a new phenomena for America, and one of the reasons why America tends to have higher levels of crime and larger prison populations than many other 1st world countries.
BTW, if you are "undocumented" and largely living in a black economy anyway (talking about illegal immigrants and how they are paid for their labor), they aren't contributing to Social Security either. Some are, but they are also depressing the wages, and providing excuses for industries to not automate process that due to cheap labor are uneconomical to automate.
That is not the "party line" with the Democratic Party in the USA. For those that do "pay into the system" (note that not all of them do, for fear they might get caught by a computer check), there have been suggestions to issue these workers a separate Social Security number and "transfer" their earning figures from those whose identity they stole. Many of the bills before congress have been to allow non-citizens to get money from the Social Security Trust Fund as well.
For myself, I think if somebody has stolen your identity for employment purposes, you should get the benefit of keeping the value generated from that extra income in retirement. There are so many ways you get screwed over by the legal system from identity theft that this one "perk" is comparatively minor... but I digress here.
The only real concession that has made any real difference is to push back mandatory retirement from 65 to 70... which isn't going to come into effect until well after the Baby Boomers have all gone into retirement. It's the GenX'ers that are going to have to foot this bill, along with those who are younger.
I guess I'm a bit younger than you are, although I'm curious about what you are using as a definition of the Baby Boomers... especially to get it nailed down to within a week. I like to use the definition of Baby Boomers to be those people who were born after V-J day and before enlisted personnel were sent in large numbers into Vietnam from the USA. Gen X'ers are more easily defined as those who were born during the Vietnam War (which is why they didn't serve in that war).
To throw a bit of personal information out here on the web, I was born on the day that Ed White decided to leave his Gemini capsule and do the first human EVA (extra-vehicular activity)... also called at the time a spacewalk. If you are into space trivia, you can find that date easily enough. It also make me one of the older guys here on
Something to still think about, if you compare the change of technology from 1900 to 1950, and then compare 1950 to 2000, the difference in the 2nd half of the 20th Century wasn't nearly so dramatic... at least in terms of what 1st world countries had to deal with. Most of the 2nd half of the 20th Century was mainly the industrial revolution catching up to the rest of the world, most notably India and China, in terms of the impact on humanity as a whole.
One thing that would be unique and new for spaceflight would be the development of genuine spaceships . So far everything that has gone into space is a spacecraft. Using the wet navy terms for craft and ship, a craft is an auxillary vessel that is meant for temporary transit to and from a destination, and generally is much smaller...holding just a few people. The Space Shuttle perhaps qualifies marginally as a ship, as it does have multiple decks, and the "captain" (or "commander" in NASA-speak) has real authority over a real crew. Even so, the Shuttle is not intended to have a long-duration stay in space, but is really just a "shuttle" between LEO and the ground.
I hope to live long enough to see some genuine spaceships fly between the planets, which are intended to operate exclusively in the realm of space and have long term quarters for its crew. I don't see NASA in all its infinite wisdom trying to come up with something like this, but instead want something they can throw away once they get back to the Earth.
You mean nuclear rocketry? I'm not talking fancy Polywell or Ramjet fusion tech here, I'm just talking a more or less conventional nuclear submarine-type nuclear reactor with a pile of water to be super-heated as a propellant. That isn't even new technology, other than trying to figure out how to build the individual nozzles that will allow steam to escape into a vacuum efficiently. The steam generation bit is actually 19th Century tech for the most part, and indeed was written about by Jules Verne.
So will California...or Oregon for that matter. Those places still exist, but Oregon is not a part of Mexico because Mexico didn't take the initiative to try and get there, and to develop it in any reasonable fashion. They also ignored California as a frontier province of little importance. And Spanish-governed Mexico has a nearly 200 year "head start" to get to Oregon if they had bothered trying. So is California a place to ignore, and an economic backwater of little significance? What about Oregon?
The question to me is not if somebody is going to get to Mars, but whom and what sort of economic/cultural/political advantage that society that has the balls to get there first will have over everybody else. The benefits that America earned from going to the Moon have in many ways driven the U.S. economy over the past 30 years in ways that were unimaginable. And that is with just applying the technology used to get to the Moon in the first place...not actually getting anything from the Moon other than some dust samples. It doesn't take somebody with much intelligence to realize that the GDP of extra-terrestrial worlds has the potential to dwarf the economy of the Earth...all countries combined. It is just a matter of how that may happen and who does it.
First of all, going to Mars is more than simply a "touch and go" type of proposition. The time involved is something more akin to a voyage of discovery in the 16th Century, where there will be many months of travel (even with improved inter-planetary propulsion techs), and many months that will have to be spent on Mars simply to get a "cheap" launch window to get back to the Earth.
As far as efficient long-term life support systems needed for maintaining a sustained environment off of the Earth, these have already been developed to a significant degree. Ignoring obvious mistakes like the Biosphere2 project, there have been several laboratory experiments, using people (paid "volunteers" even), that have been living independently from the main environment of the Earth. Most military nuclear submarines are able to "create" their fresh water and even the air they breathe from their local environment (deep seawater). Other even more "closed systems" have been developed by NASA to test the necessary components of what would be needed to send people to Mars, and even simulated "missions to Mars" have been conducted with participants spending several years at a time with completely closed water, air, and food resources to sustain the "crew". The only exception was that this lab experiment occurred on the Earth instead of in orbit or on the surface of Mars...and they did exchange crew in the module through air locks from time to time.
More to the point, there are well documented solutions to all of these "problems" you are mentioning, and the only thing missing is the political will necessarily to either allow this to happen through private industry, or to ramp up funding for this to happen as a governmen
I know this is the "ideal" method of sending a manned expedition to Mars in terms of getting people there cheaply, and may be the only way to get to Mars using chemical propulsion methods, but there are other propulsion methods that can get people to Mars much faster and don't require such windows of opportunity such as when one of these transfer orbit opportunities becomes available.
Also, these opportunities to travel to Mars happen about once every couple of years, so there isn't really anything special about 2031. It certainly isn't the "next time Mars and the Earth will be in the right position". I do admit that when you can travel to Mars is restricted, but not nearly as much as you suggest. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Launch_windows for specific details.
The "next" opportunity to do a Hohmann transfer orbit is December 2009, not 2031. The last window was just last month, surprisingly enough. I somehow doubt that NASA is going to have a manned spacecraft ready by 2009 that can get to Mars, so it is reasonable to say that the timing of the launch windows is irrelevant to actually getting hardware put together. Several launch windows will pass before NASA gets their act together and can figure out what they are going to do... if NASA even gets to Mars first.
BTW, I've suggested elsewhere that NASA is going to be greeted on Mars by a welcoming committee of people who beat them to the surface, with live televised images coming from CNN and other news agencies who sent their reporters to cover the event.
I can't agree with you any more. It would be one thing if some actual flying hardware was being tested, or some genuine planning teams beyond a few white paper studies were in development, but absolutely nothing is even being worked upon that has any realistic way of getting to Mars at the moment.
The only real news here is that something resembling a basic mission concept has been chosen in terms of how NASA may be getting to Mars. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), this was one of the concepts that was thrown up back in the 1950's in terms of how we could get to the Moon... at least in outline form. All it looks like here is that original white paper from the 1950's has been updated to include references to technology built in the last 50 years. Yes, I'm talking about a concept developed during the Eisenhower administration. Think about that real carefully here for how strange it sounds to even say that. Kennedy just took credit for suggesting we should go to the moon, but the plans were already in place when he was elected, and even actual hardware was being built. Remember, Project Mercury was an Eisenhower administration project.
I'm still not convinced that the Ares I, much less the Ares V, is ever going to even be something more than an expensive test vehicle. NASA, since the mid 1970's (when the Space Shuttle was being built), has an absolutely dismal record of getting a vehicle design from concept to flying hardware. Dozens of designs have been proposed beyond just a mere white paper, and in some cases some real flying hardware was even built (such as the DC-X). All of this spinning wheels looking busy and not really accomplishing anything makes me strongly believe that it will be more of the same in the next 30 years, given the current track record by NASA. In 5 years, when the Shuttle is going to be retired (and Congress simply won't allow another shuttle to be built), NASA is going to be completely without anything resembling a manned spacecraft of any kind. They won't even be able to duplicate the original Mercury missions, much less get to Mars.
At least Burton Rutan (with some help from friends) has been able to accomplish that, and is building a spacecraft that may be flying soon and is in the process of actually being built. Elon Musk (with SpaceX) is building the Dragon spacecraft.... and that is being done with his own dime for the most part. The COTS money is not so much for the lanuch vehicle but for the spacecraft hardware itself that is the payload on top of the Falcon 9, and even that is only partially funded by NASA. It is worth it for Musk to hire a couple of paper pushers to earn a little extra money from NASA, but it is not the primary justification for building the spacecraft.
You are doing double talk here. First you say it doesn't matter what is responsible for global warming, and then you go of and say that we are responsible for it. So which is it? Does it matter? I guess you are saying it does matter. If so, why do you say it doesn't matter?
BTW, if you can show me the satellite telemetry from the 9th Century that you are comparing to similar data collected in the 20th Century, I might be a little bit more convinced. Oh, but wait, that doesn't exist... does it?
I can also give you some real horror stories where I strongly question some of the data collected after 1970 that is being used as "proof" that recent human activities are responsible for most of the global warming.
As I said, I agree that there is global warming. I just don't believe there is anthroprogenic factors as a primary cause of the effect, nor do I accept the philosophy that we must immediately and irrevokably modify our political and economic systems to account for this wild religious belief in global warming. And this is a religious belief under any sort of definition other than the fact that it isn't something most hard-core greens would admit to on a survey of theological belief. I'm just not a part of this religion...and that makes hard-core adherants pissed at me, thinking I'm spouting some sort of blaspheme. So what has really changed in the last 1000 years, other than the religion here?
For the record, I strongly believe (here is the word again) that the influence of solar radiation activity is strongly under-represented, and there have been other non-human environmental factors that are not even being looked at with the temperature and weather models that are being used to describe global warming. I've seen the models and talked with the "researchers", and the more I see, the more I'm convinced this is a religious/political concept and not something established by any real science. I understand the scientific methods, and what proports to be climatology is often developed under practices that would make most social scientists cringe with horror in terms of statistical controls over the data. And I don't think too highly of social scientists either and their scientific methodologies.
One of the most telling examples to me is a suggestion that modern American cities are far more polluted now than they were in the past, specifically citing air pollution. Los Angeles of the 1970's and 1960's was far worse than Los Angeles of the 1st decade of the 21st Century, and Pittsburgh, PA is many orders of magnitude better than it was in the 1890's. Yes, the late 19th Century is what I'm talking about here.... where you couldn't even see to the end of the block in most parts of that city. London has also significantly improved in terms of particulate matter as well as simple CO2 from nearly a century ago as well. Yet such successes at improving vehicle and industrial efficiency for all of these cities is openly dismissed completely as if no effort is being done at all. Or fictional things like a super-secret carborator allowing gasoline vehicles to travel at 200 mpg or better effeciency is being hidden by "Big Oil" and/or major automakers.
In short, I don't think "we" are contributing to global warming as bad as many (or you) are suggesting, and it doesn't have to be dealt with "immediately". Do I think we need to make some changes as to how we are providing energy sources for vehicles and industries? Yes. Do I think we need to be responsible stewards in regards to how we can treat the environment in which we live? Yes. I just don't think stupid scams more worthy of a Nigerian 419 advance fee scam (like Carbon tax credits) are necessarily the way to go, and that there are some suggestions on how to improve the envronment that are simply wacked out and are not going through political and scientific review because it makes people "feel good" that they are helping the environment.
I happen to believe that life is much more resilient than what you are suggesting here, and that not only will "life" continue... meaning 50%+ of all current large animal & plant species living for another 1000 years or more, but that changes to the climate are even anticipated within the DNA of nearly all of these creatures. By large I mean something that can fit into your hand or larger.
As for the methane being trapped in tundra, yeah, I can see that happening. But temperatures have been warmer than today even in historic times (going back 10,000 years). Greenland has a triving and growing community before 1000 A.D., but died off because of Global cooling. It seems as though this is merely a return to that climate which existed during the time of Leif Erikson. Please explain to me what is different today than in 800 A.D. in terms of overall temperatures and ground conditions... and why a methane-induced runaway global warming didn't occur then? Were we (or our ancestors from 1000 years ago) simply lucky?
BTW, I have to agree with you that there is global warming, but I strongly disagree that there is much, if anything, that we as ordinary humans can do to either encourage or stop it from happening. I certainly don't think a massive crash restructuring of the economy and government is necessary to "prevent global warming".
This is an AC troll trying to goad me, but for the sake of argument here (and because this is so incredibly inept that it deserves are response), I'd like to point out something here:
The U.S. Army is staffed completely by people who have voluntarily joined its ranks. They have stepped up to the recruiter and signed up on their own, without any government program that "forces" them to be there.
In most other countries of the world, including much of Europe, soldiers are "drafted" into the service and are conscripts, not volunteers. This is a huge difference between how the U.S. military is organized compared to those of other countries.... and a reason why the U.S. Army does comparatively better on the battlefield: The soldiers have personal motivations above and beyond the gun pointed at them by their own government to serve.
On top of everything else, the purpose of a decent military organization is to scare the hell out of anybody who wants to challenge that country's military... in other words, peace through strength. It also is the final line of civil defense if for some reason local police can no longer maintain civil control. In theory, if you challenge the police with automatic weapons and RPGs, the police can call in the military to deal with your challenge to the government. And it has happened on a few occasions. Generally this role is performed by the National Guard units, but active duty Army units can also get involved (or more likely Marine units) if the Guardsmen are overwhelmed.
BTW, the reason why completely cutting the DoD spending wouldn't have any real impact is that I have no doubt that existing federal departments and programs could easily grow to use that same money.... and more than likely would. A national health care system, to use a recent political example, is one of those that could easily grow to completely consume current defense spending and be begging for much more.
While I don't understand the idea of why the USA is defending the west Germans from the east Germans (now that west and east are lower case and there is no border between the two parts of Germany), I generally agree with you on what you are talking about.
BTW, perhaps the most concerning to me is the re-arming of Japan to the point that if the USA were to go away, that Japan can pretty much take care of itself. Explicitly, Japan spends nearly as much on national defense as the United Kingdom, and just ahead of Germany, being the sixth largest military organization in the world. Any significant increase by Japanese defense spending would put them ahead of Russia and might even make them the #2 military power in the world. Go Japan!
Now I'm not seeing a Japanese-American conflict in the near future, but the post WWII philosophy of the USA providing the military protection over Japan to make sure they can't wage a war against the USA has disappeared a long time ago. I'm not saying that the Japanese don't have some strong concerns over national defense, being neighbors to China, Russia, and Korea (both North and South). At this point, it is more of a mutual understanding between Japan and the USA to help each other if that part of the world blows up into open warfare.
Or to put it another way, Japanese military spending compared to the USA is nearly identical to what it was like prior to World War II, even if compared to the GDP of both countries it is significantly lower.
And yes, I'm aware of the legislation in 1938 to disband the U.S. Army.
BTW, your comment about paying each terrorist $10 million is a good one. While in a perfect world, I would agree with you that sending them to Las Vegas would be both a better jobs program for helping poor people (those who work in the hospitality industries of Nevada) and have given these terrorists their 100 virgins in this lifetime instead of a future life to come, I don't see a realistic way to actually make that happen. Still, it is an excellent thought, and I wish these terrorists would have thought about it before killing their fellow muslim brothers (and a few Americans along the way).
While I am in no way trying to disparage what you are trying to say (in fact, it needed to be said), let's get one thing clear:
In 2010, Geroge W. Bush will not be President of the United States of America. Period.
The U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits him from even holding office after that... unless he wants to run for the U.S. House of Representatives again. I have no doubt that the people of Texas might even support that idea, even if Laura might not like the thought.
This isn't a question of what the results of the next election is going to be, because Bush isn't even running for office. He simply can't. Or more to the point, I support the removal of George W. Bush from office under the grounds of the 22nd Article of Amendment of the Constitution: He has served his two terms honorably and it is time for somebody else to take the flak of idiots like the one who insists that Bush get impeached. It took over two years for Clinton to get impeached...when there was even support for the idea. Two years from now, Bush won't even be President.
BTW, a part of me really does want to see Hillary run against George W. Bush. And from a political strategy viewpoint, I think it is incredible that she has organized her campaign explicitly along the lines to run against Bush when he isn't even running.