So, let's say your grandmother's pension plan is invested in a mutual fund that owns stock in a "death row" company. You think she should be liable? Come on.
Absolutely!
The point being that your grandmother would not find that kind of risk acceptable and would very quickly pull any and all money from any such business. Or even pay money to dump stock (selling stock at a negative price anybody???)
In all seriousness, investing in any business is a very risky proposition, and the role of a publically traded stock corporation only help to insulate average investors from those problems.
Damn, I wish I had a couple of moderation points right now. This should be modded up, if for no other reason to draw attention to the argument against the expressive nature of software.
I had a really good friend that made the following comment:
"A really good mathamatician can appreciate good art, but a really good artist can't appreciate good mathamatics"
I find this statement sad, but true. In some ways what needs to happen is an effort to let people know about good quality code.
Donald Knuth does indeed write good software, although some of the better code that I've de-compiled has been written by Steven Wozniak, and is one of the reasons why I am a software developer today. How many people do you know that have been able to "hand-assemble" a software development environment? And I'm talking about looking the opcodes up in a table yourself and trying to remember what order the operands go with the opcodes.
Although at the moment it looks like both China and the US are going to be headed for some kind of economic mussle-flexing (like the US Congress revoking MFN status or even setting up a boycott) there is some substantial precedence in the US for going to war under these conditions.
In particular, the Spanish-American War was started by "the sinking of the USS Maine", and then whipped up by the US news media, particularly William Randolph Hearst and the newspapers he owned. Indeed, the differences between a US battleship sitting in a foriegn port and a military airplane flying close to a "hostile" country are very similiar.
One difference between the two is that the people of the United States are not really trying to get a major war started, even though I can see US-China relations potentially going back to policies similar to what they were like before President Nixon. It does concern me, however, that the Chinese government is stiring up support of its own people, to the point that war may be the only option. And most American's won't sit idle and tolerate actions by the Chinese Army like what happened to both Russia and Vietnam, where China and those respective countries bumped up against each other and had a few thousand casualties before they settled their differences.
The economic impact is very real, and right now the company I work for is looking for alternative supplies for parts currently made in China.
There are several source for "global warming" that don't even include any influence from mankind or "advanced industrial societies". Among these include:
Increases in solar radiation - that's right, the sun is producing more energy, more heat, therefore the planet is heating up too. Look at increases in the sunspot cycle, which has been well documented for more than a half a millenium.
Increase in volcanism - More volcanoes are blowing up and spewing massive quanities of greenhouse gasses at a rate significantely higher than in the past. Admittedly the records are not quite as accurate for this, but there does seem to be a "recent" increase in volcanic activity throughout the Earth. Volcanic activity was much less in the 19th and 18th Centuries, and there are historical records to back this up.
Deep Ocean currents - This is simply an unknown factor. The first substantive ocean current cycle that has been documented is the El Nino, La Nina (sorry about the lack of enya... I got an english keyboard here). There are several other oceanic cycles that interact in a very complex manner that are still not fully understood.
Polar Precession - The effects of precession are still being debated, and it is clear that a different orientation of the poles can change climate behavior.... but again you find many schools of thought over what it does and how much influence it really has
One thing to note about all of these items: There is practically nothing that an industrial society could possibly do to even affect any of these things from occuring.... even with a Manhattan Project style concentrated effort to even try.
Furthermore, there are strong indications that at least some of the meterological data has been manipulated to some extent to "promote" a radical change of public policy to change global warming, when in fact not all of the facts are in.
The only "substantive" climate data that I've seen that would suggest there is some sort of impact on the global climate by the current global civilization is from the ice core samples from Greenland, which can document air pollution levels in Greenland for more than 1000 years. I would like to point out that Pittsburg Pennsylvania used to have air pollution so thick that you couldn't see more than a block (and that was in the 1890's) There are some notable improvements in many industrial centers of production... but that is for another argument at another time.
To suggest that the jury has made its verdict regarding global warming is really not seeing the whole picture.
Actually, one of the biggest problems regarding a constitutional convention is that there is no limiting language.
The last time the USA held a constitutional convention, they were told to modify the current constitution (or "Articles of Confederation") and instead replaced the entire structure of government. All suggestions that a "limited" convention could be held that would discuss a single subject matter, or that the scope of such a convention could be contained has been suggested as faulty. All that would keep any new government that came from such a convention is if the existing government wouldn't acknowledge the legitimacy of the new one.
Essentially, it would be a mess, and cause some real confusion (as if the mess in Florida wasn't enough).
For an example of a large employee-owned company, check out:
HyVee, a large midwestern grocery store chain. Although it is run in a more authoritaian manner, all of the employees are actual owners of the chain (even part-timer baggers and shelf stockers), with shareholder rights and all of the other usual privleges. As can be expected, managers are employees who have been around awhile (since the number of shares is proportional to the length of employement). Decisions regarding what items the chain will be selling is made up of a committee of managers from several stores. If a manager is incompotent or rather unpopular, there is a very real danger of having the manager fired simply because the shareholders (= the employees) don't want him to be there.
Some side benefits are that the stores tend to not be unionized (even in strong labor union areas of the midwest--- where grocery stores tend to have a lot of union workers), have relatively low turnover of employees, and a great deal of internal promotion rather than outside hiring.
This really isn't a problem. If somebody wants to set up a server farm with 10,000 machines, each requesting a certain document, then you are free to do that... even if you distribute them across the world.
With Freenet, it isn't a problem because you are then saying that all the nodes have a specified piece of information, and it is all done on your dime anyway, so who is hurting? All that really happens is if I decide to access that data as well along the line, the likelyhood of finding a node with the data is going to be pretty high. Indeed, in such a scheme it still wouldn't be a problem even to the people running Freenet, because you've just added 10,000 nodes to Freenet and at least some of the server space will still be available on those nodes to store stuff that belongs to other Freenet users. It would be a win-win situation.
As far as making a bot to keep requesting a piece of information, all that it would affect is your local node, so it would at least allow others to grab it off of your node if it somehow became a piece of "popular" data. That sounds like a very good piece of software you should write... so please submit it!
For those interested in a genuine GPL'd project to provide an IDE for a Pascal compiler, check out The Lazarus Project.
One of the reasons we are doing this is because Borland is intending to make Kylix a closed-source compiler and IDE. This is also being done as a cross-platform project (supporting both Windows and Linux through the GTK).
For my $0.02, I think this is mainly a lot of buzz words and steam to create the impression that they are GPL-friendly. There are some Borland-sponsored projects, such as the JEDI project which incorporate quite a bit of GPL'd code.
I think that Kylix will be a fantastic tool for people who want to implement a Linux-based application platform with closed-source software (using Linux as the OS... instead of MS-Windows or something else). This should be encouraged in the sense that it does promote the use of Linux as a general platform and will get Linux into "the real world(tm)". For the GNU/Linux purist, however, Kylix will never be GPL'd or free as in speech (such as an RMS-inspired completely free computer system without any closed-source software whatsoever), except as a piece of abandonware from the ruins of Borland. This won't happen soon, if ever.
I would agree that you shouldn't put something "experimental" in a production situation where people's lives are on the line. I also wouldn't put latest x.0 version of Red Hat, (choose your own distro or OS here) to operate a heart monitoring device in a hospital either.
(As a side note: It makes me really cringe when I see monitoring equipment in a hospital running in MS-Windows.... but I digress here)
This isn't to say that you could extensively test a system that would be very robust that you wouldn't mind putting your grandmother's life on the line, but that would take some strong testing before I would consider it ready.
On the same level or viewpoint, I think it would be possible to put together a volunteer group that would be working with "open" designs on components, that when fully assembled could become a rocket capable of human spaceflight.
What would this mean? Technology used to build something like this could also be transfered to other projects as well, and a unique opportunity to allow people to participate in "reaching the stars"
One of the problems with putting together something like that would mean that people who are not normally used to working in an open development group (like mechanical, aeronautical, and chemical engineers) would also have to be involved in order to put something like this together. That and a standardizing process to allow different components to come together, so if one component doesn't quite work that another can be relativly easily put in its place. Plus you would have to have somebody with one huge ego and a lot of free time (like Linus with Linux or RMS with GNU) who could organize something like this.
Impossible? No. Easy to accomplish? Far from it.
Right now non-governmental rocketry is at about the stage of the Home-brew computer club/Altair/Apple ][/TRS-80/Atari stage of development (to use an analogy with the computer industry). The very first practical commercial launches are finally getting off of the ground, but there is a long way to go.
Keep in mind that the editor of the Open Directory project are for the most part volunteers. If a site hasn't been added to a category, there may be a good reason (such as the ODP definition of SPAM... a little different from the rest of the computer world, which means somebody which is trying to get their site into about a hunderd categories or so. ODP guidelines suggest that a particular site only be listed once or twice, and that should only be the top-level of the web site as well unless it really does fit into multiple categories on lower levels. This is what the editors are supposed to do anyway).
There are some things you can do to get listed in the ODP.
Contact the editors of the category. If after a resonable length of time (about a week) you don't get a reply, contact the next higher level of editors. All editors of a higher-level category can take care of the lower levels, but usually try to leave that to the more specific category editors.
Be polite. Because they are volunteers, they don't have to put up with abuse, and if enough people are chastizing them, they may simply give up even editing a category.
Become an editor yourself. If it a rather obscure category, even if there are some other editors already listed, you will probabally get the category. This isn't always an option, but it can be quite rewarding. The people involved with ODP will be justifibly annoyed if you try to add your site and make it the cool site of the category, but they have ways of dealing with that as well. Adding your own site to the category isn't by itself against any guidelines.
Adding to some the other search sites or indexes will justifibly be easier, simply because they are all totally automated. Keep in mind just what the Open Directory Project is about: Allowing people to edit what is cool and appropriate for a particular topic. I've seen some very impressive work in the ODP, and will still continue to support it in the future.
What is truly sad is that the reactors at Chernobyl are still being used in the Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, they can't really afford to shut down the reactors that didn't go through the melt-down. I've seen documentaries of the place, and it is kinda spooky to see people taking trains to the reactor to work, and people deliberately trying to avoid the "hot spots" that are still there.
I did hear some talk of international help to shut it down, and possibly build a more modern nuclear plant (western style) to replace it, but I havn't heard anything since then.
What I'm trying to say is that your analogy is flawed, and yes, people are running the Chernobyl reactos for nostalgic reasons as well. Maybe we should talk about Three-mile Island... oh wait, that's still there as well. However, I don't think it is in current operation.
If you want to get a good glimpse at the earlier days of computer "hacking", this is a good place to start. I especially like the "hack" to open a Master combination lock. I hope this helps a little.
If a friend gets a copy of the AOL modem software as an unsolisited bulk mail distribution, that friend has a perfectly valid reason to hand that same software to somebody else so they can install it on another computer.
The point of this is NOT about copyright, because the software being used by the "hacker" community is licensed under the GPL. They have a license to distribute the software if they care to. Indeed copyright law freely permits people who have a license to distribute software to make as many copies as that license allows (which is unlimited with GPL). Digital Convergence has produced a product, and as long as you don't manufacture new identical copies of the hardware, then I can't see how you are in any way violating copyright.
The DCMA, on the other hand, has a very questionable principle that still has to be tested for constitutional validity that the mere act of reverse engineering something to see how it works is illegal. This is entirely the same principle that the deCSS software is going through the courts right now, and if the MPAA, DVD-CCA, and the DVD Fourm are allowed to set a precident, then products like the:CueCat are going to be crammed down people's throats.
For a lighter side of reverse engineering, look at The Red Green Show, which usually includes a segment on how Red Green (the name of the fictional host) hacks at a car or other household appliance (with a chain saw/hack saw/tin snips, ect.) to make a useful product out of it. The show has been on PBS for a number of years, but it appears as though CBS has picked it up for the fall (or for the folks in Canada, I think it is being broadcast by CBC.... I know that it is a Canadian import). It is too bad that the news media doesn't have this view of hackers instead of the 16 year old wannabe that breaks into the Pentagon computers and starts a nuclear war.
With the Stanley Miller experiment, he was trying to simulate the assumed starting conditions for life on the Earth, and was using a sparking electrode to act as an energy source.
Keep in mind that the following conditions are required for "life":
An energy gradient (i.e. "an organized", dense energy source near an "energy sink" so living things can grab that energy and use it)
The ability to reproduce (share traits with the next "generation")
Responds to stimulus
In addition to this, in order to be a "carbon-based" life form, using DNA for storage of genetic material, the only other items you need are:
Water
Carbon
Nitrogen (Can be ammonia or NH3)
Everything else can be manipulated or created with basic protiens around these items to create a DNA based life form. On the Earth, living things have been found in such inhospitable places as the bottom of a gyser, Antartica, Marianas Trench, thermal vents, Surveyor 4 (a lunar probe recovered by Apollo 14) etc.
It is precisely because of some of the harsh environments that living things have been found (even from the moon, although it was clearly of Earth origin) that make people suspect that life should be fairly easy to find on Europa. Martian life may already be there, but perhaps brought there courtesy of the governments of the USSR (pre-breakup) and the United States.
BTW, there is an office at NASA that is responsible for certifying space probes that go to other worlds. Places like Venus and the Moon are given a blank check, where as Europa and Mars are given "clean room" treatment. I can't find the division right off from the NASA web site (I looked) but I do know that it exists.
Although you can say that everything orbits the Earth from a certain perspective, there is a small problem with this mathamatical model:
The Sun is so much more massive than the Earth (about 99% of the mass of the entire solar system... including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) that you need to keep track of the gravitational effects of all of the other planets at the same time.
With a heilocentric viewpoint you can simplify the calculations (at least on an initial basis) to only take into account the mass of the sun. In fact, you don't even have to take into account any planetary body when you are calculating rough orbits. Only when you are trying to determine the possibility of other objects (such as what was used to discover Neptune... and erronously used to discover Pluto) is the mass of the other planets even used. And you have to use many significant digits in your calculations for this to be even remotely useful.
None the less, this is a valid viewpoint to suggest that the Sun and everything else in the universe orbits the Earth.
Since no alien race has contacted us yet, they're probably all less advanced than we are.
And who says we are already in contact with beings from other worlds.
What about
Area 51 (Groom Lake AFB, Nevada)
Something like Stargate (GO SGC!)
Roswell, New Mexico
Heaven's Gate
UFO's (in general)
I'm not saying that any of these are anything but a ficticous story, but it still is an alternative to saying that we are have never been contacted by "aliens". Of course you need to believe that the US government is capable of a "grand conspiracy".
There are definitely some problems with people in electronic media that want to "scoop" their competition. News gathering has become increasingly competitive, and with the explosion of web-page news sources there is even more competition.
The result of all of this activity is that news organizations tend to publish stuff even before the report can verify the facts... and sometimes get it wrong. In earlier times the time pressure was still there, but there were a lot of really good editors who would filter out crap so it wouldn't get published. It also took quite a bit longer to become a major reporter, so you would have to prove yourself and develop the skills to know what is pure Bulls*** and what is a legitimate rumor. Now days anybody with an e-mail address can throw up a web page, and call it professional journalism.
With this situation: I will blame C-Net. Their editors should have done a much better job of checking up on this story... by calling up Netscape or at least e-mailing some of the people directly in the newsgroups that posted. It wouldn't be that hard to verify the information before they posted the article. At least with a news fourm like/. the readers will give a poster of lousy stories hell when they post BS like this.
Until recently, the Postmaster General was a cabinet level officer who reported directly to the President of the United States. There were some congressmen who got the brilliant idea to try and convert this bloated governement agency into a for profit company (so they wouldn't have to be pouring piles of money to subsidize it).
For example, things they used to do (at least in rural early 20th Century America):
Process Passports (they still do... sort of)
Enlist in the military
Posting of "official" documents like new law, forclosures, bankruptcies, ect.
Savings accounts (yes, like a bank)
Foriegn currency exchange
The fact was, the local postmaster was a federal officer who could act in behalf of the government, and usually did when nobody else was available in small towns. Yes, in big cities that wasn't always the case, but it has been mainly since WWII that most Americans live in large cities or suburbia.
Even now the USPS still has much of this authority. The budget of the USPS is still a part of the annual federal budget, and every postmaster has to be approved by an act of congress. (Yeah, their names usually get read off in empty chambers, together with the names of all the graduates from the military academies and ROTC programs when they get comissioned officers in the military, but it still takes a congressional vote.)
At least it makes a little bit of sense that this agency delivers mail, but they are still federal employees. Sometimes the other government departments are much more messed up with overlapping authorities that you can't figure out what is really going on.
Admittedly, there are many alternatives to DVD technology, but they will take some time to get going.
The Video CD was an interesting technology, and is still currently a cheap alternative to somebody who wants to put video content together for a "set-top" box, but not pay the huge fees to author DVD titles.
There are also other nacient technologies which will eventually replace DVD, but it will be the better part of a decade before they become as solid as DVD.
What really makes me upset is that the DVD Fourm had (and to a small extent still has, although the clock is ticking) the opportunity to establish a universal video data format, and create a "consumer" multi-media computer platform that could be operated by your grandmother. Instead, the DVD format will disappear in a few years when the next generation of high data density devices appear. Efforts on projects like MPEG-4 will also obsolete DVD-Video as a format, which can be only described as a specification comittee gone mad at best. This is too bad, because it held so much promise.
If you want to find the official web site for the Corinthians soccer team check the link out. (Unfortunately, bable fish is bombing out right now with this page.) What is really interesting, contrary to the posting, is that the name "Corinthians" is used by the team itself. They are also using currently corinthians.com.br
An important point that should be made, is that if somebody in the US were using the URL of www.dodgers.com, there wouldn't be any doubt what would be at that site. In the case of the Corinthians soccer team, it is one of the big sports franchises in Brazil, and for somebody living there they clearly understand why there is a dispute.
The Lazarus IDE it in pretty good shape, with quite a few developers working on the code (and I suspect that this article will help attract qutie a few other people as well).
One of the things that we are in desperate need of is a good mirror of the Lazarus site. The main server site is pretty good... if it is up. With Free Pascal being slashdotted right now I'm sure that the Lazarus site has died if for no other reason than the total number of people who are logged on. Even the CVS server for Free Pascal has been slashdotted. If you can get onto the web site, there are some screen captures posted of some of the user interface, as it is currently developed.
If you get on the CVS server for Free Pascal (in a couple of days after this traffic has died down a little bit) you can get the latest source code for Lazarus from the lazarus subdirectory of the cvs tree. I also got a couple of binaries I've compiled for Windows '98 that look pretty good.
Lazarus is still in fundimental development right now with core visual components being developed (like the TForm and how we are going to store the equivalent of a dfm file is still up to debate in the mailing list).
You can currently create apps using the command-line compiler and lazarus components, and the ability to drag and drop components onto a form is almost ready. As Lazarus is heavily dependent on GTK, development in the Windows environment is going to be strongly linked to the GTK development for Windows. In terms of Linux functionality, there doesn't seem to be any major problems. Just a lot of spit and polish.
On the whole, this is a pretty good environment and in roughly a year or so I think you will see Lazarus take off and really do some neat things. They seem to have picked up the pieces of the old Medigo project rather well, and the fact that there is even a working protype and mock-up of the IDE interface successfully running should be considered a good sign. If you know Pascal or want to see a strong GPL'd GUI development system, stay persistant and try to get connected with Lazarus.
There are also some strong connections between the Free Pascal developers and the Lazarus developers (with some people working on both), so if you keep a book mark on the Free Pascal site you should be able to stay in touch with Lazarus as well.
The truth is, there hasn't been a real 'revolution' in computers since 1947. All we've done with them since then is make them smaller, faster, and paint them in prettier colors.
There have been some remarkable advances in computing technology over the past 50 years. For Instance:
Nerual Networks
Transputers
Quantum Computing
Multi-processor clusters (Beowolf, ect.)
Networked CPUs
Timeshare systems
Admittedly, not all of these are as equally significant, but they do represent some attempts to go beyond the Von Neumann archetechture which computing has followed since the introduction of ENIAC.
One of the things that has been lost in this process is the ability to make decent analog computers. In the first half of the 20th Century, almost all of the routine calculations were done using these instruments, epitomised with perhaps the most useful: The Sliderule. Although for the most part they lack the precision needed for some of today's applications, you can get some calculations performed with a well-designed analog computer much faster than you can with a 1 GHz CPU. It just takes a good mechanical engineer and machinist rather than an electrical engineer.
Although not really a part of this list, the introduction of a personal computer allowed computing technology to be spread to the point that an average person could sit down with the technology and try to use it.
Probabally the number one idea to keep in mind about computers was missed by the author of this article: Electronic computers are a general purpose machine
You can take a CPU (putting this broadly... I'm talking right now about a "black box" that holds a processor, disks, network interface cards, I/O ports, ect. that you don't care where it sits) and by using the very same box you can have it perform all kinds of various functions. For example:
operate the engine of your car
monitor usage of gasoline at a gas station, and run a cash register
build an automobile from the ground up, controlling robots in a factory
act as an interactive toy for toddlers
act as a sports medium to play games for older folks (like most/. readers)
respond as a really beefed up typewriter that even helps proofread your content
monitor your house for security/fire protection
At this point I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it seems like he totally misses this point. As computing technology changes, through evolutionalary not revolutionary processes, will there be any of the changes that he is discussing. The revolution, if any, will be with some of the alternative computing techniques that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, where you will be able to develop machines that can do something that nobody even expected.
Of course coming up with a new computing model is about as difficult as coming up with a new universal physical theory, like Celestial Mechanics (Newton) or Relativity (Einstein). I seriously down the author is in the caliber of creativity as either of these two, or even Babbage, Turing, or Von Neumann. (add your own short list of computing pioneers if you like)
Whenever I read an article like David Gelernter's piece I also want to shout "Show me the interface!" Having done programming for almost two full decades now, I have plenty of experience trying to come up with a program, just to have an "end user" play with it for a few minutes and get frustrated because it isn't doing exactly what "they" want. Usually I just scribble down a few notes and try to refine the interface, but sometimes I have to throw in the towel and try to start over with a different approach.
The GPL has been hammered over and over again, and it seems to be doing its job of encouraging people to share their source code in an attempt to give back to the community what you have recieved.
As a professional software developer, I have been the beneficiary of quite a bit of software programming gems which have been given out as a matter of public domain. I have even taken these subroutines and incorporated them into some of the software that I've written for my employer. Unfortunately, by the nature of my contracts I can't release this software even if I wanted to (sense it is a work-for-hire... copyright issues and stuff). I've been careful regarding the GPL, and my immediate supervisor is actually looking forward to releasing updates to some GPL'd software under the GPL, especially as we are moving toward using Linux as one of our major platforms.
The point that I'm trying to make is that you can always try to get around any restriction if you really wanted to. Just look at the US Tax Code and see how some of the wealthiest Americans pay less, sometimes in absolute numbers, than many people making less money. They just hire a good CPA to find the loopholes to get out of the taxes. The GPL is no different, and if a company wants to use GPL'd routines and products, there is always going to be a way to get around the restrictions, even if they are upheld in court.
Probabally the most important thing to keep in mind with the GPL is to keep it up to date with current technology and changes in the computer industry. This article mentioned distributed software applications (where software runs on multiple machines... and I'm not just talking Seti@Home either), hacked interfaces (such as the Photoshop example), and stuff like Java or Flash applets where you run something once and then throw it away when you are done. The trick here is for the developer of the software to decide just how they want people to use it. What happens with quantum computers come along? Can you GPL a quantum machine? How? What about a neural network design?
The GPL needs to be updated from time to time, and the legal profession has long been slow to react to changes in technology. As long as the GPL stays in the hands of the technology developers (working, of course with lawyers.. but I degress) I don't see that this will be much of a problem.
Yes, there definitely is a place for innovation in a larger corporate laboratory. Just look at Thomas Edison (who practically invented the concept of a corporate research laboratory), the old Bell Labs, and even some of the stuff comming from IBM. One consistant theme of all of these companies is that the projects they are involved with require a large amount of capital to even get the projects off of the ground (which was the original idea of a corporation in the first place).
Doing something completely original out of your garage or basement workshop requires a little bit of innovation. In fact, because you don't have access to a muti-million dollar budget it tends to sharpen your mind a little and try new approaches by necessity. If you are a little lucky you can take that garage idea and turn it into the next Microsoft or Apple Computer (both of which were very small companies that grew based on unique idea fostered with a decided lack of capital).
I guess I'm trying to say that the kinds of project and ideas that come from different development environments are just simply different. And they meet the needs of a different group of people. Free software is more a product of the garage workshop mentality (although with some groups like the Linux distro companies this is beginning to change).
Slashdot Mirror
So, let's say your grandmother's pension plan is invested in a mutual fund that owns stock in a "death row" company. You think she should be liable? Come on.
Absolutely!
The point being that your grandmother would not find that kind of risk acceptable and would very quickly pull any and all money from any such business. Or even pay money to dump stock (selling stock at a negative price anybody???)
In all seriousness, investing in any business is a very risky proposition, and the role of a publically traded stock corporation only help to insulate average investors from those problems.
Damn, I wish I had a couple of moderation points right now. This should be modded up, if for no other reason to draw attention to the argument against the expressive nature of software.
I had a really good friend that made the following comment:
"A really good mathamatician can appreciate good art, but a really good artist can't appreciate good mathamatics"
I find this statement sad, but true. In some ways what needs to happen is an effort to let people know about good quality code.
Donald Knuth does indeed write good software, although some of the better code that I've de-compiled has been written by Steven Wozniak, and is one of the reasons why I am a software developer today. How many people do you know that have been able to "hand-assemble" a software development environment? And I'm talking about looking the opcodes up in a table yourself and trying to remember what order the operands go with the opcodes.
Although at the moment it looks like both China and the US are going to be headed for some kind of economic mussle-flexing (like the US Congress revoking MFN status or even setting up a boycott) there is some substantial precedence in the US for going to war under these conditions.
In particular, the Spanish-American War was started by "the sinking of the USS Maine", and then whipped up by the US news media, particularly William Randolph Hearst and the newspapers he owned. Indeed, the differences between a US battleship sitting in a foriegn port and a military airplane flying close to a "hostile" country are very similiar.
One difference between the two is that the people of the United States are not really trying to get a major war started, even though I can see US-China relations potentially going back to policies similar to what they were like before President Nixon. It does concern me, however, that the Chinese government is stiring up support of its own people, to the point that war may be the only option. And most American's won't sit idle and tolerate actions by the Chinese Army like what happened to both Russia and Vietnam, where China and those respective countries bumped up against each other and had a few thousand casualties before they settled their differences.
The economic impact is very real, and right now the company I work for is looking for alternative supplies for parts currently made in China.
One thing to note about all of these items: There is practically nothing that an industrial society could possibly do to even affect any of these things from occuring.... even with a Manhattan Project style concentrated effort to even try.
Furthermore, there are strong indications that at least some of the meterological data has been manipulated to some extent to "promote" a radical change of public policy to change global warming, when in fact not all of the facts are in.
The only "substantive" climate data that I've seen that would suggest there is some sort of impact on the global climate by the current global civilization is from the ice core samples from Greenland, which can document air pollution levels in Greenland for more than 1000 years. I would like to point out that Pittsburg Pennsylvania used to have air pollution so thick that you couldn't see more than a block (and that was in the 1890's) There are some notable improvements in many industrial centers of production... but that is for another argument at another time.
To suggest that the jury has made its verdict regarding global warming is really not seeing the whole picture.
Actually, one of the biggest problems regarding a constitutional convention is that there is no limiting language.
The last time the USA held a constitutional convention, they were told to modify the current constitution (or "Articles of Confederation") and instead replaced the entire structure of government. All suggestions that a "limited" convention could be held that would discuss a single subject matter, or that the scope of such a convention could be contained has been suggested as faulty. All that would keep any new government that came from such a convention is if the existing government wouldn't acknowledge the legitimacy of the new one.
Essentially, it would be a mess, and cause some real confusion (as if the mess in Florida wasn't enough).
For an example of a large employee-owned company, check out:
HyVee, a large midwestern grocery store chain. Although it is run in a more authoritaian manner, all of the employees are actual owners of the chain (even part-timer baggers and shelf stockers), with shareholder rights and all of the other usual privleges. As can be expected, managers are employees who have been around awhile (since the number of shares is proportional to the length of employement). Decisions regarding what items the chain will be selling is made up of a committee of managers from several stores. If a manager is incompotent or rather unpopular, there is a very real danger of having the manager fired simply because the shareholders (= the employees) don't want him to be there.
Some side benefits are that the stores tend to not be unionized (even in strong labor union areas of the midwest--- where grocery stores tend to have a lot of union workers), have relatively low turnover of employees, and a great deal of internal promotion rather than outside hiring.
This really isn't a problem. If somebody wants to set up a server farm with 10,000 machines, each requesting a certain document, then you are free to do that... even if you distribute them across the world.
With Freenet, it isn't a problem because you are then saying that all the nodes have a specified piece of information, and it is all done on your dime anyway, so who is hurting? All that really happens is if I decide to access that data as well along the line, the likelyhood of finding a node with the data is going to be pretty high. Indeed, in such a scheme it still wouldn't be a problem even to the people running Freenet, because you've just added 10,000 nodes to Freenet and at least some of the server space will still be available on those nodes to store stuff that belongs to other Freenet users. It would be a win-win situation.
As far as making a bot to keep requesting a piece of information, all that it would affect is your local node, so it would at least allow others to grab it off of your node if it somehow became a piece of "popular" data. That sounds like a very good piece of software you should write... so please submit it!
For those interested in a genuine GPL'd project to provide an IDE for a Pascal compiler, check out The Lazarus Project.
One of the reasons we are doing this is because Borland is intending to make Kylix a closed-source compiler and IDE. This is also being done as a cross-platform project (supporting both Windows and Linux through the GTK).
For my $0.02, I think this is mainly a lot of buzz words and steam to create the impression that they are GPL-friendly. There are some Borland-sponsored projects, such as the JEDI project which incorporate quite a bit of GPL'd code.
I think that Kylix will be a fantastic tool for people who want to implement a Linux-based application platform with closed-source software (using Linux as the OS... instead of MS-Windows or something else). This should be encouraged in the sense that it does promote the use of Linux as a general platform and will get Linux into "the real world(tm)". For the GNU/Linux purist, however, Kylix will never be GPL'd or free as in speech (such as an RMS-inspired completely free computer system without any closed-source software whatsoever), except as a piece of abandonware from the ruins of Borland. This won't happen soon, if ever.
I would agree that you shouldn't put something "experimental" in a production situation where people's lives are on the line. I also wouldn't put latest x.0 version of Red Hat, (choose your own distro or OS here) to operate a heart monitoring device in a hospital either.
(As a side note: It makes me really cringe when I see monitoring equipment in a hospital running in MS-Windows.... but I digress here)
This isn't to say that you could extensively test a system that would be very robust that you wouldn't mind putting your grandmother's life on the line, but that would take some strong testing before I would consider it ready.
On the same level or viewpoint, I think it would be possible to put together a volunteer group that would be working with "open" designs on components, that when fully assembled could become a rocket capable of human spaceflight.
What would this mean? Technology used to build something like this could also be transfered to other projects as well, and a unique opportunity to allow people to participate in "reaching the stars"
One of the problems with putting together something like that would mean that people who are not normally used to working in an open development group (like mechanical, aeronautical, and chemical engineers) would also have to be involved in order to put something like this together. That and a standardizing process to allow different components to come together, so if one component doesn't quite work that another can be relativly easily put in its place. Plus you would have to have somebody with one huge ego and a lot of free time (like Linus with Linux or RMS with GNU) who could organize something like this.
Impossible? No. Easy to accomplish? Far from it.
Right now non-governmental rocketry is at about the stage of the Home-brew computer club/Altair/Apple ][/TRS-80/Atari stage of development (to use an analogy with the computer industry). The very first practical commercial launches are finally getting off of the ground, but there is a long way to go.
There are some things you can do to get listed in the ODP.
Adding to some the other search sites or indexes will justifibly be easier, simply because they are all totally automated. Keep in mind just what the Open Directory Project is about: Allowing people to edit what is cool and appropriate for a particular topic. I've seen some very impressive work in the ODP, and will still continue to support it in the future.
What is truly sad is that the reactors at Chernobyl are still being used in the Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, they can't really afford to shut down the reactors that didn't go through the melt-down. I've seen documentaries of the place, and it is kinda spooky to see people taking trains to the reactor to work, and people deliberately trying to avoid the "hot spots" that are still there.
I did hear some talk of international help to shut it down, and possibly build a more modern nuclear plant (western style) to replace it, but I havn't heard anything since then.
What I'm trying to say is that your analogy is flawed, and yes, people are running the Chernobyl reactos for nostalgic reasons as well. Maybe we should talk about Three-mile Island... oh wait, that's still there as well. However, I don't think it is in current operation.
I will regret doing this, because I know it will get slashdotted, but a mirror of all of the issues can be found here.
If you want to get a good glimpse at the earlier days of computer "hacking", this is a good place to start. I especially like the "hack" to open a Master combination lock. I hope this helps a little.
If a friend gets a copy of the AOL modem software as an unsolisited bulk mail distribution, that friend has a perfectly valid reason to hand that same software to somebody else so they can install it on another computer.
:CueCat are going to be crammed down people's throats.
The point of this is NOT about copyright, because the software being used by the "hacker" community is licensed under the GPL. They have a license to distribute the software if they care to. Indeed copyright law freely permits people who have a license to distribute software to make as many copies as that license allows (which is unlimited with GPL). Digital Convergence has produced a product, and as long as you don't manufacture new identical copies of the hardware, then I can't see how you are in any way violating copyright.
The DCMA, on the other hand, has a very questionable principle that still has to be tested for constitutional validity that the mere act of reverse engineering something to see how it works is illegal. This is entirely the same principle that the deCSS software is going through the courts right now, and if the MPAA, DVD-CCA, and the DVD Fourm are allowed to set a precident, then products like the
For a lighter side of reverse engineering, look at The Red Green Show, which usually includes a segment on how Red Green (the name of the fictional host) hacks at a car or other household appliance (with a chain saw/hack saw/tin snips, ect.) to make a useful product out of it. The show has been on PBS for a number of years, but it appears as though CBS has picked it up for the fall (or for the folks in Canada, I think it is being broadcast by CBC.... I know that it is a Canadian import). It is too bad that the news media doesn't have this view of hackers instead of the 16 year old wannabe that breaks into the Pentagon computers and starts a nuclear war.
Keep in mind that the following conditions are required for "life":
An energy gradient (i.e. "an organized", dense energy source near an "energy sink" so living things can grab that energy and use it)
The ability to reproduce (share traits with the next "generation")
Responds to stimulus
In addition to this, in order to be a "carbon-based" life form, using DNA for storage of genetic material, the only other items you need are:
Water
Carbon
Nitrogen (Can be ammonia or NH3)
Everything else can be manipulated or created with basic protiens around these items to create a DNA based life form. On the Earth, living things have been found in such inhospitable places as the bottom of a gyser, Antartica, Marianas Trench, thermal vents, Surveyor 4 (a lunar probe recovered by Apollo 14) etc.
It is precisely because of some of the harsh environments that living things have been found (even from the moon, although it was clearly of Earth origin) that make people suspect that life should be fairly easy to find on Europa. Martian life may already be there, but perhaps brought there courtesy of the governments of the USSR (pre-breakup) and the United States.
BTW, there is an office at NASA that is responsible for certifying space probes that go to other worlds. Places like Venus and the Moon are given a blank check, where as Europa and Mars are given "clean room" treatment. I can't find the division right off from the NASA web site (I looked) but I do know that it exists.
Although you can say that everything orbits the Earth from a certain perspective, there is a small problem with this mathamatical model:
The Sun is so much more massive than the Earth (about 99% of the mass of the entire solar system... including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) that you need to keep track of the gravitational effects of all of the other planets at the same time.
With a heilocentric viewpoint you can simplify the calculations (at least on an initial basis) to only take into account the mass of the sun. In fact, you don't even have to take into account any planetary body when you are calculating rough orbits. Only when you are trying to determine the possibility of other objects (such as what was used to discover Neptune... and erronously used to discover Pluto) is the mass of the other planets even used. And you have to use many significant digits in your calculations for this to be even remotely useful.
None the less, this is a valid viewpoint to suggest that the Sun and everything else in the universe orbits the Earth.
And who says we are already in contact with beings from other worlds.
What about
I'm not saying that any of these are anything but a ficticous story, but it still is an alternative to saying that we are have never been contacted by "aliens". Of course you need to believe that the US government is capable of a "grand conspiracy".
There are definitely some problems with people in electronic media that want to "scoop" their competition. News gathering has become increasingly competitive, and with the explosion of web-page news sources there is even more competition.
/. the readers will give a poster of lousy stories hell when they post BS like this.
The result of all of this activity is that news organizations tend to publish stuff even before the report can verify the facts... and sometimes get it wrong. In earlier times the time pressure was still there, but there were a lot of really good editors who would filter out crap so it wouldn't get published. It also took quite a bit longer to become a major reporter, so you would have to prove yourself and develop the skills to know what is pure Bulls*** and what is a legitimate rumor. Now days anybody with an e-mail address can throw up a web page, and call it professional journalism.
With this situation: I will blame C-Net. Their editors should have done a much better job of checking up on this story... by calling up Netscape or at least e-mailing some of the people directly in the newsgroups that posted. It wouldn't be that hard to verify the information before they posted the article. At least with a news fourm like
For example, things they used to do (at least in rural early 20th Century America):
The fact was, the local postmaster was a federal officer who could act in behalf of the government, and usually did when nobody else was available in small towns. Yes, in big cities that wasn't always the case, but it has been mainly since WWII that most Americans live in large cities or suburbia.
Even now the USPS still has much of this authority. The budget of the USPS is still a part of the annual federal budget, and every postmaster has to be approved by an act of congress. (Yeah, their names usually get read off in empty chambers, together with the names of all the graduates from the military academies and ROTC programs when they get comissioned officers in the military, but it still takes a congressional vote.)
At least it makes a little bit of sense that this agency delivers mail, but they are still federal employees. Sometimes the other government departments are much more messed up with overlapping authorities that you can't figure out what is really going on.
Admittedly, there are many alternatives to DVD technology, but they will take some time to get going.
The Video CD was an interesting technology, and is still currently a cheap alternative to somebody who wants to put video content together for a "set-top" box, but not pay the huge fees to author DVD titles.
There are also other nacient technologies which will eventually replace DVD, but it will be the better part of a decade before they become as solid as DVD.
What really makes me upset is that the DVD Fourm had (and to a small extent still has, although the clock is ticking) the opportunity to establish a universal video data format, and create a "consumer" multi-media computer platform that could be operated by your grandmother. Instead, the DVD format will disappear in a few years when the next generation of high data density devices appear. Efforts on projects like MPEG-4 will also obsolete DVD-Video as a format, which can be only described as a specification comittee gone mad at best. This is too bad, because it held so much promise.
If you want to find the official web site for the Corinthians soccer team check the link out. (Unfortunately, bable fish is bombing out right now with this page.) What is really interesting, contrary to the posting, is that the name "Corinthians" is used by the team itself. They are also using currently corinthians.com.br
An important point that should be made, is that if somebody in the US were using the URL of www.dodgers.com, there wouldn't be any doubt what would be at that site. In the case of the Corinthians soccer team, it is one of the big sports franchises in Brazil, and for somebody living there they clearly understand why there is a dispute.
The Lazarus IDE it in pretty good shape, with quite a few developers working on the code (and I suspect that this article will help attract qutie a few other people as well).
One of the things that we are in desperate need of is a good mirror of the Lazarus site. The main server site is pretty good... if it is up. With Free Pascal being slashdotted right now I'm sure that the Lazarus site has died if for no other reason than the total number of people who are logged on. Even the CVS server for Free Pascal has been slashdotted. If you can get onto the web site, there are some screen captures posted of some of the user interface, as it is currently developed.
If you get on the CVS server for Free Pascal (in a couple of days after this traffic has died down a little bit) you can get the latest source code for Lazarus from the lazarus subdirectory of the cvs tree. I also got a couple of binaries I've compiled for Windows '98 that look pretty good.
Lazarus is still in fundimental development right now with core visual components being developed (like the TForm and how we are going to store the equivalent of a dfm file is still up to debate in the mailing list).
You can currently create apps using the command-line compiler and lazarus components, and the ability to drag and drop components onto a form is almost ready. As Lazarus is heavily dependent on GTK, development in the Windows environment is going to be strongly linked to the GTK development for Windows. In terms of Linux functionality, there doesn't seem to be any major problems. Just a lot of spit and polish.
On the whole, this is a pretty good environment and in roughly a year or so I think you will see Lazarus take off and really do some neat things. They seem to have picked up the pieces of the old Medigo project rather well, and the fact that there is even a working protype and mock-up of the IDE interface successfully running should be considered a good sign. If you know Pascal or want to see a strong GPL'd GUI development system, stay persistant and try to get connected with Lazarus.
There are also some strong connections between the Free Pascal developers and the Lazarus developers (with some people working on both), so if you keep a book mark on the Free Pascal site you should be able to stay in touch with Lazarus as well.
There have been some remarkable advances in computing technology over the past 50 years. For Instance:
Admittedly, not all of these are as equally significant, but they do represent some attempts to go beyond the Von Neumann archetechture which computing has followed since the introduction of ENIAC.
One of the things that has been lost in this process is the ability to make decent analog computers. In the first half of the 20th Century, almost all of the routine calculations were done using these instruments, epitomised with perhaps the most useful: The Sliderule. Although for the most part they lack the precision needed for some of today's applications, you can get some calculations performed with a well-designed analog computer much faster than you can with a 1 GHz CPU. It just takes a good mechanical engineer and machinist rather than an electrical engineer.
Although not really a part of this list, the introduction of a personal computer allowed computing technology to be spread to the point that an average person could sit down with the technology and try to use it.
Probabally the number one idea to keep in mind about computers was missed by the author of this article: Electronic computers are a general purpose machine
You can take a CPU (putting this broadly... I'm talking right now about a "black box" that holds a processor, disks, network interface cards, I/O ports, ect. that you don't care where it sits) and by using the very same box you can have it perform all kinds of various functions. For example:
At this point I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it seems like he totally misses this point. As computing technology changes, through evolutionalary not revolutionary processes, will there be any of the changes that he is discussing. The revolution, if any, will be with some of the alternative computing techniques that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, where you will be able to develop machines that can do something that nobody even expected.
Of course coming up with a new computing model is about as difficult as coming up with a new universal physical theory, like Celestial Mechanics (Newton) or Relativity (Einstein). I seriously down the author is in the caliber of creativity as either of these two, or even Babbage, Turing, or Von Neumann. (add your own short list of computing pioneers if you like)
Whenever I read an article like David Gelernter's piece I also want to shout "Show me the interface!" Having done programming for almost two full decades now, I have plenty of experience trying to come up with a program, just to have an "end user" play with it for a few minutes and get frustrated because it isn't doing exactly what "they" want. Usually I just scribble down a few notes and try to refine the interface, but sometimes I have to throw in the towel and try to start over with a different approach.
The GPL has been hammered over and over again, and it seems to be doing its job of encouraging people to share their source code in an attempt to give back to the community what you have recieved.
As a professional software developer, I have been the beneficiary of quite a bit of software programming gems which have been given out as a matter of public domain. I have even taken these subroutines and incorporated them into some of the software that I've written for my employer. Unfortunately, by the nature of my contracts I can't release this software even if I wanted to (sense it is a work-for-hire... copyright issues and stuff). I've been careful regarding the GPL, and my immediate supervisor is actually looking forward to releasing updates to some GPL'd software under the GPL, especially as we are moving toward using Linux as one of our major platforms.
The point that I'm trying to make is that you can always try to get around any restriction if you really wanted to. Just look at the US Tax Code and see how some of the wealthiest Americans pay less, sometimes in absolute numbers, than many people making less money. They just hire a good CPA to find the loopholes to get out of the taxes. The GPL is no different, and if a company wants to use GPL'd routines and products, there is always going to be a way to get around the restrictions, even if they are upheld in court.
Probabally the most important thing to keep in mind with the GPL is to keep it up to date with current technology and changes in the computer industry. This article mentioned distributed software applications (where software runs on multiple machines... and I'm not just talking Seti@Home either), hacked interfaces (such as the Photoshop example), and stuff like Java or Flash applets where you run something once and then throw it away when you are done. The trick here is for the developer of the software to decide just how they want people to use it. What happens with quantum computers come along? Can you GPL a quantum machine? How? What about a neural network design?
The GPL needs to be updated from time to time, and the legal profession has long been slow to react to changes in technology. As long as the GPL stays in the hands of the technology developers (working, of course with lawyers.. but I degress) I don't see that this will be much of a problem.
Yes, there definitely is a place for innovation in a larger corporate laboratory. Just look at Thomas Edison (who practically invented the concept of a corporate research laboratory), the old Bell Labs, and even some of the stuff comming from IBM. One consistant theme of all of these companies is that the projects they are involved with require a large amount of capital to even get the projects off of the ground (which was the original idea of a corporation in the first place).
Doing something completely original out of your garage or basement workshop requires a little bit of innovation. In fact, because you don't have access to a muti-million dollar budget it tends to sharpen your mind a little and try new approaches by necessity. If you are a little lucky you can take that garage idea and turn it into the next Microsoft or Apple Computer (both of which were very small companies that grew based on unique idea fostered with a decided lack of capital).
I guess I'm trying to say that the kinds of project and ideas that come from different development environments are just simply different. And they meet the needs of a different group of people. Free software is more a product of the garage workshop mentality (although with some groups like the Linux distro companies this is beginning to change).