Few (if any) Java technologies are licensed under the GPL.
I don't quite understand what place Java has in an enumeration of open source technologies not licensed under the GPL. Yes, Java isn't licensed under the GPL, but Java (meaning, Sun Java) isn't even open source. In fact, it isn't even an open standard. Java is a proprietary cross-platform language and runtime with a large user community.
All our companies go out of bussiness and we're screwed when they jack up the price.
Chip plants get built all the time; once they stop subsidizing, we'll just build new ones. We can even subsidize ourselves a little bit at that time. Overall, we still win.
It was discredited with the simple truthful statement that a neutrino interacting with matter in the Earth could potentially release more energy than RHIC could generate in it's lifetime.
No, they were almost certainly not talking about "neutrinos" but about very high energy particles hitting earth.
i.e. higher energy reactions than those generated at RHIC occur all the time, all around us; and, we're still here.
That has been suggested, but it's not clear that it's true. The situation of two particles colliding head-on in an accelerator is not at all the same as cosmic particles interacting with the earth.
Still I wouldn't worry too much about a meta-stable vacuum--I think you are more likely to get killed during your morning commute. And I'm sure that if it is metastable and we cause it to phase-change, the effect will at least be quick and painless. But we really may be embarking into new territory here.
Protectionism is a harmful and ultimately self destructive practice.
I fully agree. And that's why countries will sooner or later figure it out and stop hurting themselves.
When things started to go sour countries all over the world starting implementing these kinds of policies to "protect themselves" and international trade came to a grinding halt.
There is an easy solution to prevent that from happening: we let the South Koreans waste their money on sending us subsidized memory chips and we don't retaliate. World trade continues, and we get cheap memory. Great, isn't it?
The problem with accepting that gift of a few pennies from the South Korean taxpayers is that it comes at the expense of American workers that Micron employs. We'd rather see Hynix vaporize and let the price of DRAM go up than end up with Micron being the one that goes bankrupt.
So, if the South Korean tax payers gave us a hundred million dollars as a gift, you'd be angry, too? Because that's, effectively, what they are doing.
Sure, this gift may cause job losses at Micron, but that would be made up for by job gains elsewhere. On balance, we are still better off.
Let's just hope everybody is as stupid as the Koreans--let them waste their money. (Of course, we are similarly stupid ourselves with our farm, defense, and airline subsidies.)
Corporate welfare is self-punishing: sooner or later, the Koreans will have to give up on this, otherwise they are going to run out of money. This is really no different from any other loss leader: a way to get an industry started.
Because the South Korean government has repeatadly propped up a dying company that dumps product onto the market below cost?
You mean, like the US is doing with steel, agriculture, airlines, and defense contractors?
we can get rid of the last vestiges of this type of protectionism
"Vestige"? This isn't a "vestige", it's worse than it has ever been.
I think all nations should just drop the pretenses of "fairness" and "openness" and just assume that protectionism is a fact of life. Then, democratically elected governments can negotiate about it rationally and without all the bluster and lies, and without having the WTO interfere.
I find that far less disgusting than having media companies monopolize the public airwaves, or energy companies corrupting our government. As far as taxpayer money wasted on private projects goes, it is also far less significant.
If you still don't like it, just think of it as "foreign aid". We are quite stingy anyway when it comes to foreign aid, so a little more money going to the Russian space program through this indirect route seems pretty defensible to me.
You claim I'm wrong, then you essentially restate what I said: the Constitution was considered incomplete by a majority of people, which is why it was amended in the form of the Bill of Rights.
The fact that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not part of the original Constitution is a historical accident. Other nations put the same rights directly into their constitutions. Therefore, the existence of the Bill of Rights as a separate document does not mean that Americans have more protection or rights under the law, it just means that the process by which those protections were codified was more haphazard than elsewhere.
As for the contents of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, it is an incomplete enumeration of what is considered basic human rights by most nations these days. Far from being ahead of the rest of the world, the US has fallen behind with its Constitution and defense of human rights.
But, of course, when people like you hear "human rights", they think "international left wing conspiracy", and when they hear "US Constitution", they think "unique document guaranteeing freedoms unparalleled anywhere in the world".
(1) People/companies who are afraid that others might steal their copyrighted materials should just not put them up on the net.
(2) People/companies who are afraid that others might break the encryption on their products should simply use strong ecryption. There is no reason to outlaw the breaking of encryption because it really isn't all that hard to make encryption unbreakable. The only thing that was wrong with CSS was that the people who designed it made some serious blunders.
SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM
Well, that is predicated on the idea that SCO actually has a UNIX business to hurt. It seems to me that they don't really have much of a product anymore.
But assuming they do actually still ship their own version of UNIX enough to make them money, nmap may not make such a big difference. But if projects like Apache, gcc, and others remove SCO support, that might start hurting SCO. Of course, they'd be free to maintain their own ports and incorporate their own bug fixes, but that is going to cost.
It seems like big business will just use this as a way to stamp out or obscure dissent.
Maybe they will figure out how to use this against dissent. If they do, we can deal with it then. But we already know where not doing anything takes us.
Every blogger that makes a negative comment about the music industry will have to post RIAA propaganda on their webpage, for free.
Just a link will suffice. And if the RIAA has to hire 1000 new employees to handle all of this, all the better.
Nothing. There's nothing like Eurocrats speanding hideous quantities of time and money on something which proves useless by sheer virtue of its unenforcability.
How does that differ from Americrats sending their goons to Sweden to pursue the author of DeCSS?
International enforcement of intellectual property, computer hacking, and libel laws is a reality and it works both ways. The US depends on this sort of thing, and sends its police for around the world, much more than Europe. If the US wants other nations to help it in such matters, it has to reciprocate.
There are plenty of stupid legal tricks and intrusive laws on both sides of the Atlantic. We should learn from the mistakes on either side and try to avoid repeating them. On a grand scale, I find this European law much less problematic than US laws like the DMCA and attempts at its overseas enforcement.
Most European nations do have constitutions. The "Bill of Rights" is just a number of amendments to the US Constitution, a historical accident because the original US Constitution was deficient in a number of areas. Other nations don't have a "Bill of Rights" because the equivalent rights were part of their constitutions from the beginning.
Your ignorance is as common as it is dangerous, because it means that instead of trying to address problems with US laws and the US Constitution, you just assume that, while it is not perfect, it must be the best anybody has. Well, you are wrong: the US Constitution is getting pretty creaky and really needs some more teeth when it comes to protecting human rights and democracy in the US.
Write in your blog that you hate your Ford, and you will find yourself with 100,000 words of pro-Ford verbiage -- from 100 paid Ford shills -- that you have to post. It would become nearly impossible to have an opinion about anything.
I'd much rather post a link to "100,000 words of pro-Ford verbiage" (which is all the proposed law requires) than being sued for $10,000,000 for "product libel", which is something that can happen in the US.
It effectively gives every person and organization the power that Scientologists abuse all the time when they make an all-out assault on their critics.
Yes, and Scientologists seem to have been very effective making that assault in the oh-so-free United States of America. Seems to me that the EU proposal is something that regulates that and possibly limits it, as opposed to what happens here.
What does a right of reply have to do with not being able to sue for slander or libel?
Both are mechanisms that ensure a fairness. And it makes sense that if you put a mechanism like "right to reply" in place, you put limits on "right to sue for libel". I, for one, would welcome such a tradeoff here in the US, because libel lawsuits for big bucks have a much more chilling effect than "right to reply".
"The fact is technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them," Mr. Torvalds wrote in the e-mail message last August.
And he is completely right. That approach is standard policy at many companies. SCO probably has done the same thing. I fail to see how adopting a common corporate policy towards patents is indicative of a "disregard" for IP rights.
Imagine the chilling effect if companies can sue your for billions of dollars in damages if you say something bad about their trademark. All it might take is a single letter to scare you into taking down your entire web site. Of course, we already have that in the US.
The European proposal seems to amount to "if you are a news site (commercial or non-commercial), you have to put in a link to the person/company you write about if they ask you to". I fail to see the "chilling effect" in that. It seems to be a matter of simple journalistic ethics to do that anyway.
If we could eliminate product libel and many forms of trademark infringement lawsuits that have cropped up around web sites through such a simple requirement in the US, I think we should adopt it, too: it would seem to be a great way of ensuring that people can exercise their right to free speech without fear of being sued out of everything they own.
The phone/PDA combos are bad compromises: too big to carry everywhere, too small a screen to be useful for much of anything.
If you get a phone and PDA separately, you get more functionality and more flexibility. You can choose a tiny phone and change carriers without changing PDAs. Leave the PDA at home if you want something small. Leave the phone at home when you travel to Siberia. You still get wireless Internet access from your PDA through Bluetooth.
Apple estimates that there are over 3 million Mac OS X users today (they don't tell us how many copies they have actually shipped, or how many people update their machines from their servers). But RedHat alone ships around 1 million Linux distributions a year through retail channels, and that usually gets installed on many machines. Furthermore, many Linux "server installations" actually run client software that people access from Windows and Mac desktops. Outside the US, SuSE and Mandrake are far more important.
I think the notion that Mac OS X is "hugely" more important than Linux for end user applications is bogus; they are in the same league, and who is ahead probably depends on how you count. But, as with their "desktop supercomputer", Apple has to create the impression that they are more important than they actually are--it's a matter of survival to them because without it, they can't attract developers.
SCO isn't publishing the information because it is in their interest not to do so. MD5 checksums don't change that. If they wanted to publish bits and pieces, they could already do so under copyright laws. But they just want to pretend that this stuff is so valuable and so secret that they can't show even the smallest bits.
I think it is sufficient to have the government give explicit preference to OSS projects and keep funding OSS projects through existing channels (government grants, universities, etc.).
Trying to exact an extra tax on this and then redistribute it by some new mechanism just invites corruption. And where does Microsoft get its money from anyway? From customers. Most likely, they'd just raise their prices 10% and the SA government would pay for its own tax.
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Few (if any) Java technologies are licensed under the GPL.
I don't quite understand what place Java has in an enumeration of open source technologies not licensed under the GPL. Yes, Java isn't licensed under the GPL, but Java (meaning, Sun Java) isn't even open source. In fact, it isn't even an open standard. Java is a proprietary cross-platform language and runtime with a large user community.
All our companies go out of bussiness and we're screwed when they jack up the price.
Chip plants get built all the time; once they stop subsidizing, we'll just build new ones. We can even subsidize ourselves a little bit at that time. Overall, we still win.
It was discredited with the simple truthful statement that a neutrino interacting with matter in the Earth could potentially release more energy than RHIC could generate in it's lifetime.
No, they were almost certainly not talking about "neutrinos" but about very high energy particles hitting earth.
i.e. higher energy reactions than those generated at RHIC occur all the time, all around us; and, we're still here.
That has been suggested, but it's not clear that it's true. The situation of two particles colliding head-on in an accelerator is not at all the same as cosmic particles interacting with the earth.
Still I wouldn't worry too much about a meta-stable vacuum--I think you are more likely to get killed during your morning commute. And I'm sure that if it is metastable and we cause it to phase-change, the effect will at least be quick and painless. But we really may be embarking into new territory here.
Caffeine can trigger palpitations, increase blood pressure and disrupt sleep in sensitive people
Yeah, great stuff!
Protectionism is a harmful and ultimately self destructive practice.
I fully agree. And that's why countries will sooner or later figure it out and stop hurting themselves.
When things started to go sour countries all over the world starting implementing these kinds of policies to "protect themselves" and international trade came to a grinding halt.
There is an easy solution to prevent that from happening: we let the South Koreans waste their money on sending us subsidized memory chips and we don't retaliate. World trade continues, and we get cheap memory. Great, isn't it?
Just think if they sold DRAM chips for $1 a 512 stick and they stuck to that for years. Would you be ecstatic about that?
Yes, absolutely ecstatic. It would be great for US computer manufacturers and US consumers.
They now have a monopoly since no one can compete. Sure, they gave us cheap memory, but at what cost? We now need them and have no DRAM industry.
And we'd rebuild it within a few years; after all, new fab lines are built constantly, and the tools and software come from the US anyway.
The problem with accepting that gift of a few pennies from the South Korean taxpayers is that it comes at the expense of American workers that Micron employs. We'd rather see Hynix vaporize and let the price of DRAM go up than end up with Micron being the one that goes bankrupt.
So, if the South Korean tax payers gave us a hundred million dollars as a gift, you'd be angry, too? Because that's, effectively, what they are doing.
Sure, this gift may cause job losses at Micron, but that would be made up for by job gains elsewhere. On balance, we are still better off.
Let's just hope everybody is as stupid as the Koreans--let them waste their money. (Of course, we are similarly stupid ourselves with our farm, defense, and airline subsidies.)
Corporate welfare is self-punishing: sooner or later, the Koreans will have to give up on this, otherwise they are going to run out of money. This is really no different from any other loss leader: a way to get an industry started.
Because the South Korean government has repeatadly propped up a dying company that dumps product onto the market below cost?
You mean, like the US is doing with steel, agriculture, airlines, and defense contractors?
we can get rid of the last vestiges of this type of protectionism
"Vestige"? This isn't a "vestige", it's worse than it has ever been.
I think all nations should just drop the pretenses of "fairness" and "openness" and just assume that protectionism is a fact of life. Then, democratically elected governments can negotiate about it rationally and without all the bluster and lies, and without having the WTO interfere.
I find that far less disgusting than having media companies monopolize the public airwaves, or energy companies corrupting our government. As far as taxpayer money wasted on private projects goes, it is also far less significant.
If you still don't like it, just think of it as "foreign aid". We are quite stingy anyway when it comes to foreign aid, so a little more money going to the Russian space program through this indirect route seems pretty defensible to me.
You claim I'm wrong, then you essentially restate what I said: the Constitution was considered incomplete by a majority of people, which is why it was amended in the form of the Bill of Rights.
The fact that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not part of the original Constitution is a historical accident. Other nations put the same rights directly into their constitutions. Therefore, the existence of the Bill of Rights as a separate document does not mean that Americans have more protection or rights under the law, it just means that the process by which those protections were codified was more haphazard than elsewhere.
As for the contents of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, it is an incomplete enumeration of what is considered basic human rights by most nations these days. Far from being ahead of the rest of the world, the US has fallen behind with its Constitution and defense of human rights.
But, of course, when people like you hear "human rights", they think "international left wing conspiracy", and when they hear "US Constitution", they think "unique document guaranteeing freedoms unparalleled anywhere in the world".
Well, we still have existing copyright laws that allow copyright violations to be prosecuted.
(1) People/companies who are afraid that others might steal their copyrighted materials should just not put them up on the net.
(2) People/companies who are afraid that others might break the encryption on their products should simply use strong ecryption. There is no reason to outlaw the breaking of encryption because it really isn't all that hard to make encryption unbreakable. The only thing that was wrong with CSS was that the people who designed it made some serious blunders.
SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM
Well, that is predicated on the idea that SCO actually has a UNIX business to hurt. It seems to me that they don't really have much of a product anymore.
But assuming they do actually still ship their own version of UNIX enough to make them money, nmap may not make such a big difference. But if projects like Apache, gcc, and others remove SCO support, that might start hurting SCO. Of course, they'd be free to maintain their own ports and incorporate their own bug fixes, but that is going to cost.
It seems like big business will just use this as a way to stamp out or obscure dissent.
Maybe they will figure out how to use this against dissent. If they do, we can deal with it then. But we already know where not doing anything takes us.
Every blogger that makes a negative comment about the music industry will have to post RIAA propaganda on their webpage, for free.
Just a link will suffice. And if the RIAA has to hire 1000 new employees to handle all of this, all the better.
Nothing. There's nothing like Eurocrats speanding hideous quantities of time and money on something which proves useless by sheer virtue of its unenforcability.
How does that differ from Americrats sending their goons to Sweden to pursue the author of DeCSS?
International enforcement of intellectual property, computer hacking, and libel laws is a reality and it works both ways. The US depends on this sort of thing, and sends its police for around the world, much more than Europe. If the US wants other nations to help it in such matters, it has to reciprocate.
There are plenty of stupid legal tricks and intrusive laws on both sides of the Atlantic. We should learn from the mistakes on either side and try to avoid repeating them. On a grand scale, I find this European law much less problematic than US laws like the DMCA and attempts at its overseas enforcement.
Most European nations do have constitutions. The "Bill of Rights" is just a number of amendments to the US Constitution, a historical accident because the original US Constitution was deficient in a number of areas. Other nations don't have a "Bill of Rights" because the equivalent rights were part of their constitutions from the beginning.
Your ignorance is as common as it is dangerous, because it means that instead of trying to address problems with US laws and the US Constitution, you just assume that, while it is not perfect, it must be the best anybody has. Well, you are wrong: the US Constitution is getting pretty creaky and really needs some more teeth when it comes to protecting human rights and democracy in the US.
Write in your blog that you hate your Ford, and you will find yourself with 100,000 words of pro-Ford verbiage -- from 100 paid Ford shills -- that you have to post. It would become nearly impossible to have an opinion about anything.
I'd much rather post a link to "100,000 words of pro-Ford verbiage" (which is all the proposed law requires) than being sued for $10,000,000 for "product libel", which is something that can happen in the US.
It effectively gives every person and organization the power that Scientologists abuse all the time when they make an all-out assault on their critics.
Yes, and Scientologists seem to have been very effective making that assault in the oh-so-free United States of America. Seems to me that the EU proposal is something that regulates that and possibly limits it, as opposed to what happens here.
What does a right of reply have to do with not being able to sue for slander or libel?
Both are mechanisms that ensure a fairness. And it makes sense that if you put a mechanism like "right to reply" in place, you put limits on "right to sue for libel". I, for one, would welcome such a tradeoff here in the US, because libel lawsuits for big bucks have a much more chilling effect than "right to reply".
"The fact is technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them," Mr. Torvalds wrote in the e-mail message last August.
And he is completely right. That approach is standard policy at many companies. SCO probably has done the same thing. I fail to see how adopting a common corporate policy towards patents is indicative of a "disregard" for IP rights.
Imagine the chilling effect if companies can sue your for billions of dollars in damages if you say something bad about their trademark. All it might take is a single letter to scare you into taking down your entire web site. Of course, we already have that in the US.
The European proposal seems to amount to "if you are a news site (commercial or non-commercial), you have to put in a link to the person/company you write about if they ask you to". I fail to see the "chilling effect" in that. It seems to be a matter of simple journalistic ethics to do that anyway.
If we could eliminate product libel and many forms of trademark infringement lawsuits that have cropped up around web sites through such a simple requirement in the US, I think we should adopt it, too: it would seem to be a great way of ensuring that people can exercise their right to free speech without fear of being sued out of everything they own.
The phone/PDA combos are bad compromises: too big to carry everywhere, too small a screen to be useful for much of anything.
If you get a phone and PDA separately, you get more functionality and more flexibility. You can choose a tiny phone and change carriers without changing PDAs. Leave the PDA at home if you want something small. Leave the phone at home when you travel to Siberia. You still get wireless Internet access from your PDA through Bluetooth.
Apple estimates that there are over 3 million Mac OS X users today (they don't tell us how many copies they have actually shipped, or how many people update their machines from their servers). But RedHat alone ships around 1 million Linux distributions a year through retail channels, and that usually gets installed on many machines. Furthermore, many Linux "server installations" actually run client software that people access from Windows and Mac desktops. Outside the US, SuSE and Mandrake are far more important.
I think the notion that Mac OS X is "hugely" more important than Linux for end user applications is bogus; they are in the same league, and who is ahead probably depends on how you count. But, as with their "desktop supercomputer", Apple has to create the impression that they are more important than they actually are--it's a matter of survival to them because without it, they can't attract developers.
SCO isn't publishing the information because it is in their interest not to do so. MD5 checksums don't change that. If they wanted to publish bits and pieces, they could already do so under copyright laws. But they just want to pretend that this stuff is so valuable and so secret that they can't show even the smallest bits.
I think it is sufficient to have the government give explicit preference to OSS projects and keep funding OSS projects through existing channels (government grants, universities, etc.).
Trying to exact an extra tax on this and then redistribute it by some new mechanism just invites corruption. And where does Microsoft get its money from anyway? From customers. Most likely, they'd just raise their prices 10% and the SA government would pay for its own tax.