Interesting side note: American forests have been experiencing a major decline in their biodiversity over the last few decades. The cause? Deer. Because of strict limits on the hunting of deer, deer populations in the US (and no doubt Canada as well) are now so large that they are decimating forests.
There wouldn't be a problem, except that the predators that would normally keep deer in check are largely absent. No one wants cougars or packs of wolves living near their town. But without these top predators, deer populations have nothing to keep their numbers down -- except hunting.
Therefore, interestingly enough, conservation demands that we hunt more deer.
It's not unlike the paradox of the principal-of-least-harm. In order to minimize the number of animals that die on account of your diet, it's best to eat nothing but large free-range ruminants. A vegetarian diet results in enormous numbers of rodents and insects being killed by threshers and harvesting machinery.
He's not joking. As you are no doubt aware, teenagers only get themselves pregnant because of their support for bioscience. Birth control never fails accidentally -- it fails because of people's subconcious desire to see researchers discover new forms of treatment for organ damage. Even rape was only created by God to ensure that when the second millenium arrived, there would be a mechanism by which a surplus of unwanted foetuses could be ensured.
That's pretty damn good. Here in BC (Canada), "income assistance" (as it is called here) is only $510 CDN / month. Plus, you have to be apply for something like 25 jobs each week (and the ministry checks up with the people you applied with to make sure). Etcetera etcetera. Not that these are necessarily bad things -- Canada certainly has its share of welfare slackers. Welfare for the unemployed is SUPPOSED to suck; that's why it's a seperate program from disability assistance and other programs for those unable to work.
Anyway, people on income assistance usually don't have a lot of free time for hobbies like OSS projects. Between applying for jobs, doing employment programs, and doing whatever casual labour the ministry manages to throw your way, the jobless in BC are actually kept pretty busy.
What do you expect from a Gentoo user? They're inherently irrational and unscientific. If they were sensible, they'd be running a real Linux distro, or BSD. Instead they insist on recompiling everything despite the fact that a hand-tuned Gentoo install consistently underperforms Mandrake (ahem -- Mandriva) in tests.
Well, it's not like these things don't change over time. The country used to be sustained by coal from the maritimes and prairie grain; but those things have run out and become devalued, respectively. The horrendous mismanagement of BC's economy over the last decade is no doubt causing us to become one of the welfare provinces. I mean seriously -- what ever happened to fiscal conservatism? I'm pretty damn liberal, but at least fiscal conservatism is something worthy of respect; I don't know what the hell the Campbell government is, but it ain't about keeping the books balanced. For comparison, I deeply respect the Klein government's competency in balancing their budget and killing their debt, despite the fact that I deeply disagree with their social policies.
It's true -- BC, Alberta, and Ontario are the only provinces that generate more tax revenue than they consume. The rest of the country is supported by us. It's not unlike how the American south is completely dependent on subsidies from the more developed states (which is ironic given the South's hatred of the very taxes which allow them survive).
What on earth is the term unknowable supposed to mean? There is no such mathematical concept. The closest things I can think of are "not definable" and "not calculable".
Not definable: PI is clearly definable -- it is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.
Not calculable: PI is clearly calculable -- that fact that we can calculate its value to an arbitrary degree of precision is proof of that.
PI is just about as tractable a number as you could ask for. It's easy to analyze and use. If someone really wants to deal with a tough number, ask them to try and calculate the digits of Chaitin's Omega for the Lambda Calculus.
Oh, wow -- that's totally comforting. The US military is giving machine guns and assault weapons to incompetent soldiers. Malice would almost be comforting by comparison.
What continent do YOU live on? Race has virtually nothing to do with culture. Do you think black people living in North America have anything in common with people living in Africa, other than some minor cosmetic differences? The same goes for "Asians" -- there are people of Chinese descent living here in Canada whose ancestors were here before mine, and who are totally and completely assimilated.
Consider the third-party libraries and applications written in Java, and the ones written in C++.
The vast majority of software written in Java is at least shared-source, and a great deal of it is open source. C++ libraries and software, by comparison, are generally close-source. It's sometimes easy to miss that fact, steeped as we are in the world of GNU, Linux, and BSD, but keep in mind that most software is still being written for Windows operating systems and the majority of it is still closed source.
It's kind of ironic that this would be the case, given that -- as you point out -- the Sun Java API sources are only shared-source whereas the C++ standard API sources are all open. But there it is.
I don't think concealing the source is the most important point in the propietary model. The question is whether people are allowed to disassemble the object code, and whether they may do anything with the results, legally.
I don't dispute that the license is the determiner of openness -- but I think the license often follows from the practicality of keeping the source closed. It would be silly to distribute a perl script under a restrictive license, for instance. A license that hard to enforce isn't worth much, and would seem to undermine the authority of the licensor.
Black-box re-engineering can do amazing things, even in C/C++.
Yeah, but it's non-trivial. Compare that to reverse-engineering Python (in its normal non-compiled state).
The point is, really, what do you allow users to do with the code. The legal framework of copyright, and the means to enforce it, are so powerful today that you don't actually need to conceal the code to keep people from using it.
What I'm suggesting here is that the license sometimes follows from nature of the language. This is especially true outside of the US, where copyright law isn't held in godlike reverence by those in power. Sun could have chosen to keep the Java SDK sources completely hidden, but the open nature of Java encouraged them to leave the sources visible, albeit legally constrained. Granted that's a little different from Borland's magnamity here, but it's still better than what you get from some of the more notable C++ ide purveyors.
Well, I'd be a fool to discount the language's "personality" -- otherwise, there'd probably be enormous ADA and Eiffel communities. Perfectly good languages that just didn't have the right flavour to build up the kind of super-following that languages like Python enjoy and benefit so tremendously from.
I think you see this more with some languages than others. Interpreted and VM languages, like Java, Perl, and Python, have a tendency to be extremely open. I believe this stems at least partly from the difficulty of concealing the sources of such languages -- even when compiled to a byte code of some kind, applications written in them still tend to be quite easy to disassemble. Compare that to C++, which is difficult to disassemble; it's much easier to conceal source.
As a result, languages like Perl, Python, and Java have a strong tradition of OSS licensing, and C/C++ less so.
That's just my impression of the industry though from my own interaction with the Python, C++, and Java communities; don't take this as some attempt to be the moses of language-politics.:)
People who have been discriminated against are often become extremely aggressive discriminators themselves. Just look at ultraradical feminists, or the way some homosexuals actively persecute bisexuals. Look at the enormous amount of hatred and intolerance that some black subcultures possess. Look at how fast the early Christians went from being Rome's whipping boys to being the oppressors of the pagans.
This scenario plays out over and over again. Humans are fundamentally hateful and intolerant. Being gay, female, transexual, a member of a racial, cultural, or religious minority, or whatever doesn't matter -- the hate is still there. Minorities are just as monstrous as anyone else, often more so because intolerance is all they've known of life.
Blaming all religious people for the actions of a hateful minority is as silly as... say... blaming all atheists for the actions of the Nazi party, or blaming all conservatives for the actions of the Bush government.
Generalizing about a group from the actions of its angriest and most vitriolic members is profoundly intolerant. I'd expect a homosexual to know better, you fucking bigot.
Well, let's just say that governments excel at a lot of things, many of them of questionable virtue. But monopoly-busting is one of the good things that governments occasionally rouse themselves from their corrupt stupour for long enough to do.
Because the market is incapable of sorting out monopolies/oligopolies, cartels, and the other techniques used by immoral businesses to gouge customers.
You could easily say the same thing about Free software users. And yet look at the staggering number of excellent Free/OSS applications and operating systems.
Don't yanks get exactly the same benefit from their Congress, and then the same benefit again from their Senate (our Senate isn't even elected, it's fucking appointed)? The president is essentially a figurehead. It's Congress and the Senate that wield the real power in the states if I'm not mistaken.
So what exactly were you saying? I suppose you were genuinely just pointing out that there are other nations with crappy electoral systems -- a fact which you KNOW everyone on Slashdot is already aware of? You were just looking for some commiseration about American citizens' lack of any real democratic representation?
Slashdot Mirror
There wouldn't be a problem, except that the predators that would normally keep deer in check are largely absent. No one wants cougars or packs of wolves living near their town. But without these top predators, deer populations have nothing to keep their numbers down -- except hunting.
Therefore, interestingly enough, conservation demands that we hunt more deer.
It's not unlike the paradox of the principal-of-least-harm. In order to minimize the number of animals that die on account of your diet, it's best to eat nothing but large free-range ruminants. A vegetarian diet results in enormous numbers of rodents and insects being killed by threshers and harvesting machinery.
I guess I'm a little off-topic now...
Seriously man, get with the program.
Anyway, people on income assistance usually don't have a lot of free time for hobbies like OSS projects. Between applying for jobs, doing employment programs, and doing whatever casual labour the ministry manages to throw your way, the jobless in BC are actually kept pretty busy.
What do you expect from a Gentoo user? They're inherently irrational and unscientific. If they were sensible, they'd be running a real Linux distro, or BSD. Instead they insist on recompiling everything despite the fact that a hand-tuned Gentoo install consistently underperforms Mandrake (ahem -- Mandriva) in tests.
Well, it's not like these things don't change over time. The country used to be sustained by coal from the maritimes and prairie grain; but those things have run out and become devalued, respectively. The horrendous mismanagement of BC's economy over the last decade is no doubt causing us to become one of the welfare provinces. I mean seriously -- what ever happened to fiscal conservatism? I'm pretty damn liberal, but at least fiscal conservatism is something worthy of respect; I don't know what the hell the Campbell government is, but it ain't about keeping the books balanced. For comparison, I deeply respect the Klein government's competency in balancing their budget and killing their debt, despite the fact that I deeply disagree with their social policies.
It's true -- BC, Alberta, and Ontario are the only provinces that generate more tax revenue than they consume. The rest of the country is supported by us. It's not unlike how the American south is completely dependent on subsidies from the more developed states (which is ironic given the South's hatred of the very taxes which allow them survive).
Not definable: PI is clearly definable -- it is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.
Not calculable: PI is clearly calculable -- that fact that we can calculate its value to an arbitrary degree of precision is proof of that.
PI is just about as tractable a number as you could ask for. It's easy to analyze and use. If someone really wants to deal with a tough number, ask them to try and calculate the digits of Chaitin's Omega for the Lambda Calculus.
Oh, wow -- that's totally comforting. The US military is giving machine guns and assault weapons to incompetent soldiers. Malice would almost be comforting by comparison.
Stop trying to justify racism.
My hat goes off to you -- your cynicism is awe inspiring.
The vast majority of software written in Java is at least shared-source, and a great deal of it is open source. C++ libraries and software, by comparison, are generally close-source. It's sometimes easy to miss that fact, steeped as we are in the world of GNU, Linux, and BSD, but keep in mind that most software is still being written for Windows operating systems and the majority of it is still closed source.
It's kind of ironic that this would be the case, given that -- as you point out -- the Sun Java API sources are only shared-source whereas the C++ standard API sources are all open. But there it is.
Well, I'd be a fool to discount the language's "personality" -- otherwise, there'd probably be enormous ADA and Eiffel communities. Perfectly good languages that just didn't have the right flavour to build up the kind of super-following that languages like Python enjoy and benefit so tremendously from.
As a result, languages like Perl, Python, and Java have a strong tradition of OSS licensing, and C/C++ less so.
That's just my impression of the industry though from my own interaction with the Python, C++, and Java communities; don't take this as some attempt to be the moses of language-politics. :)
Keep fighting the good fight, man.
There's also extortion, as in "if we're not kept happy, we may need to move our office to Mexico/India/Wherever".
This scenario plays out over and over again. Humans are fundamentally hateful and intolerant. Being gay, female, transexual, a member of a racial, cultural, or religious minority, or whatever doesn't matter -- the hate is still there. Minorities are just as monstrous as anyone else, often more so because intolerance is all they've known of life.
Generalizing about a group from the actions of its angriest and most vitriolic members is profoundly intolerant. I'd expect a homosexual to know better, you fucking bigot.
It's also the same consumer market that legalised same-sex marriage in several states and a number of nations.
Well, let's just say that governments excel at a lot of things, many of them of questionable virtue. But monopoly-busting is one of the good things that governments occasionally rouse themselves from their corrupt stupour for long enough to do.
Because the market is incapable of sorting out monopolies/oligopolies, cartels, and the other techniques used by immoral businesses to gouge customers.
Thanks for the "insight" though.
Don't yanks get exactly the same benefit from their Congress, and then the same benefit again from their Senate (our Senate isn't even elected, it's fucking appointed)? The president is essentially a figurehead. It's Congress and the Senate that wield the real power in the states if I'm not mistaken.
You really shouldn't get so upset over a literary allusion. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
So what exactly were you saying? I suppose you were genuinely just pointing out that there are other nations with crappy electoral systems -- a fact which you KNOW everyone on Slashdot is already aware of? You were just looking for some commiseration about American citizens' lack of any real democratic representation?