5. "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Great. Thanks, so you manage to put Open Source and anti-American in a sentence. That's the last thing that OSS needs: "OSS developed by terrorists". Stop splitting the world into American and anti-American;
But 5. can be true, even if you don't want it to be.
it's not that simple, and surely the number of people who sit that and go "I'm going to develop this cool software because I hate America" must be tiny. Most of them are doing it for the glory.
Maybe, but Governments (say) might want to equip themselves with OS for reasons that come down to Xenophobia.
Methinks that you don't understand capitalism: people are meant to seek lower costs, and in this case, lower costs mean that wages go to those who need the money most.
It is competition, that drives down prices, but in order for lower costs to be sought, there has to be a temporary advantage, and indeed there is a short term gain until the competition catches up. In order to sustain your cynicism, you'll need to explain why the games industry is so uncompetitive.
I suggest that you stop seeing greed as intrisically bad, but instead see poverty as bad. The result of looking at things sanely instead of through the distorting lens of class war can be rather enlightening.
If you are worried about the wages of those who do get the work, you need to look to the longer term: how are they going to get out of poverty if they don't get experience, and their country doesn't gain infrastructure?
If you think that I am a doctrinaire libertarian, I'm not, but I do think that your kind of thinking comes is in fact simple emotional indulgence masquerading as morality.
You're missing something: rights are first being taken away from the purchaser. Artist's rights are about incentives, but in truth, this right is achieved through restriction.
I'm not saying that we don't need to preserve incentives, but I am saying that we need to see that rights are not completely one-sided.
Also, you may be moving in the direction of free software, but those of us who have house payments and a reasonably nice standard of living (rather than mom's basement and Chinese noodles between bong hits) tend to like to be compensated for out work.
I can't see why BSD-style licenses (say) helps you there. At least with the GPL, you can dual-license your code.
Actually, developers perfer BSD, noisy zealots prefer the GPL.
It depends upon which developers. The GPL leaves the option of dual-licencing. I have a friend who uses the GPL for pricisely this reason.
For my software, I choose the GPL (where I have the choice) in order to maximise freedom (see my journal). Maximising freedom as an activity naturally recognises trade-offs, and the GPL is a means to achieving a freedom-maximising outcome.
So there exist both profit-centred and ideological reasons for chosing the GPL.
If you mean "ability to ensnare others", other licences are a good deal more free.
If you mean having your source available 'n' generations down the line, together with that of software that is built upon yours, the GPL is probably the most free.
The GPL yields free software, so the Free Software Foundation is eminently the correct name for a GPL-promoting organisation.
Your first three paragraphs I see as an entirely reasonable response [I'm not sure that the constitution in this regard does deliver liberty, but this is a good justification].
I'm not sure how much water the argument about fairness and justice holds when our capacity to contribute depends on the larger system which we hope to influence.
Williams' constitutional observation is interesting, and maybe the constitution is inefficient, in that it isn't designed to maximise the US population's freedom or well-being, but looking at it morally, isn't that in fact a critique of the constitution?
As an aside, I didn't mention either Medicare or Social Security, although such things might come out of a detailed analysis that focuses upon a concept of efficiency that better corresponds to people's well-being.
I'm not saying that it necessarily does, but I am saying that Williams' preceeding analysis is suggesting that votes in proportional to wealth would create a more efficient outcome, so a critique of that undrelying concept of efficiency is sufficient to address that argument. I am not claiming that the other arguments couldn't be put to justify less government.
The most basic flaw in the professor's assumptions is thinking that $1 in the hands of one individual means as much as it does for another. If you consider what different people would be willing to do to earn that dollar in the first place, this is clearly not the case.
For a wide range of possible spins, the coin never flips at all, the team proved.
In experiments, the researchers were surprised to find that it's difficult to tell from watching a coin whether it has flipped. A coin toss typically takes just half a second, with the circumference of the coin whizzing around at 3 meters per second. What's more, the coin's spin makes it wobble, often creating the illusion that the coin has flipped.
"Sometimes we had the complete impression that the coin had turned over when it really hadn't," Holmes says.
In other words, one can toss the coin in a biased way. Coin-tossing relies upon the tosser's goodwill to be fair.
well, that was particularly insulting. nothing quite like the threat of "no pussy!" to drive intelligent young programmers away from open source / free software.
1 - The rest of the world still gains from Chinese growth through greater opportunity to trade. This trade might not occur in software, but greater wealth means that the opportunities exist somewhere.
2 - GPL leverages copyright law, but it's failure is not a loss, but an absence of gain.
3 - Protectionism will fail. Having lower wealth and infrastructure, the Chinese cannot keep up with the rest of the world with a divergent software solution without clobbering the rest of their economic growth through massive redirection of resource.
The WTO exists mostly to prevent stupid ideologies and populism from corrupting the way to wealth for each country individually. Countries join so that their governments can blame the WTO when some special interest isn't indulged.
"The people who are making political decisions instead of business decisions, we're going to lose some," said Ballmer. "The people who are making business decisions based on where are the applications, what is the value, what is the lowest cost of ownership, we're not losing them. "For us, anything that becomes a political issue, nobody wins them all on merit."
Yep, its as I predicted over a year ago. Linux is the new pseudo-tech savy executive's latest buzzword. Congratulations!
Once again- non-technical people make technical decision, disaster ensues. And, in this case, if you like MS products, hillarity ensues.
What you're missing is the fact that the problems with a transition to open source need only be solved once a lot of the time: What today is a political decision will be an economic one tomorrow.
QM doesn't negate the invokation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. QM gives a mechanism (tunnelling of particles) by which entropy can still increase. Given this mechanism, the 2nd Law simply implies that this mechanism will be used.
You're sounding like a Christian, I'm afraid. "Just a theory" is a ridiculous thing to say about something as well-tested and with the predictive power of quantum mechanics. You might as well say gravity is just a theory, and hold onto everything in sight for fear of being flung into space!
That'd be the heuristic explanation I'd give that most closely corresponds to the usual computation. There are additional things to say about the fact that the guy far in the future and far away from the black hole can't see what's in the hole, so he has incomplete information about the state, so he sees a state with entropy, in fact a thermal state. (Here I'm assuming the black hole was NOT eternal, so the guy way back in the past didn't have the black hole to contend with. Apparently Hawking's original computation dealt with this case, but people subsequently watered down his explanation by assuming the black hole was there eternally, to simplify the math. This is what the guy at the talk said... I'd only seen the watered-down version!)
Hawking Radiation is an untested theory. It sure would be a shame if it turned out the Hawking Radiation didn't work.
Hawking Radiation is an outcome of a very well-tested theory: the second law of thermodynamics. Besides, this isn't the most important point.
Since the energy in and on the earth isn't sucking us in deperately hard, a small fraction of that energy concentrated to a point won't either. It will have the same pull to a single point as it would have done over the whole of a larger object with the same energy content.
The term "Black Hole" is used in the article for effect; a less misleading term would be "singularity". "Full-scaled" black holes pull as hard as they do essentially because they start off as massive stars that collapse. The original star would have pulled pretty hard on the surrounding space, and being concentrated makes it pull no harder overall. Stars disrupt each other as much as black holes disrupt stars, and Supermassive Black Holes are the extremely rare and "lucky" ones that simply accumulated enough mass to form that way.
Slashdot Mirror
The topic surely includes ballot-stuffing.
Noooo! My tin foil hat might be chipped!
It is competition, that drives down prices, but in order for lower costs to be sought, there has to be a temporary advantage, and indeed there is a short term gain until the competition catches up. In order to sustain your cynicism, you'll need to explain why the games industry is so uncompetitive.
I suggest that you stop seeing greed as intrisically bad, but instead see poverty as bad. The result of looking at things sanely instead of through the distorting lens of class war can be rather enlightening.
If you are worried about the wages of those who do get the work, you need to look to the longer term: how are they going to get out of poverty if they don't get experience, and their country doesn't gain infrastructure?
If you think that I am a doctrinaire libertarian, I'm not, but I do think that your kind of thinking comes is in fact simple emotional indulgence masquerading as morality.
I'm not saying that we don't need to preserve incentives, but I am saying that we need to see that rights are not completely one-sided.
Topical journal entry.
People need to spend their mod points more considerately.
For my software, I choose the GPL (where I have the choice) in order to maximise freedom (see my journal). Maximising freedom as an activity naturally recognises trade-offs, and the GPL is a means to achieving a freedom-maximising outcome.
So there exist both profit-centred and ideological reasons for chosing the GPL.
If you mean "ability to ensnare others", other licences are a good deal more free.
If you mean having your source available 'n' generations down the line, together with that of software that is built upon yours, the GPL is probably the most free.
The GPL yields free software , so the Free Software Foundation is eminently the correct name for a GPL-promoting organisation.
I'm not sure how much water the argument about fairness and justice holds when our capacity to contribute depends on the larger system which we hope to influence.
In case you didn't catch it, JCMay replied here.
As an aside, I didn't mention either Medicare or Social Security, although such things might come out of a detailed analysis that focuses upon a concept of efficiency that better corresponds to people's well-being.
I'm not saying that it necessarily does, but I am saying that Williams' preceeding analysis is suggesting that votes in proportional to wealth would create a more efficient outcome, so a critique of that undrelying concept of efficiency is sufficient to address that argument. I am not claiming that the other arguments couldn't be put to justify less government.
The most basic flaw in the professor's assumptions is thinking that $1 in the hands of one individual means as much as it does for another. If you consider what different people would be willing to do to earn that dollar in the first place, this is clearly not the case.
Sorry, that just made me laugh. I agree with you, though.
1 - The rest of the world still gains from Chinese growth through greater opportunity to trade. This trade might not occur in software, but greater wealth means that the opportunities exist somewhere.
2 - GPL leverages copyright law, but it's failure is not a loss, but an absence of gain.
3 - Protectionism will fail. Having lower wealth and infrastructure, the Chinese cannot keep up with the rest of the world with a divergent software solution without clobbering the rest of their economic growth through massive redirection of resource.
The WTO exists mostly to prevent stupid ideologies and populism from corrupting the way to wealth for each country individually. Countries join so that their governments can blame the WTO when some special interest isn't indulged.
Sun could always dual-licence Java. GPLing code still allows you to sell it for proprietry use.
QM doesn't negate the invokation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. QM gives a mechanism (tunnelling of particles) by which entropy can still increase. Given this mechanism, the 2nd Law simply implies that this mechanism will be used.
You're sounding like a Christian, I'm afraid. "Just a theory" is a ridiculous thing to say about something as well-tested and with the predictive power of quantum mechanics. You might as well say gravity is just a theory, and hold onto everything in sight for fear of being flung into space!
Since the energy in and on the earth isn't sucking us in deperately hard, a small fraction of that energy concentrated to a point won't either. It will have the same pull to a single point as it would have done over the whole of a larger object with the same energy content.
The term "Black Hole" is used in the article for effect; a less misleading term would be "singularity". "Full-scaled" black holes pull as hard as they do essentially because they start off as massive stars that collapse. The original star would have pulled pretty hard on the surrounding space, and being concentrated makes it pull no harder overall. Stars disrupt each other as much as black holes disrupt stars, and Supermassive Black Holes are the extremely rare and "lucky" ones that simply accumulated enough mass to form that way.