But it isn't, "Thou Shalt Not Kill." It's "Thou shalt not commit murder." Killing is not always murder. Leagally sanctioned execution is by definition not murder.
"Thou shalt not murder" is still not a commandment to kill killers, although it may allow it.
But you're right, The Bible is a strange and contradictory document; EzInKy's reply points this out rather well, although Jesus's later pronouncements to turn the other cheek, do unto others..., and not to judge others do tend to suggest that revenge is not Christian.
More to the point, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" still wouldn't be a command to kill killers, whoever said it!
It's also so much more poetic, don't you think?
The fact that they are not going out of business, and in fact seem to be thriving, means that some people like spam, (or at least are willing to buy from it) even if you personally don't happen to believe it.
Whilst I'm sure that this is true, it doesn't follow, for the simple fact is that returns occur after the spam is sent. The senders could easily have been mislead into thinking that they'd be a return without it actually being realised. There are enough mugs around for this to work indefinately, IMO!
I know that this seems to be a minor quibble, but the observation that investment follows expections, and not even best expectation, but also quite irrational ones is an important step to make when being realistic about market mechanisms. Greatest profit is not always, or even usually sought; rather, simple evolutionary selection goes on, and many of the best ideas fail because of mistakes, lack of recognition, or bad luck. Similarly, people are ripped off time and again...
Oh yeah, that cheap and easy cryptography technology that can be performed on a CPU in a wristwatch or smartcard and be can used for encryption, signing, PKI infrastructure, n of m schemes etc will be instantly replaced by a system that's only good to transmit bits with a guarantee that the recipient will be able to detect if someone else is reading the traffic. Yawn.
Not quite true: if you don't know the polorizations of the photons coming through, you can't read it!
Well, okay, The Bible's inconsistent, but "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is not self-contradictory, even if the bible as a whole is.
The Sceptics Annotated Bible is a great place to look for more of the same!
Re: "Stop The Slaughter Now!"
It's not hypocritical if it's a request to the Congoese Government. On a similar basis "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is not a commandment to kill killers.
My personal preference for government elections is the Approval system, which eliminates the vast majority of the problems with Plurality without introducing worse ones, like a complicated ballot sheet (remember, a significant percentage of Floridians couldn't handle the ones we have now!) and violations of monotonicity.
The Single Transferable Vote is a little more complex, yet it was easily sold in Ireland with the simple slogan STV, as simple as 1, 2, 3, since all that the voter has to do is number their preferences.
Additionally, when evaluating the faithfulness of representation of intent, you also need to account for the fact that the status quo does that lousily. I dispute your contention that STV is worse (I'm not sufficiently familiar with IRV, but your criticisms could equally be levelled at STV, so I'm treating the attack as generic); the vast majority do grasp STV's demands on the voter, and those who don't more likely than not have a problem voting, so the gain almost certainly outweighs the losses.
People tend to forget that more holes are found in Microsoft products partly because more people use Microsoft products. As a result, that's where the attackers focus a great deal of their energy. Linux would have the same problem if it had Microsoft's market share.
Hardly. Consider this: Linux programmers increase in number with the penetration of Linux. As Linux penetration grows, so does the number of people able to fix security flaws. Whilst the number of crackers may increase, both sides of the arms race are in fact bolstered.
Yes, because we all know it's the only moral and correct thing to do. And it makes so much sense to protest in a manner that makes your act of protesting completely unknowable on the one day people care about it.
Better then to supply an alternate front page! It need not be very complex. "Slashdot has been taken down for a day in protest..." and provide a link to the one site that needs to be open, explaining the protest, its meaning, where to congregate, and other relevent information.
It is possible that the value is available but the distribution system for the wealth breaks down. That's sort of what happened during the great depression.
You get value by buying it cheaper, even if you're an ultimate end user. There needs to be capacity in the rest of the economy so as to soak up the saved cash.
The profit is only going to come from the industries where there is a barrier to entry.
Not so: industries without a barrier to entry should expect to make a normal rate of profit, comparible to putting your money elsewhere. Furthermore, wages are as good as profit for making the economy turn over, as is money saved by the customer by not paying investment tax [profit].
In order to attract investment, it is true, however that there need to be expectation of profit, and this is the crunch point, so although I quibble, I don't really disagree with you now. I am interested in how Open Source allows others to make a profit, 'though, and I think that our recent exchange of comments betrays a difference of focus.
If OS brings savings across many industries, these savings will in the first instance translate into profit. After a while, competition will eat into this profit. Whether the profit would have been greater for the originators of such software or across the economy is hard to tell, particularly since more people will be using the software if it is a lot cheaper (or free).
The difference is that she didn't try to hack it first. She made a challenge and they accepted. This is how normal society acts.
Although this is true, it is by making the 'normal' universal that we oppress. Arrogance on the part of those running the vulnerable system is in fact likely to both make them sloppy, and take those who would crack their system to court. We need to protect the messenger so that people focus upon securing the system against attacks, rather than their ego.
I am not claiming that hackers aren't arrogant, BTW, but simply that the law should encourage behaviour that is in the public interest, whatever the motives. Here, finding vulnerabilities (and then informing those who are in a position to fix them) is in the public interest, and obscuring them goes against it.
I should elucidate that I'm saying that the value is still being created, as before, but it might simply be that the company's customers extract that value, rather than the companys themselves.
Lower costs are bad for the incumbents, good for the up-and-comers, but the up-and-comers have less potential to look forward to.
This is only true because those who are able to extract more value are already there. It is true that competition between these may drive down the price of their product in turn (assuming they they're themselves in competition with one another, which might not be the case, given the diversity of (say) web sites), but this means that the value of their product has been passed on in turn, to their own customers.
The accrued value of a website is proportional to the cost of building a competing one.
I'm not sure about that; all we know is that the web site is more valuable than its cost (assuming 'rational' behaviour). Lower costs allows more value to be extracted, but mostly by others.
Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights.
"To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO," she said.
3. The 21st century will be that of the knowledge-based economies, in which intellectual property will be the main driving force. WIPO should be able to provide strong leadership in developing the intellectual property system with a view to underpin the global conditions where creative potential can be released and channeled into tangible, sustainable development.
It's notable that investigating which system of property rights would be most appropriate for developing nations is entirely within the organasation's remit, ie. Lois Boland is simply lying.
You have a point, and you've caught me out; I was attempting to challenge the assumption that we should be looking in terms of the nation's jobs, specifically.
However, I'd agree that tax cuts for trickle-down is voodoo economics, _normal_ competition really is a mechanism for trickle-down to occur. As for the value of commoditisation, obviously in general, it's harmful for the industry concerned, although open source is not so straightforward: much software, especially those produced under open-source fascilitate development of futher software. More generally, most software enables further productivity (consider artist's packages), and real end-use software, such as games, tends not to be OS, anyway!
I think that the jury is out as to the overall effect; I'll have to conceed the point that OS is probably not good for programming jobs in the west, though.
You seem to have naive and overly idealistic faith in capitalism. In reality, unregulated capitalism is an unstable system. Capitalism doesn't work without a damping factor, be it local laws, collusion, or military force.
Actually, I don't; I really meant that it was working in this case, hence "This is the market working at its best"; I acknowledge that it gets a lot worse.
I've got that. My point is that to do serious engineering, rather than hacking, you need the source, and you can't readily reconstruct it from an executable. Consider attempting to reconstruct optimised code! A nightmare!
I do acknowledge that you can do stuff with only the executable, but the difference between having a hex editor and the source is orders of magnitude. As for a decompiler, I'd like to see that! A disassembler is a useful tool 'though.
Of course, this is all being done over TCP instead of the post, and with math instead of padlocks, but you get the idea.
It's a side-effect of the algorithm, notably that raising to a power is commutative, ie. (a^b)^c = a^(b*c) = (a^c)^b, so multiple encryption can be decrypted in any order.
Agreed./. readers may not want to hear it, but this is the exact reason why open source will do nothing but accelerate the flow of jobs overseas.
This is ideal; not only does Open Source encourage growth by bringing down the price of software, it also accelerates the redistributive "trickle down" to those who are less well off, in this case by fascilitating competition. This is the market working at its best.
If they dont follow our rules why should we follow theirs? If they try to sell open source software, we buy it, crack it and give it away. Problem solved.
Umm. How do you "crack" an executable to reverse-engineer the source? To do that, you'll need to crack the companies producing the software, or you'll need someone to leak it at tremendous personal risk. I don't think that this is on a par with the death penalty of religious oppression, frankly.
Although RMS is obviously a very talented and intelligent individual, he seems hellbent on enforcing his ethics and morals on others.
This simply doesn't matter. It's not reasonable that we should credit people with oppressiveness that relies upon them having power that they do not have: intellectuals tend to hold extreme positions; this creates a field of diversity of thought for the rest of us, as we can blend others' ideas. If it weren't for the extremes, our own thinking would be so much poorer.
Slashdot Mirror
But you're right, The Bible is a strange and contradictory document; EzInKy's reply points this out rather well, although Jesus's later pronouncements to turn the other cheek, do unto others..., and not to judge others do tend to suggest that revenge is not Christian.
More to the point, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" still wouldn't be a command to kill killers, whoever said it!
It's also so much more poetic, don't you think?
I know that this seems to be a minor quibble, but the observation that investment follows expections, and not even best expectation, but also quite irrational ones is an important step to make when being realistic about market mechanisms. Greatest profit is not always, or even usually sought; rather, simple evolutionary selection goes on, and many of the best ideas fail because of mistakes, lack of recognition, or bad luck. Similarly, people are ripped off time and again...
Well, okay, The Bible's inconsistent, but "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is not self-contradictory, even if the bible as a whole is.
The Sceptics Annotated Bible is a great place to look for more of the same!
Re: "Stop The Slaughter Now!"
It's not hypocritical if it's a request to the Congoese Government. On a similar basis "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is not a commandment to kill killers.
Ooops, non-fiction (above) should read fiction, sorry!
Additionally, when evaluating the faithfulness of representation of intent, you also need to account for the fact that the status quo does that lousily. I dispute your contention that STV is worse (I'm not sufficiently familiar with IRV, but your criticisms could equally be levelled at STV, so I'm treating the attack as generic); the vast majority do grasp STV's demands on the voter, and those who don't more likely than not have a problem voting, so the gain almost certainly outweighs the losses.
In order to attract investment, it is true, however that there need to be expectation of profit, and this is the crunch point, so although I quibble, I don't really disagree with you now. I am interested in how Open Source allows others to make a profit, 'though, and I think that our recent exchange of comments betrays a difference of focus.
If OS brings savings across many industries, these savings will in the first instance translate into profit. After a while, competition will eat into this profit. Whether the profit would have been greater for the originators of such software or across the economy is hard to tell, particularly since more people will be using the software if it is a lot cheaper (or free).
I am not claiming that hackers aren't arrogant, BTW, but simply that the law should encourage behaviour that is in the public interest, whatever the motives. Here, finding vulnerabilities (and then informing those who are in a position to fix them) is in the public interest, and obscuring them goes against it.
I should elucidate that I'm saying that the value is still being created, as before, but it might simply be that the company's customers extract that value, rather than the companys themselves.
You have a point, and you've caught me out; I was attempting to challenge the assumption that we should be looking in terms of the nation's jobs, specifically.
However, I'd agree that tax cuts for trickle-down is voodoo economics, _normal_ competition really is a mechanism for trickle-down to occur. As for the value of commoditisation, obviously in general, it's harmful for the industry concerned, although open source is not so straightforward: much software, especially those produced under open-source fascilitate development of futher software. More generally, most software enables further productivity (consider artist's packages), and real end-use software, such as games, tends not to be OS, anyway!
I think that the jury is out as to the overall effect; I'll have to conceed the point that OS is probably not good for programming jobs in the west, though.
I've got that. My point is that to do serious engineering, rather than hacking, you need the source, and you can't readily reconstruct it from an executable. Consider attempting to reconstruct optimised code! A nightmare!
I do acknowledge that you can do stuff with only the executable, but the difference between having a hex editor and the source is orders of magnitude. As for a decompiler , I'd like to see that! A disassembler is a useful tool 'though.