free as in money which is the usage of free I was using when saying "things can not, will not and should not be free"
Ah, sorry. I agree with that. I'm not proposing government ownership or collective ownership or any such. I misread. My bad.
it is true that many pepole would not do a thing unless they perceived some pecuniary reward for their efforts. I can't believe you would challange that.
Nope, I don't challenge that. I was challenging that people would only do something if guaranteed a reward for their efforts.
And to be fair, copyright and patent did replace previous systems which were much worse in terms of market freedom. I'm not one to suggest getting rid of either. I would love to see both patent & copyright systems fixed to remove some abuses and some places the systems are being used where they don't apply, but that's different.
You asked, jokingly, Let me ask you, do you have a job? Do you work for free? and that was funny, and to the point. The distinction I'm making here is the difference between working for hire and between working only with a guarantee of permanent employment.
drugs are no longer marketed once the patent expires
Let's accept that is a given. That just means that there's no advertising for the drugs, and therefore maybe some ad agencies aren't making money. You're not going to suggest that the only drugs being sold and used are those which are currently within their patent lifetime, are you? And can you name a non-psychoactive drug that has been made illegal after its patent expired? Ecstasy is a very bad example.
Besides, opiates are very illegal, yet are used as prescription drugs. Who has the current patent on Vicodin? What about Demerol? Hmm, what about that little-prescribed drug Ritilin? Is that still under patent protection?
Who has the current patent on Naproxen Sodium? Lots of heart medications are no longer under patent protection, yet are routinely used. Aspirin, for goodness sake, is still used in hospitals! As is Peniccilin. (sp?) What about all those stomach medicines and heart medicines whose patents expired in the 90's, yet continue to be marketed? You know the ones with ads that talk about the Nobel prize willing research? The beta blockers?
Drugs past their patent lifetime may no longer get aggressive marketing, but they are surely used by the medical establishment. It is just not the case that doctors only precribe drugs less than seven years old.
Of course major drug companies try most aggressively to sell drugs for which they have exlusive rights! Are you saying that because of this natural behavior, we should extend the exclusive rights? That is not to say that drug companies cannot make a profit on drugs no longer in the patent lifetime. They just cannot make an arbitrarily large profit. That's all. The free market is still in existence.
Unless you are suggesting that the free market works everywhere but drug companies, and for those companies, we need to remove the free market? I don't understand what your point is, here.
there's just no need for a highly skill person to program 95% of what's out there.
If we don't care about software reliability or security and are willing to accept unstable software as the norm, there is no need for highly skilled people to program 95% of the stuff out there. A problem is that people want good software but don't want to pay for it.
If people can't patent things (like AIDS medication) they will not invent it because they will never recoup their R&D
That's simply not true. Besides, a patent is NOT a free market concept! A company that has a patent has the ONLY market for that which is patented. How is that free? I'm not saying patents shouldn't exist. I'm just responding to your statement.
Patents encourage R&D by ensuring companies that'll have a good chance of making their money back, but the patent system can and has been abused. It's curious that you say "things can not, will not and should not be free" while championing the "Free" market.
The argument that without patents -- without a guarantee of a temporary monopoly -- no-one would produce anything new, well, that's a specious argument. It's just silly. Long before the current concept of patents existed, people created things and did research.
I should have mentioned in my previous post that I live in (near, actually) the "Second City," so named as being at the time of the naming the second largest city in the US, second to NYC. Now, LA is larger than Chicago, but the name has stuck. But as someone who lives in the Second City in the Second World, no-one takes it as perjorative. It's taken as descriptive, and at most with an underdog's sense of pride of "We're not as large as NYC, but we still kick ass."
What elitist crap. Ignoring such a pejorative term as third world, how then does a "third world" country improve its lot if the world's richest nations refuse to do business with the 3rd world country?
Wow, calm down! You're only the second person I've encountered who thought the term "Third world" was pejorative. I rather doubt it's being used in any such sense here.
Anyway, I don't believe anyone (a few extremists ignored) is talking about "First" or "Second" world nations simply refusing to do business with other nations. I believe that people are rather talking about the desire to have economies that are sustainable for all countries involved. If the US, for example, outsourced all of its skilled labor to other countries where the labor and pollution laws are more lax and salaries are lower, that would have a devestating affect on the US economy. While some business would profit in the short term, they would end up with no consumers.
THAT concept is what bothers people. If you take it as an elitist or arrogant, you're missing the point of most people's arguments. Of course, there are some who are arrogant or elitist, but I'd bet that most people in this discussion are trying to be reasonable in a topic that causes heated disucssions.
The one question I have never been able to get a straight answer on. What field should the millions of displaced American IT workers get trained in?
Well, as we move to a pure service economy, there will be two classes of people: Those who do service work and those who have capital. Service work, by its nature, cannot be outsourced. Of course, service work generally pays much less than the white collar jobs now being outsourced.
Outsourcing is a huge boon to those who have capital. To the rest of us, it means retraining in a new career that may never be able to repay the investment in training.
I actually have no quarrel with outsourcing when it is done right, whether the "out" part is to a company in another city, another state, another country, another continent. In the long term, this benefits all countries. Given the extra costs in extra management one must do of any outsourcing, it's not like every company is going to outsource. It's just not worth it. Only the larger companies will be outsourcing, and few companies will outsource the whole development departments. It just doesn't make sense.
Actually roaches and mamals already existed back then. Expecially roaches I bet existed in large numbers
Sorry, but roaches and mammals are both younger than 250 million years. Not by a whole lot, but still, younger is younger. And like I said, two orbits ago there was no life on land. Probably not even algae on rocks. Only oceanic life.
In comparison to the 4.5 billion years age of the Earth, multicellular life is very young.
To bring it back on topic, and talking about choatic orbits, we are so far from the core of the galaxy that even the likelihood of a star passing close enough to cause severe disruption of our solar system is unlikely. And things travel so slowly out here that we'd see it coming LONG before it got here if it was at all luminous.
The most likely interaction in this part of the galaxy is that some star would pass closely enough to throw a few comets in from the Oort cloud. That's about it.
Re:Plotting Ahead?
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The can figure out where things are going about as well as they can figure out where things came from. It depends critically on our knowledge of where everything else is that the stars can gravitationally interact with. It can be highly chaotic when stars pass at all close to one another. (Using the appropriate definition of "close," which does not include any likelyhood of collision.) If there's a dense gas cloud we're not aware of in the wrong spot, that would invalidate much of this kind of simulation forward or backward.
Local stars are all moving slowly enough (relative to us) that there are no surprises likely. The only kind of surprises we could get would be a brown dwarf or the like, something not visible until it's close. In terms of human lifetimes, this isn't changing very rapidly at all.
Remember, the animation from the article covers 250 million years! Two such rotations ago, there was no life on land and fish were only just beginning to appear. One rotation ago -- the beginning of the simulation -- was the time of the Permian mass extinction. That was a freaking long time ago! That predates roaches! And mammals.
If we're lucky, we'll still be around in another 250 million years.
Stars do collide - I'm sure quite frequently given the number of them. It's just a question of how likely it is to happen to any one particular star - ie: ours.
Sorry, but stars collide quite rarely, because they are so astonishingly small compared to the space around them. Even in galactic clusters -- as dense as space gets when one is looking at stars -- stars rarely physically collide.
Now, star SYSTEMS collide. That means that in a galactic cluster, two solar systems can pass closely enough to cause orbital disruption. This would be especially a risk to life, as any disruption of a star's Oort cloud would cause an incoming rain of cometary objects.
But that being said, the frequency of stars physically colliding is unimaginably small.
Even when galaxies collide, it's a gravitational "collision" and not a collision like a car hitting a wall. When galaxies collide, there are no stellar collisions. Yes, people get a hole-in-one in a golf course. But to go to the original example, if the tee was ten miles from the cup, how often would that happen? Keep in mind that stars are not aimed.:)
About the only way for stars to collide would be gravitational capture with something causing the orbit to lose energy. With that, one star would spiral into another (or more reasonably the two stars would spiral toward each other).
Supermassive black holes do not require stars collding into them. The huge quantities of dust and gas in the center of a galaxy are sufficient. And easier to capture.
First, there is no center or edge of the universe. Second, at the time the light we now see was emitted from the galaxy, we were much much closer to the galaxy.
One way to think about that is to think about the surface of a sphere. Not the sphere itself, but just its surface. There is no boundary, there is no center. There are no privileged locations on the surface of a non-rotating sphere. Of course, this is a 2-d finite example. If the universe is infinite, then "radius of the universe" doesn't have meaning.
I don't know if astronomers posit a volume to the universe. There is a limit to what we can see and measure. If the universe is larger than that, we'll have no way to really measure it.
They very clearly said "It seems likely...". So no, they did not report that as fact. Secondly, who has any real motive besides the Linux users that stand to lose the most? BBC did nothing wrong by pointing the spotlight at the people most likely to have done it.
Who has any real motive? How about the folks who have been putting out virus after virus after virus for the past year, where these viruses are really a backdoor to spread their ability to send SPAM? Someone doing that has a motive to hide their real motive. A DOS attack against someone is a perfect extra to hide the motive.
Now, maybe there is some Linux crank out there who is also a Windows expert who was able to do this. And maybe that person is also allied with the folks producing the SPAMbots, because this virus includes one.
But to suggest that whoever created the virus is a MAINSTREAM Linux person is just silly. That doesn't fit any of the facts. In addition, it would be monstrously stupid. However, anyone who wanted Linux users to have a black eye would be able to accomplish that by attacking SCO.
Now, if there's someone out there who hates Linux and who knows Windows internals in great detail, enough detail to create a sophisticated virus, then that person can accomplish many goals by taking their SPAMbot virus and attacking a site that will divert blame from them.
Mainstream Linux users are not people who advocate this sort of malevolent virus or attack.
Fedora Core is what used to be Red Hat Linux. They just stopped calling it like that.
Repeat the mantra after me: it is just a name change.
Not true. With RH 9 I could pay $60/year and get guaranteed updates. Having searched through both RedHat and Fedora web pages, I see no guarantees that security updates will ever be available.
What has kept me using Red Hat for recent years was RHN. I could migrate to Fedora... but there is no RHN for it. Maybe there is some equivalent, but not a single thing in any press releases or anything I can find on the Fedora web page talks about it.
If I move to Fedora and they decide to stop supporting it, I'm sunk.
Never before in the history of capitalism has a product been produced and given away entirely for free. This is a new concept, and whether or not it's a good thing is still to be seen.
Look at science, a necessary part of capitalism as we know it. Without science, our economy would not be anywhere close to where it is. Science and Open Source resemble one another because there is overlap in thinking and overlap in population. If, instead of open scientific progress, we had each organization doing private research and not publishing results, companies might in the short term make more money -- maybe far more money -- than with public science. However, the long term is much, much better with science open to the public.
The product of information has a long history of being given away for free in capitalism, and capitalism benefits from this cooperation more than it would benefit from the competition that would otherwise replace it.
As one example of Open Source software, in the 21st century should we still be paying a lot of money for the operating system? That's just part of the platform. The cost of hardware has dropped. The cost of fundamentally required software has not. Not really. This doesn't make sense. Software prices do not seem to benefit from the same economies of scale that physically manufactured items benefit from. If Microsoft sells twice as many copies of Office in a year, do you think they will drop the price? No, because it costs them no more and no less to make twice as many boxes, compared to the sale price of those boxes. However, if GM sold twice as many cars, they would drop the price somewhat due to economies of scale. (Unless demand was higher than supply.)
In the day and age where you can spend more on an operating system to run on it than you would spend on a 3.0 GHz processor... something isn't right. This doesn't seem good for the economy. It's only good for the few companies selling the operating systems.
The economy is more efficient when people are employed solving different problems, as opposed to people solving the same problems over and over again at different companies. Open source gives this efficiency as an option.
And yes, in the worst case, a company who spends less on software by using open source might piss away the saved cash. But that money still goes into the economy, either as cash in the economy or as capital. In the worst case, that money goes somewhere other than the tech economy. That is the case where programmers are hurt by "giving it away for free." Talking of locking money out of the economy, what about Microsoft and Sun and certain other tech companies sitting on many billions of dollars? How does that benefit the economy? (Unless indirectly by being saved or invested in a way that provides capital to the economy)
For the computing fundamentals, it makes more sense IMO to pay for support and customization than it does to pay for the operating system, a web browser, a web server, a database server, a file server, and so on. Yes, this changes the tech landscape in a disruptive way, but IMO open source is only hastening this change, not bringing it about. I believe this is good for the economy, but not good for all workers. It's like any other disruptive technological change -- some careers go away or become less prominant, other careers are created.
Last I checked, college kids writing software for free most definitely have an adverse effect on the economy. But if you don't think so, just tell me where you work, and I'll follow you around, offering to your managers to do your job for free.
You're confusing the economy with the jobless rate. By your same argument, factories that automated -- putting people out of work -- had an adverse affect on the economy. At worst, open source turns software from a capital purchase into a commodity. That lowers the amount those companies have to pay for their business needs, so they have more money available to hire.
Thus, it's quite likely that open source will cause jobe to move from this to that, but that doesn't mean it will destroy jobs. And at a time when US (I don't know about other countries) companies are outsourcing to other countries, I don't know that open source is really a cause of high tech unenployment.
What open source does is free up resource in the economy that would otherwise be spent on certain commodity parts -- operating systems, web servers, and so on -- so those resource can instead be spent hiring people to do what the company needs done. It's not like money disappears from the economy. It's just spent elsewhere.
Also, really, open source benefits the economy. Rather than having dozens of companies each having their own internal development trying to rebuild the wheel, they all can share one developement model for the fundamentals of their business and can focus on their real business needs.
In some ways, this is the same effect that public standards have on business. They allow businesses to spend their dollars on what distinguishes them from others. It's more efficient. I opens up money to be spent elsewhere.
When you talk about open source harming the economy, you seem to believe that the money those companies would have spent on employees to do that task has just disappeared. Nope. That have that money available to hire employees to do something else. Like install or customize or mainain that open source application. Or build the custom applications that the business actually cares about.
As a subscriber to the magazine, maybe you can tell us -- is this slant against the GPL a quirk in an otherwise balanced publication? Or do they have several well known biases but are otherwise well balanced. Like JAMA, for example, that has a couple well known and not even disguised biases, but on other topics is a fair and reliable publication.
P.S. They can't give EVERYONE a person ID. Even slashdot's member IDs go higher than 142453. Oh, unless Forbes only gives person IDs to people who matter to the world of business. Hmm. That must be it. Probably well under 1/4 million of those.:)
Yeah, completely unlike other kinds of zealots. (grin) If you remove "OSS" from that sentence it is just as true.
Having read the FA, I can understand why people would shout "TROLL!!!" It's an opinion piece thinly disguised as a news article. I would have thought that when reporting news one wouldn't cast aspersions at or call names of one side of a news story.
I'm not a zealot. (Most of the time!) But I agree with you that zealots of all stripes tend to act like a bunch of immature kids. But you know, it's just part of the definion of "zealot."
I would have thought -- naively -- that Forbes would contain good reporting. But after RTFA I read several other Linux-related stories on their web site. ALL of them were propoganda in the guise of reporting. The kind of things one would find on an editorial page, not on a news page.
Is that considered to be real reporting in the financial world? I hope not. Portraying open source as communism or angry hordes is fine and good for an editorial page or an opinion column. But as news?
And all those gripes about the FSF -- it's the same old complaint of, "Hey, I cannot take the stuff you wrote for free and use it in my proprietary code the way I want to." Well, then, write your own!!! I don't get how that is onorous.
And since when is indemnification a "standard practice"?
How does the DMCA comeinto play whne you are dealing with files that you have permission to mess with?
Hint: It doesn't.
Hmmm. Try telling that to the people who get sued for DECSS when their only use of it is to watch DVDs they have legally purchased.
In addition, many employers will fire anyone accused of using "hacking" tools, regardless of intent.
One of the problems with the DMCA is its wide scope. Intent doesn't really matter for DMCA. If you're caught breaking into your own house with tools that are illegal to possess, you'll still get arrested for possessing those tools. Lock-picking tools are illegal to possess in many areas. The DMCA is similar -- making it illegal to possess certain tools, regardless of your use of those tools.
Which prison do you think Darl will serve his time at?
I would be surprised if there is any prison time for anyone at SCO or any of their lawyers. Especially with the administration in the White House at the moment, where in the post-Enron days the rules for oversight are weaker than they used to be. I would pretty much be surprised if any suits are brought against anyone at SCO, even for the pump & dump. Even for the fairly obvious Microsoft financing of this lawsuit, including Bill's wife running a company that is more or less the only entity purchasing SCO stock, and is thus the corporate entity responsible for SCO stock price being so high.
Remember, in the US, white collar crime is almost never prosecuted. And even when it is, it's often just to make an example of someone so it looks like something is being done.
Invalidation of the GPL would mean that existing GPL'd software could be incorporated into commercial code without restriction or credit to the original author.
No, that's totally wrong. If the GPL is invalidated, the code will not go into the public domain. If an existing license fails, the code goes back to the copyright of each individual author. This means legally no-one could use the code without getting permission from each and every author. If the GPL is invalidated for a given chunk of code, it would become unlicensed, but not public domain. And not unlicensable unless that was a specific condition of the court.
And that would be if the GPL were totally invalidated by this court case, which would stun me. At most, I could see a court decide that the GPL license has been invalidated on a given chunk of kernel code due to abuses. Because, yes, courts periodically make decisions that do not seem to be based in the facts. If the GPL license were invalidated for the kernel due to these alleged abuses, I really doubt that would have any legal consequence to any other GPL licensed product.
As an aside, as others have pointed out, SCO quotes the latest revised version of a license when it is in SCO's favor, but quotes the original AT&T licenses (ignoring later revisions) when that license is in SCO's favor. In a court of law, such logic would not hold up.
And as many lawyers have pointed out, SCO's lawyers would be punished for Barratry if they brought their accusations about the GPL into a court of law. That is, the argument that the GPL is invalid because it tries to superceed the copyright act. That's just silly. If the GPL superceeds the copyright act, then most licenses do so also.
I agree with your statement that we should not be complacent. That just because their arguments are specious -- doesn't mean the court will find against them.
the definition of open and closed universe is not refering to a boundry, or infinite space. [snip] If there is not enough matter (i.e. not enough gravity), the universe will continue expanding at an accelerated rate [snip] The third option, you didn't mention, is where scientists think we are now....a 'flat' universe.
OK, I was speaking imprecisely. You're partly correct. A closed universe is often used to mean a universe that will eventually collapse upon itself.
In all cases, there is (at any moment in time) a finite amount of space. The difference is that in the closed universe you speak of, space will reach a maximum "volume" and will then contract. In the other two cases (flat and open), there is no maximum volume. Space is finite at any moment in time, but the "maximum" is infinite because expansion occurs forever. The difference between "flat" and "open" is that one case is asymptotically flat and in "infinite time" would "stop" expanding, and the other case expands forever. Not accelerating, but not decelerating enough to stop even in infinite time.
The accelerating expansion is a totally different issue -- dark energy. Dark energy (as proposed) can have a negative gravitational influence, thus causing things to move farther apart with increasing velocity. Without dark energy, an open universe would expand forever, but at a decelerating rate.
A "flat" universe is not a very narrow spot on the graph between open and closed. It is a single zero-dimensional point where the mass of the universe exactly balances the expansion. This universe will still expand forever, however.
The whole definition of space expanding does not allow for a "center" of the expansion. For there to be a center, space would have to be expanding into something. That is not the case. Space is simply getting bigger.
By the way, the word "flat" is used to describe the geometry of space. A flat universe is one that is flat geometrically in 3 dimensions in the same way that a flat infinite plane is flat. The other two options are both curved. The "not enough matter" choice is curved hyperbolically, like a horse saddle shape. The other choice is curved in a way that can close in on itself.
Again, using examples of 2-d surfaces embedded in a 3-dimensional space.
Then in 5 years or so when their IP is firmly entrenched in the Gnome/Linux landscape, a swawm of laywers will decend to argue over who actually owns what.
Well, the worst they could do is force licensing fees to use Mono, or force the removal of that work from Linux. They couldn't use that to attack Linux itself unless somehow Mono became an integral aprt of the operating system itself.
I mean, Mono running under Solaris or MacOS certainly wouldn't give Microsoft an in to destroying those platforms.
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most advanced software platform in existence
OK, I'll bite.:) Most advanced platform in existence? Isn't that a bit lofty? C#/.Net can be described, accurately, as Microsoft's answer to J2EE. While I'm a pragmatist about this and I find things to admire and things to dislike about both platforms, history still favors J2EE as the better platform.
If Java were just Sun, then.NET would probably quickly become a superior platform. I hate to say this. I like Sun, I dislike Microsoft. But I have to be honest with what I see. However, Java is not just Sun. There is a huge array of open source software for Java. Just tour the Apache software web site and the enormous variety of Java software available so developers don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Microsoft is often better at making software easier to use. They are often better at making software to make making GUI's easy. They are often better at making certain kinds of tools and certain kinds of integration between products.
But to those who think that Open Source is all about copying what others innovate (I'm not accusing anyone in this discussion of that), there are a great many J2SE and J2EE projects out there that disprove that straw man. (I don't know enought about J2ME to speak intelligently.)
In addition to Apache, check out Exolab. These are just a couple of the organizations creating open source J2SE and J2EE solutions. The existence of these sorts of organizations, these projects, brings great power and maturity to Java that.NET doesn't yet have.
I'm learning.NET stuff because I'm pragmatic and there are indeed some very nice features it has. One is the ability to link many languages in a native way rather than having to go through JNI. (shudder)
All of this to say that I have to question not only calling any software platform the "most advanced software platform in existence," but especially the.NET platform which has not yet caught up to J2EE in functionality. Not for web projects at any rate.
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free as in money which is the usage of free I was using when saying "things can not, will not and should not be free"
Ah, sorry. I agree with that. I'm not proposing government ownership or collective ownership or any such. I misread. My bad.
it is true that many pepole would not do a thing unless they perceived some pecuniary reward for their efforts. I can't believe you would challange that.
Nope, I don't challenge that. I was challenging that people would only do something if guaranteed a reward for their efforts.
And to be fair, copyright and patent did replace previous systems which were much worse in terms of market freedom. I'm not one to suggest getting rid of either. I would love to see both patent & copyright systems fixed to remove some abuses and some places the systems are being used where they don't apply, but that's different.
You asked, jokingly, Let me ask you, do you have a job? Do you work for free? and that was funny, and to the point. The distinction I'm making here is the difference between working for hire and between working only with a guarantee of permanent employment.
drugs are no longer marketed once the patent expires
Let's accept that is a given. That just means that there's no advertising for the drugs, and therefore maybe some ad agencies aren't making money. You're not going to suggest that the only drugs being sold and used are those which are currently within their patent lifetime, are you? And can you name a non-psychoactive drug that has been made illegal after its patent expired? Ecstasy is a very bad example.
Besides, opiates are very illegal, yet are used as prescription drugs. Who has the current patent on Vicodin? What about Demerol? Hmm, what about that little-prescribed drug Ritilin? Is that still under patent protection?
Who has the current patent on Naproxen Sodium? Lots of heart medications are no longer under patent protection, yet are routinely used. Aspirin, for goodness sake, is still used in hospitals! As is Peniccilin. (sp?) What about all those stomach medicines and heart medicines whose patents expired in the 90's, yet continue to be marketed? You know the ones with ads that talk about the Nobel prize willing research? The beta blockers?
Drugs past their patent lifetime may no longer get aggressive marketing, but they are surely used by the medical establishment. It is just not the case that doctors only precribe drugs less than seven years old.
Of course major drug companies try most aggressively to sell drugs for which they have exlusive rights! Are you saying that because of this natural behavior, we should extend the exclusive rights? That is not to say that drug companies cannot make a profit on drugs no longer in the patent lifetime. They just cannot make an arbitrarily large profit. That's all. The free market is still in existence.
Unless you are suggesting that the free market works everywhere but drug companies, and for those companies, we need to remove the free market? I don't understand what your point is, here.
there's just no need for a highly skill person to program 95% of what's out there.
If we don't care about software reliability or security and are willing to accept unstable software as the norm, there is no need for highly skilled people to program 95% of the stuff out there. A problem is that people want good software but don't want to pay for it.
If people can't patent things (like AIDS medication) they will not invent it because they will never recoup their R&D
That's simply not true. Besides, a patent is NOT a free market concept! A company that has a patent has the ONLY market for that which is patented. How is that free? I'm not saying patents shouldn't exist. I'm just responding to your statement.
Patents encourage R&D by ensuring companies that'll have a good chance of making their money back, but the patent system can and has been abused. It's curious that you say "things can not, will not and should not be free" while championing the "Free" market.
The argument that without patents -- without a guarantee of a temporary monopoly -- no-one would produce anything new, well, that's a specious argument. It's just silly. Long before the current concept of patents existed, people created things and did research.
Ignoring such a pejorative term as third world
I should have mentioned in my previous post that I live in (near, actually) the "Second City," so named as being at the time of the naming the second largest city in the US, second to NYC. Now, LA is larger than Chicago, but the name has stuck. But as someone who lives in the Second City in the Second World, no-one takes it as perjorative. It's taken as descriptive, and at most with an underdog's sense of pride of "We're not as large as NYC, but we still kick ass."
What elitist crap. Ignoring such a pejorative term as third world, how then does a "third world" country improve its lot if the world's richest nations refuse to do business with the 3rd world country?
Wow, calm down! You're only the second person I've encountered who thought the term "Third world" was pejorative. I rather doubt it's being used in any such sense here.
Anyway, I don't believe anyone (a few extremists ignored) is talking about "First" or "Second" world nations simply refusing to do business with other nations. I believe that people are rather talking about the desire to have economies that are sustainable for all countries involved. If the US, for example, outsourced all of its skilled labor to other countries where the labor and pollution laws are more lax and salaries are lower, that would have a devestating affect on the US economy. While some business would profit in the short term, they would end up with no consumers.
THAT concept is what bothers people. If you take it as an elitist or arrogant, you're missing the point of most people's arguments. Of course, there are some who are arrogant or elitist, but I'd bet that most people in this discussion are trying to be reasonable in a topic that causes heated disucssions.
Well, as we move to a pure service economy, there will be two classes of people: Those who do service work and those who have capital. Service work, by its nature, cannot be outsourced. Of course, service work generally pays much less than the white collar jobs now being outsourced.
Outsourcing is a huge boon to those who have capital. To the rest of us, it means retraining in a new career that may never be able to repay the investment in training.
I actually have no quarrel with outsourcing when it is done right, whether the "out" part is to a company in another city, another state, another country, another continent. In the long term, this benefits all countries. Given the extra costs in extra management one must do of any outsourcing, it's not like every company is going to outsource. It's just not worth it. Only the larger companies will be outsourcing, and few companies will outsource the whole development departments. It just doesn't make sense.
Actually roaches and mamals already existed back then. Expecially roaches I bet existed in large numbers
Sorry, but roaches and mammals are both younger than 250 million years. Not by a whole lot, but still, younger is younger. And like I said, two orbits ago there was no life on land. Probably not even algae on rocks. Only oceanic life.
In comparison to the 4.5 billion years age of the Earth, multicellular life is very young.
To bring it back on topic, and talking about choatic orbits, we are so far from the core of the galaxy that even the likelihood of a star passing close enough to cause severe disruption of our solar system is unlikely. And things travel so slowly out here that we'd see it coming LONG before it got here if it was at all luminous.
The most likely interaction in this part of the galaxy is that some star would pass closely enough to throw a few comets in from the Oort cloud. That's about it.
The can figure out where things are going about as well as they can figure out where things came from. It depends critically on our knowledge of where everything else is that the stars can gravitationally interact with. It can be highly chaotic when stars pass at all close to one another. (Using the appropriate definition of "close," which does not include any likelyhood of collision.) If there's a dense gas cloud we're not aware of in the wrong spot, that would invalidate much of this kind of simulation forward or backward.
Local stars are all moving slowly enough (relative to us) that there are no surprises likely. The only kind of surprises we could get would be a brown dwarf or the like, something not visible until it's close. In terms of human lifetimes, this isn't changing very rapidly at all.
Remember, the animation from the article covers 250 million years! Two such rotations ago, there was no life on land and fish were only just beginning to appear. One rotation ago -- the beginning of the simulation -- was the time of the Permian mass extinction. That was a freaking long time ago! That predates roaches! And mammals.
If we're lucky, we'll still be around in another 250 million years.
Stars do collide - I'm sure quite frequently given the number of them. It's just a question of how likely it is to happen to any one particular star - ie: ours.
Sorry, but stars collide quite rarely, because they are so astonishingly small compared to the space around them. Even in galactic clusters -- as dense as space gets when one is looking at stars -- stars rarely physically collide.
Now, star SYSTEMS collide. That means that in a galactic cluster, two solar systems can pass closely enough to cause orbital disruption. This would be especially a risk to life, as any disruption of a star's Oort cloud would cause an incoming rain of cometary objects.
But that being said, the frequency of stars physically colliding is unimaginably small.
Even when galaxies collide, it's a gravitational "collision" and not a collision like a car hitting a wall. When galaxies collide, there are no stellar collisions. Yes, people get a hole-in-one in a golf course. But to go to the original example, if the tee was ten miles from the cup, how often would that happen? Keep in mind that stars are not aimed. :)
About the only way for stars to collide would be gravitational capture with something causing the orbit to lose energy. With that, one star would spiral into another (or more reasonably the two stars would spiral toward each other).
Supermassive black holes do not require stars collding into them. The huge quantities of dust and gas in the center of a galaxy are sufficient. And easier to capture.
Oprah and Consumer Reports have been sued many times for telling manufacturers that their products are unsafe. So, yes, you can be sued for anything.
First, there is no center or edge of the universe. Second, at the time the light we now see was emitted from the galaxy, we were much much closer to the galaxy.
One way to think about that is to think about the surface of a sphere. Not the sphere itself, but just its surface. There is no boundary, there is no center. There are no privileged locations on the surface of a non-rotating sphere. Of course, this is a 2-d finite example. If the universe is infinite, then "radius of the universe" doesn't have meaning.
I don't know if astronomers posit a volume to the universe. There is a limit to what we can see and measure. If the universe is larger than that, we'll have no way to really measure it.
They very clearly said "It seems likely...". So no, they did not report that as fact. Secondly, who has any real motive besides the Linux users that stand to lose the most? BBC did nothing wrong by pointing the spotlight at the people most likely to have done it.
Who has any real motive? How about the folks who have been putting out virus after virus after virus for the past year, where these viruses are really a backdoor to spread their ability to send SPAM? Someone doing that has a motive to hide their real motive. A DOS attack against someone is a perfect extra to hide the motive.
Now, maybe there is some Linux crank out there who is also a Windows expert who was able to do this. And maybe that person is also allied with the folks producing the SPAMbots, because this virus includes one.
But to suggest that whoever created the virus is a MAINSTREAM Linux person is just silly. That doesn't fit any of the facts. In addition, it would be monstrously stupid. However, anyone who wanted Linux users to have a black eye would be able to accomplish that by attacking SCO.
Now, if there's someone out there who hates Linux and who knows Windows internals in great detail, enough detail to create a sophisticated virus, then that person can accomplish many goals by taking their SPAMbot virus and attacking a site that will divert blame from them.
Mainstream Linux users are not people who advocate this sort of malevolent virus or attack.
Fedora Core is what used to be Red Hat Linux. They just stopped calling it like that. Repeat the mantra after me: it is just a name change.
Not true. With RH 9 I could pay $60/year and get guaranteed updates. Having searched through both RedHat and Fedora web pages, I see no guarantees that security updates will ever be available.
What has kept me using Red Hat for recent years was RHN. I could migrate to Fedora ... but there is no RHN for it. Maybe there is some equivalent, but not a single thing in any press releases or anything I can find on the Fedora web page talks about it.
If I move to Fedora and they decide to stop supporting it, I'm sunk.
Never before in the history of capitalism has a product been produced and given away entirely for free. This is a new concept, and whether or not it's a good thing is still to be seen.
Look at science, a necessary part of capitalism as we know it. Without science, our economy would not be anywhere close to where it is. Science and Open Source resemble one another because there is overlap in thinking and overlap in population. If, instead of open scientific progress, we had each organization doing private research and not publishing results, companies might in the short term make more money -- maybe far more money -- than with public science. However, the long term is much, much better with science open to the public.
The product of information has a long history of being given away for free in capitalism, and capitalism benefits from this cooperation more than it would benefit from the competition that would otherwise replace it.
As one example of Open Source software, in the 21st century should we still be paying a lot of money for the operating system? That's just part of the platform. The cost of hardware has dropped. The cost of fundamentally required software has not. Not really. This doesn't make sense. Software prices do not seem to benefit from the same economies of scale that physically manufactured items benefit from. If Microsoft sells twice as many copies of Office in a year, do you think they will drop the price? No, because it costs them no more and no less to make twice as many boxes, compared to the sale price of those boxes. However, if GM sold twice as many cars, they would drop the price somewhat due to economies of scale. (Unless demand was higher than supply.)
In the day and age where you can spend more on an operating system to run on it than you would spend on a 3.0 GHz processor... something isn't right. This doesn't seem good for the economy. It's only good for the few companies selling the operating systems.
The economy is more efficient when people are employed solving different problems, as opposed to people solving the same problems over and over again at different companies. Open source gives this efficiency as an option.
And yes, in the worst case, a company who spends less on software by using open source might piss away the saved cash. But that money still goes into the economy, either as cash in the economy or as capital. In the worst case, that money goes somewhere other than the tech economy. That is the case where programmers are hurt by "giving it away for free." Talking of locking money out of the economy, what about Microsoft and Sun and certain other tech companies sitting on many billions of dollars? How does that benefit the economy? (Unless indirectly by being saved or invested in a way that provides capital to the economy)
For the computing fundamentals, it makes more sense IMO to pay for support and customization than it does to pay for the operating system, a web browser, a web server, a database server, a file server, and so on. Yes, this changes the tech landscape in a disruptive way, but IMO open source is only hastening this change, not bringing it about. I believe this is good for the economy, but not good for all workers. It's like any other disruptive technological change -- some careers go away or become less prominant, other careers are created.
Last I checked, college kids writing software for free most definitely have an adverse effect on the economy. But if you don't think so, just tell me where you work, and I'll follow you around, offering to your managers to do your job for free.
You're confusing the economy with the jobless rate. By your same argument, factories that automated -- putting people out of work -- had an adverse affect on the economy. At worst, open source turns software from a capital purchase into a commodity. That lowers the amount those companies have to pay for their business needs, so they have more money available to hire.
Thus, it's quite likely that open source will cause jobe to move from this to that, but that doesn't mean it will destroy jobs. And at a time when US (I don't know about other countries) companies are outsourcing to other countries, I don't know that open source is really a cause of high tech unenployment.
What open source does is free up resource in the economy that would otherwise be spent on certain commodity parts -- operating systems, web servers, and so on -- so those resource can instead be spent hiring people to do what the company needs done. It's not like money disappears from the economy. It's just spent elsewhere.
Also, really, open source benefits the economy. Rather than having dozens of companies each having their own internal development trying to rebuild the wheel, they all can share one developement model for the fundamentals of their business and can focus on their real business needs.
In some ways, this is the same effect that public standards have on business. They allow businesses to spend their dollars on what distinguishes them from others. It's more efficient. I opens up money to be spent elsewhere.
When you talk about open source harming the economy, you seem to believe that the money those companies would have spent on employees to do that task has just disappeared. Nope. That have that money available to hire employees to do something else. Like install or customize or mainain that open source application. Or build the custom applications that the business actually cares about.
As a subscriber to the magazine, maybe you can tell us -- is this slant against the GPL a quirk in an otherwise balanced publication? Or do they have several well known biases but are otherwise well balanced. Like JAMA, for example, that has a couple well known and not even disguised biases, but on other topics is a fair and reliable publication.
P.S. They can't give EVERYONE a person ID. Even slashdot's member IDs go higher than 142453. Oh, unless Forbes only gives person IDs to people who matter to the world of business. Hmm. That must be it. Probably well under 1/4 million of those. :)
OSS zealots tend to be a bunch of immature kids.
Yeah, completely unlike other kinds of zealots. (grin) If you remove "OSS" from that sentence it is just as true.
Having read the FA, I can understand why people would shout "TROLL!!!" It's an opinion piece thinly disguised as a news article. I would have thought that when reporting news one wouldn't cast aspersions at or call names of one side of a news story.
I'm not a zealot. (Most of the time!) But I agree with you that zealots of all stripes tend to act like a bunch of immature kids. But you know, it's just part of the definion of "zealot."
I would have thought -- naively -- that Forbes would contain good reporting. But after RTFA I read several other Linux-related stories on their web site. ALL of them were propoganda in the guise of reporting. The kind of things one would find on an editorial page, not on a news page.
Is that considered to be real reporting in the financial world? I hope not. Portraying open source as communism or angry hordes is fine and good for an editorial page or an opinion column. But as news?
And all those gripes about the FSF -- it's the same old complaint of, "Hey, I cannot take the stuff you wrote for free and use it in my proprietary code the way I want to." Well, then, write your own!!! I don't get how that is onorous.
And since when is indemnification a "standard practice"?
How does the DMCA comeinto play whne you are dealing with files that you have permission to mess with?
Hint: It doesn't.
Hmmm. Try telling that to the people who get sued for DECSS when their only use of it is to watch DVDs they have legally purchased.
In addition, many employers will fire anyone accused of using "hacking" tools, regardless of intent.
One of the problems with the DMCA is its wide scope. Intent doesn't really matter for DMCA. If you're caught breaking into your own house with tools that are illegal to possess, you'll still get arrested for possessing those tools. Lock-picking tools are illegal to possess in many areas. The DMCA is similar -- making it illegal to possess certain tools, regardless of your use of those tools.
Which prison do you think Darl will serve his time at?
I would be surprised if there is any prison time for anyone at SCO or any of their lawyers. Especially with the administration in the White House at the moment, where in the post-Enron days the rules for oversight are weaker than they used to be. I would pretty much be surprised if any suits are brought against anyone at SCO, even for the pump & dump. Even for the fairly obvious Microsoft financing of this lawsuit, including Bill's wife running a company that is more or less the only entity purchasing SCO stock, and is thus the corporate entity responsible for SCO stock price being so high.
Remember, in the US, white collar crime is almost never prosecuted. And even when it is, it's often just to make an example of someone so it looks like something is being done.
Invalidation of the GPL would mean that existing GPL'd software could be incorporated into commercial code without restriction or credit to the original author.
No, that's totally wrong. If the GPL is invalidated, the code will not go into the public domain. If an existing license fails, the code goes back to the copyright of each individual author. This means legally no-one could use the code without getting permission from each and every author. If the GPL is invalidated for a given chunk of code, it would become unlicensed, but not public domain. And not unlicensable unless that was a specific condition of the court.
And that would be if the GPL were totally invalidated by this court case, which would stun me. At most, I could see a court decide that the GPL license has been invalidated on a given chunk of kernel code due to abuses. Because, yes, courts periodically make decisions that do not seem to be based in the facts. If the GPL license were invalidated for the kernel due to these alleged abuses, I really doubt that would have any legal consequence to any other GPL licensed product.
As an aside, as others have pointed out, SCO quotes the latest revised version of a license when it is in SCO's favor, but quotes the original AT&T licenses (ignoring later revisions) when that license is in SCO's favor. In a court of law, such logic would not hold up.
And as many lawyers have pointed out, SCO's lawyers would be punished for Barratry if they brought their accusations about the GPL into a court of law. That is, the argument that the GPL is invalid because it tries to superceed the copyright act. That's just silly. If the GPL superceeds the copyright act, then most licenses do so also.
I agree with your statement that we should not be complacent. That just because their arguments are specious -- doesn't mean the court will find against them.
the definition of open and closed universe is not refering to a boundry, or infinite space. [snip] If there is not enough matter (i.e. not enough gravity), the universe will continue expanding at an accelerated rate [snip] The third option, you didn't mention, is where scientists think we are now....a 'flat' universe.
OK, I was speaking imprecisely. You're partly correct. A closed universe is often used to mean a universe that will eventually collapse upon itself.
In all cases, there is (at any moment in time) a finite amount of space. The difference is that in the closed universe you speak of, space will reach a maximum "volume" and will then contract. In the other two cases (flat and open), there is no maximum volume. Space is finite at any moment in time, but the "maximum" is infinite because expansion occurs forever. The difference between "flat" and "open" is that one case is asymptotically flat and in "infinite time" would "stop" expanding, and the other case expands forever. Not accelerating, but not decelerating enough to stop even in infinite time.
The accelerating expansion is a totally different issue -- dark energy. Dark energy (as proposed) can have a negative gravitational influence, thus causing things to move farther apart with increasing velocity. Without dark energy, an open universe would expand forever, but at a decelerating rate.
A "flat" universe is not a very narrow spot on the graph between open and closed. It is a single zero-dimensional point where the mass of the universe exactly balances the expansion. This universe will still expand forever, however.
The whole definition of space expanding does not allow for a "center" of the expansion. For there to be a center, space would have to be expanding into something. That is not the case. Space is simply getting bigger.
By the way, the word "flat" is used to describe the geometry of space. A flat universe is one that is flat geometrically in 3 dimensions in the same way that a flat infinite plane is flat. The other two options are both curved. The "not enough matter" choice is curved hyperbolically, like a horse saddle shape. The other choice is curved in a way that can close in on itself.
Again, using examples of 2-d surfaces embedded in a 3-dimensional space.
Then in 5 years or so when their IP is firmly entrenched in the Gnome/Linux landscape, a swawm of laywers will decend to argue over who actually owns what.
Well, the worst they could do is force licensing fees to use Mono, or force the removal of that work from Linux. They couldn't use that to attack Linux itself unless somehow Mono became an integral aprt of the operating system itself.
I mean, Mono running under Solaris or MacOS certainly wouldn't give Microsoft an in to destroying those platforms.
most advanced software platform in existence
OK, I'll bite. :) Most advanced platform in existence? Isn't that a bit lofty? C#/.Net can be described, accurately, as Microsoft's answer to J2EE. While I'm a pragmatist about this and I find things to admire and things to dislike about both platforms, history still favors J2EE as the better platform.
If Java were just Sun, then .NET would probably quickly become a superior platform. I hate to say this. I like Sun, I dislike Microsoft. But I have to be honest with what I see. However, Java is not just Sun. There is a huge array of open source software for Java. Just tour the Apache software web site and the enormous variety of Java software available so developers don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Microsoft is often better at making software easier to use. They are often better at making software to make making GUI's easy. They are often better at making certain kinds of tools and certain kinds of integration between products.
But to those who think that Open Source is all about copying what others innovate (I'm not accusing anyone in this discussion of that), there are a great many J2SE and J2EE projects out there that disprove that straw man. (I don't know enought about J2ME to speak intelligently.)
In addition to Apache, check out Exolab. These are just a couple of the organizations creating open source J2SE and J2EE solutions. The existence of these sorts of organizations, these projects, brings great power and maturity to Java that .NET doesn't yet have.
I'm learning .NET stuff because I'm pragmatic and there are indeed some very nice features it has. One is the ability to link many languages in a native way rather than having to go through JNI. (shudder)
All of this to say that I have to question not only calling any software platform the "most advanced software platform in existence," but especially the .NET platform which has not yet caught up to J2EE in functionality. Not for web projects at any rate.