Astroturf isn't nearly so offensive when they're admitting to it up front. In fact, it's more like the Turing Test - can you tell the real technophile barfly from the fake one? Of course, I think the odds of running into two women playing wireless Battleship in a bar are pretty low, so the test would be biased in favor of 'shill' - but for other tests it would be kinda fun.
GE once designed a device called the MOOSE, to allow astronauts to bail out from orbit and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere with little more than a space suit and plastic cocoon (remember that early heat shields where basically a big slab of high-temperature plastic that would flake off during re-entry).Here's one link about the MOOSE:
http://www.boggsspace.com/strange_but_true.htm
I believe (on no basis other than my own suspicions) that Bill Gates just wants to be the Alpha Geek of the World. That's all that he's ever wanted, and in fact, if not for UNIX, one could say that he's got it. To every non-geek in the world, he's the Alpha Geek. To a lot of serious geeks, he's the Alpha Geek.
To everyone else, he's just a pathetic loser who never really wrote anything good on his own. He has no 'street cred'. Those people give Bill fits because they force him to confront the ugly truth.
Bill doesn't want to be 'irrelevant', so they come up with Palladium to lock everyone up in MS's monoculture. Maybe once all the competition is legislated out of existence, Bill will finally be able to live comfortably in denial of his own inadequacies.
Oh, sure, there are plenty of business reasons for Palladium - the RIAA and MPAA will love it, it will enforce licensing and increase revenues, yadda yadda. But I don't think that's really what they care about over in Redmond. They already have all the money in the world. Revenues don't mean squat to them. It's the (illusion of) supremacy that MS (and Bill) need.
So what can you do? I say, see MS and Bill for what they are - geek wannabes. What happens when you give billions in revenue to a script kiddie. Pity them. They are not worth your fear.
Because, you know, being seen as pitiful, is what THEY fear.
Ubiquity may imply generic-ness as a 'de-facto public standard'.
If that's the case, MS Office may well already be a generic public standard and the People may be well within their rights to revoke its special protection as a patented, trademarked, or copyrighted entity.
For that matter, this could apply to ANY kind of deliberate technological obfuscation from the CD and DVD 'red book' up through and including all of the MS office file formats and the Win32 API's.
If this were the case, it would provide the safety valve that we need to prevent the growth of dangerous technological institutions without bounds - feel free to make yourself popular, but make yourself UNFAIRLY popular and the People will take back their rights of fair use.
Hey, look at it this way: they're requiring it for MS, Mac, AND Linux. They aren't requiring it for QNX or Irix or whatever. They could easily exclude Linux from the bunch, and they aren't.
Re:You cannot deny GCC is the heart of free softwa
on
The Stallman Factor
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· Score: 1
Would you explain to me, then, what the whole schism was with EGCS and gcc? And which did we end up using?
If that's the case, why not tax crapola like 'Titanic' or real bombs like 'Glitter' and that damn Britney Speares thing? Give THAT money to NASA and put us on Mars with it. There's no point to singling out sci-fi.
Besides, if it's tax money, it will be wasted on pork barrels anyway.
It's bogus to claim that the people who are interested in space should pay more than people who aren't, because we ALL have to pay for EVERYTHING the government does. The government doesn't do only things that everyone likes, or they would never do anything. I shouldn't have to pay more to get the government to do what I want them to do unless everyone else has to do the same.
That means - no tax-exempt status for religions, because people who are anti-religious wouldn't want to pick up the slack for those freeloading churches. No school lunch programs because childless people shouldn't have to pay to feed someone else's kid. No workmen's comp because the working won't see why they have to support the disabled; if they want the government to do it, they can pay for it themselves.
Further, singling out sci-fi as a popular culture for taxation is as crackheaded as singling out simulated kiddie porn because it's intended to give the 'impression' that children appear in it.
And THAT'S why you should care when laws get passed that single out ANY form of freedom of speech, even disgusting forms, because they will come for YOU next. The law doesn't have aesthetics. It cannot and should not be allowed to try to make distinctions about who may speak and how they are to be taxed based on aesthetics - be it a kind of porn, or deciding what 'genre' a story is in.
In case anyone from the labels is listening, I'd much rather pay a quarter (even a dollar) a track to get a song I want and not have to pay ten bucks a CD to get one track I want and twelve that I think totally suck. You may think that's making you more money, but I'd really rather just not spend my money than have to pay for music I don't like.
I just recently spent over an hour in a music store, listening to three CD's that had a grand total of three songs I actually liked, and decided not to buy any of them because at twelve bucks a pop, it wasn't worth it to me.
Your business model is flawed. Remember: just because you're old and rich doesn't mean you're entitled to stay that way. Get with the times or you'll be forced into the past.
The whole conclusion of the DoJ suit was that they'd made their bucks illegaly. If they can't continue to be profitable without adopting a legal business model, that's not our problem. If that means that they're going to lose a whole lot of money, then they damn well should have thought of that before breaking the law. We, the People, don't owe ANYONE a living, much less an illegal monopoly. If they are too lazy and whiny to change, then they don't deserve to be in business. AT&T had to do a lot after 1984, and they're still here today.
Now, I don't know Bill personally, but I did read 'Hackers', and I've seen his mug shot for the Albequerque PD. He may be a serious geek, but if we judge by competence, he's also a LOSING serious geek.
According to 'Hackers', Bill's BASIC program for the MITS Altair was big, slow, bloated, late, didn't work well, and (here's the kicker) required an expensive 4k memory expansion board from MITS that basically didn't work.
Compare to today, where we have Windows , which is... essentially the same, right down to the excessive hardware upgrade treadmill.
The point? Bill's spirit rules the place. Bill hasn't changed. I don't think he's learned ANYTHING in the technology arena except how to muscle it around with money. That's not the same as being a 'serious geek'. Essentially, he IS an MBA who got lucky.
It must be really sad. He's got all the money in the world, but it can't buy him cool points. So he sits there in his billion-dollar house, crying himself to sleep because he's still no closer to the nirvana of technical competence than he was back in 1977.
Software will flourish if Bill learns to accept his inadequacies and stop trying to take over the world.
Capitalism is about building wealth. You are dead-on to say that simply passing money around does not build wealth. I wonder... if we consider that Microsoft's 'wealth' and place in our economy, is a creaky, fragile, sham, then are they anticapitalist? Does that make them UnAmerican? Can we charge them with treason for wrecking our economy?
Just my random, chaotic, stream of consciousness. Make of it what you will.
Obfuscated Source is NOT source
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Source code is the program 'in the preferred format for making changes'.
Obfuscated source, as you propose to distribute, is NOT the 'preferred format for making changes', because your company sure as hell isn't going to hack the messy obfuscated byte code when they need to update their product.
That mess that you intend to distribute may not be called 'source'. That affects how you may or may not use the GPL with respect to it, and I suspect that you probably won't be allowed to do it at all, no matter what 'incidental works' are involved. Your lawyer friend is only telling you half the story.
My short thought on '21st century Marxism' is what's happening with the copyright cartels (MPAA, RIAA). 'You may enjoy our media if you subscribe to our values system - which are Sell Out, Pay per Play, and No Fair Use. Be a Good Little Sheep.'
But that's totally irrelevant here.:) So please feel free to disregard. Maybe we just can't get away from ideology when we're trying to publish or sell bright ideas.
I'm so sick of hearing about how Linux isn't ready for the desktop. 'Digitial hub'? 'Integrated office suite'? By those standards, Windows was never ready for the desktop either! If we follow MS's own argument, their world-dominant desktop OS wasn't and never has been ready!
Microsoft should face up to their own arguments and realize that they've never really been ready for the desktop. Anybody who remembers all the days of fighting with emm386.sys parameters in their config.sys will agree with me here. Those problems lasted will into Windows '95 (which didn't come out until almost 1996) and the office suite didn't really get shoved in until Office '97.
MacOS had an 'integrated office suite' in 1986, maybe even before. They even had Hypercard as an 'application development platform' analogous to the Web with its Java applets and servlets. They had the Apple Desktop Bus before USB was even vaporware. They've been a full decade ahead of the curve and MS has been playing catchup.
By the MS Marketing Machine's own reasoning, we should all use Macs, they've been 'ready for the desktop' better and longer than either Windows or Linux.
Or maybe everyone should get a clue and just use what freaking works for them. I've been running Linux almost exclusively since 1994. It was ready for me eight years ago. It's total BS that MS keeps re-defining what it means to be 'ready for the desktop' and sheey idiocy that the entire industry forgets its own history and eats it all up in a crass feeding frenzy.
I haven't been able to download the document, so I can't comment totally. However, it seems to me like you're right, some of these are putting the cart before the horse.
It's always possible to discover a technology and have it useful before it's understood - consider gunpowder: it was around for hundreds of years in the West - thousands of years in the East - before the advent of modern theories of combustion. Hell, think about fire itself. So it's possible that they might get the Matrix before the 'direct brain link' by other means.
Also... you really can't tell, can you? We can make the future or we can take it on the chin. The people of Rome probably couldn't imagine anything that could come after... but here we are. How many times has this story been retold through history, known and unknown?
Think of how long medievel Europe lasted in the remains of the ruined Roman empire. Charlemagne was still calling it the Holy Roman Empire into the 800's. The Ottoman empire continued into the modern era. 'Kaiser' and 'Czar' both are derived from 'Caesar'. Parts of Hadrian's Wall still stand today.
So what does that all mean? Even if our civilization dies of technological culture shock, something will be left, and someone will survive. Technologically, we've surpassed Rome. Perhaps our civilization has more respect for its people, perhaps not. I like to think that it might.
Perhaps, if we fall victim to our own cleverness, those who come after in a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years, will learn from our mistakes. They'll have another chance to get it right where we failed, and they won't be saddled with 'political correctness' or the DMCA.
I don't think we should be shutting any plants down, either. All I'm saying is, let's not react first to the threat of 'radiation' because it's a big scary word. The bottom line is that everyone wants the benefits of cheap energy but nobody wants the waste products in their own back yard, and it's not as simple as 'Where do we put the fuel rods?'
Just as a matter of note, the water used to cool (American, commercial) reactors does not mix with the water used to moderate the reaction... eg, the water in the cooling towers never passed through the reactor vessel and is not radioactive, did not absorb neutrons, or anything like that.
The water used in the reactor vessel passes through a heat exchanger and transfers the heat to another cooling system, and that's what ends up in the cooling towers. You'll never touch 'steam heated by uranium', it's 'steam heated by other steam'.
Not all reactor designs are so safe. Be glad you live in the US. In former Soviet states, some reactors use liquid sodium as a moderator (at least, they use it in nuclear subs). I don't know all that much about power plants, but I've been told that this is very scary when it breaks.
So forget the radiation, a more immediate effect than radiation is 'thermal pollution' - eg all that heat has to go somewhere, and in coastal areas, putting it back in the ocean basically kills the ecosystem deader than the radiation ever could.
Hazards of an industrial civilization... but most of us would be dead already without it.
It's no big secret that I don't like Stallman.... however, he's had some good ideas and he gave us the GPL, one of the most useful pieces of software of the last 20 years (yes, contracts are software too!)
So why is it that he continually manages to irritate so many people? I think the answer is, you have to think a lot like RMS in order to understand what he's saying... particularly on the first try. As a result, he's prone to miscommunication. He appears confrontational because he frequently speaks his mind in a way that's going to get misinterpreted by everyone else. So is it our fault for not understanding his 'great mind'?
I don't think so. Richard, if you'd just have some respect for other people's 'user interfaces', you'd have a lot fewer problems, and do the community a whole world of good. RMS is not 'intuitive' or 'user friendly' for most of the world. Understanding how people communicate is critical to building effective interfaces to software. It's even more critical as a tool of persuasion. The Free Software community, like it or not, has a public face now, and you're it. Do you really want to keep hurting the community you built?
They can modify the license at any time, sure, but once a license with a particular user has been established, they can't arbitrarily rewrite the contract WITH THAT USER without some exchange of value.
Unlike a lot of service contracts with organizations out to screw the customer, they don't say 'We reserve the right to change this at any time without notice', and I don't think that they can. New users may be forced to accept the new license, and old users will be prevented from upgrading or patching their installations to newer versions, but there is no way that I can see (IANAL) that they could prevent you from checking your code out and using something else (CVS, SCCS, or whatever).
Since Linus (or someone Linus has a deal with) is now one of their customers, it appears that he's secure in the terms of that agreement even in the event of a 'wild hare'.
Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but I am going to get an opinion on this license from an IP lawyer that I know. I'm pretty sure that in the event of a Doomsday Scenario (like MS buys Bitmover and tries to hijack the kernel), the worst that will happen is that they'll get a copy of a bunch of data they could get from ftp.kernel.org anyway, and we'll lose a few days while Linus finds something else.
Remember that Version 1 of the GPL wasn't perfect either, that's why the FSF says to use Version 2 (or later). Perhaps further development of this license will yield a similarly-useful result.
Well, Bitkeeper's license isn't GPL, nor do I think that it's been certified as an 'Open Source' license by Eric Raymond's definition. However, it's got some interesting features that are as interesting and powerful as the GPL, and that even work in the public interest.
You can get it for free (as in beer) and it says that it will revert to GPL if they go out of business (eg, their OpenLogging servers go down for more than 180 days)... which is an interesting clause that ensures that 'abandonware' becomes a public resource.
The one scary part is that you MUST submit metadata to their OpenLogging system, or pay money for a 'closed use' license. Now before you hurl, consider... all open source projects already have all their metadata (and all their source too!) out in the open!
Is this really so bad? People who don't want to share, have to pay... it sounds like it's punishing institutions that don't produce open source with Bitkeeper (individual use is exempt). Richard Stallman might be pleased!
Apart from that, the only other funny part of the license that I see, is you lose your license if you sue BitMover over intellectual property rights. I'm not sure what to make of that, I guess it's a way to cover their own butts. I'd be upset if Microsoft had it in their license, but here, it seems appropriate.
So while they aren't using the GPL or a BSD license or the Artistic license or any other common, popular OSS license, they ARE going out of their way to work with developers and users instead of exploiting them. That's a far cry from Microsoft or even 'linux-friendly' software companies like Oracle. They've found (even more) ways to write software and work with the public, without giving away the shop.
I'd say, on the whole, two thumbs up.
Random Rant on the purpose of Science
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 4, Informative
The lead-in to this story somewhat disturbed me, independant of the content.
Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
The general public is not now, nor has it EVER been, part of the dialogue of Science. Here I mean science as an instution, like banking and marriage is an instition.
The dialogue in science is people publishing papers. These papers are peer-reviewed by other people who also publish and have 'scientific credibility'. Scientific credibility is gained by publishing good papers and having academic credentials. There's a book by Bradley Latour that describes a 'scientific economy' based on credibility.
As such, the general public may be a spectator to the dialogue of science but does not participate, as the 'general public' isn't publishing and therefore isn't part of the economy.
The public gets disappointed when science doesn't live up to claims that they read into the dialogue which is, frankly, not taking place in the Real World anyway, and it's a mistake to expect that it should produce anything the Real World can use.
It's the public that PULLS things from the realm of science, develops expectations, and tries to change the Real World with it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. You can't blame science for those failures.
Now, science isn't perfect. The landscape of debate is subject to bloody revolutions in paradigm, like the changes from Ptolemy to Galileo to Newton to Einsten and beyond. Scientists play politics, too, and sometimes lose their objectivity when reviewing papers for publication. It doesn't change the Real World. Over the last 30 years, there have been a dozen opinions and 'proofs' on whether the Universe will expand forever, collapse in a 'big crunch', or eventually stop and stabilize. So what? Life goes on here on Earth. Nobody's jumping off of buildings because astronomers tell us one day the Sun will swallow the earth (oops... they changed their mind on that one, too! Did anyone notice?)
The usefulness of this review or the book it talks about is diminshed and tarnished for me by such a sensationalistic lead-in. Many, many Slashdot readers are familiar with the division between the general public as users of computer systems, and their own roles as the makers and maintainers of those systems. We never stop bitching about clueless users, 'we' always know better what to expect out of our machines than 'they' do, etc, etc. Ha ha. Very funny.
Stop and think for a minute why that happens. When your users expect things you didn't promise, is it because they read things into your claims you didn't intend? Is that your fault or theirs? Who do they blame for it? Who do YOU blame for it?
It cuts both ways, people. If you don't want science to disappoint you, don't expect it to do things it isn't meant to do. You may play chess better than your cat, but you'd look pretty stupid if your cat asked you to catch a mouse.
So where are the white-hats? I don't like either of these guys, neither has anything but the bottom line at heart, and it's just going to squash a lot of little people. Or result in nothing, like the DoJ lawsuit.
Face it. The US is all but sold to MS. The only thing that's going to bring the Borg down are their own mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Astroturf isn't nearly so offensive when they're admitting to it up front. In fact, it's more like the Turing Test - can you tell the real technophile barfly from the fake one? Of course, I think the odds of running into two women playing wireless Battleship in a bar are pretty low, so the test would be biased in favor of 'shill' - but for other tests it would be kinda fun.
GE once designed a device called the MOOSE, to allow astronauts to bail out from orbit and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere with little more than a space suit and plastic cocoon (remember that early heat shields where basically a big slab of high-temperature plastic that would flake off during re-entry).Here's one link about the MOOSE: http://www.boggsspace.com/strange_but_true.htm
I believe (on no basis other than my own suspicions) that Bill Gates just wants to be the Alpha Geek of the World. That's all that he's ever wanted, and in fact, if not for UNIX, one could say that he's got it. To every non-geek in the world, he's the Alpha Geek. To a lot of serious geeks, he's the Alpha Geek.
To everyone else, he's just a pathetic loser who never really wrote anything good on his own. He has no 'street cred'. Those people give Bill fits because they force him to confront the ugly truth.
Bill doesn't want to be 'irrelevant', so they come up with Palladium to lock everyone up in MS's monoculture. Maybe once all the competition is legislated out of existence, Bill will finally be able to live comfortably in denial of his own inadequacies.
Oh, sure, there are plenty of business reasons for Palladium - the RIAA and MPAA will love it, it will enforce licensing and increase revenues, yadda yadda. But I don't think that's really what they care about over in Redmond. They already have all the money in the world. Revenues don't mean squat to them. It's the (illusion of) supremacy that MS (and Bill) need.
So what can you do? I say, see MS and Bill for what they are - geek wannabes. What happens when you give billions in revenue to a script kiddie. Pity them. They are not worth your fear.
Because, you know, being seen as pitiful, is what THEY fear.
Monopolies imply ubiquity.
Ubiquity may imply generic-ness as a 'de-facto public standard'.
If that's the case, MS Office may well already be a generic public standard and the People may be well within their rights to revoke its special protection as a patented, trademarked, or copyrighted entity.
For that matter, this could apply to ANY kind of deliberate technological obfuscation from the CD and DVD 'red book' up through and including all of the MS office file formats and the Win32 API's.
If this were the case, it would provide the safety valve that we need to prevent the growth of dangerous technological institutions without bounds - feel free to make yourself popular, but make yourself UNFAIRLY popular and the People will take back their rights of fair use.
Hey, look at it this way: they're requiring it for MS, Mac, AND Linux. They aren't requiring it for QNX or Irix or whatever. They could easily exclude Linux from the bunch, and they aren't.
Would you explain to me, then, what the whole schism was with EGCS and gcc? And which did we end up using?
If that's the case, why not tax crapola like 'Titanic' or real bombs like 'Glitter' and that damn Britney Speares thing? Give THAT money to NASA and put us on Mars with it. There's no point to singling out sci-fi.
Besides, if it's tax money, it will be wasted on pork barrels anyway.
It's bogus to claim that the people who are interested in space should pay more than people who aren't, because we ALL have to pay for EVERYTHING the government does. The government doesn't do only things that everyone likes, or they would never do anything. I shouldn't have to pay more to get the government to do what I want them to do unless everyone else has to do the same.
That means - no tax-exempt status for religions, because people who are anti-religious wouldn't want to pick up the slack for those freeloading churches. No school lunch programs because childless people shouldn't have to pay to feed someone else's kid. No workmen's comp because the working won't see why they have to support the disabled; if they want the government to do it, they can pay for it themselves.
Further, singling out sci-fi as a popular culture for taxation is as crackheaded as singling out simulated kiddie porn because it's intended to give the 'impression' that children appear in it.
And THAT'S why you should care when laws get passed that single out ANY form of freedom of speech, even disgusting forms, because they will come for YOU next. The law doesn't have aesthetics. It cannot and should not be allowed to try to make distinctions about who may speak and how they are to be taxed based on aesthetics - be it a kind of porn, or deciding what 'genre' a story is in.
In case anyone from the labels is listening, I'd much rather pay a quarter (even a dollar) a track to get a song I want and not have to pay ten bucks a CD to get one track I want and twelve that I think totally suck. You may think that's making you more money, but I'd really rather just not spend my money than have to pay for music I don't like.
I just recently spent over an hour in a music store, listening to three CD's that had a grand total of three songs I actually liked, and decided not to buy any of them because at twelve bucks a pop, it wasn't worth it to me.
Your business model is flawed. Remember: just because you're old and rich doesn't mean you're entitled to stay that way. Get with the times or you'll be forced into the past.
The whole conclusion of the DoJ suit was that they'd made their bucks illegaly. If they can't continue to be profitable without adopting a legal business model, that's not our problem. If that means that they're going to lose a whole lot of money, then they damn well should have thought of that before breaking the law. We, the People, don't owe ANYONE a living, much less an illegal monopoly. If they are too lazy and whiny to change, then they don't deserve to be in business. AT&T had to do a lot after 1984, and they're still here today.
Now, I don't know Bill personally, but I did read 'Hackers', and I've seen his mug shot for the Albequerque PD. He may be a serious geek, but if we judge by competence, he's also a LOSING serious geek.
According to 'Hackers', Bill's BASIC program for the MITS Altair was big, slow, bloated, late, didn't work well, and (here's the kicker) required an expensive 4k memory expansion board from MITS that basically didn't work.
Compare to today, where we have Windows , which is... essentially the same, right down to the excessive hardware upgrade treadmill.
The point? Bill's spirit rules the place. Bill hasn't changed. I don't think he's learned ANYTHING in the technology arena except how to muscle it around with money. That's not the same as being a 'serious geek'. Essentially, he IS an MBA who got lucky.
It must be really sad. He's got all the money in the world, but it can't buy him cool points. So he sits there in his billion-dollar house, crying himself to sleep because he's still no closer to the nirvana of technical competence than he was back in 1977.
Software will flourish if Bill learns to accept his inadequacies and stop trying to take over the world.
Capitalism is about building wealth. You are dead-on to say that simply passing money around does not build wealth. I wonder... if we consider that Microsoft's 'wealth' and place in our economy, is a creaky, fragile, sham, then are they anticapitalist? Does that make them UnAmerican? Can we charge them with treason for wrecking our economy?
Just my random, chaotic, stream of consciousness. Make of it what you will.
Source code is the program 'in the preferred format for making changes'.
Obfuscated source, as you propose to distribute, is NOT the 'preferred format for making changes', because your company sure as hell isn't going to hack the messy obfuscated byte code when they need to update their product.
That mess that you intend to distribute may not be called 'source'. That affects how you may or may not use the GPL with respect to it, and I suspect that you probably won't be allowed to do it at all, no matter what 'incidental works' are involved. Your lawyer friend is only telling you half the story.
My short thought on '21st century Marxism' is what's happening with the copyright cartels (MPAA, RIAA). 'You may enjoy our media if you subscribe to our values system - which are Sell Out, Pay per Play, and No Fair Use. Be a Good Little Sheep.'
:) So please feel free to disregard. Maybe we just can't get away from ideology when we're trying to publish or sell bright ideas.
But that's totally irrelevant here.
I'm so sick of hearing about how Linux isn't ready for the desktop. 'Digitial hub'? 'Integrated office suite'? By those standards, Windows was never ready for the desktop either! If we follow MS's own argument, their world-dominant desktop OS wasn't and never has been ready!
Microsoft should face up to their own arguments and realize that they've never really been ready for the desktop. Anybody who remembers all the days of fighting with emm386.sys parameters in their config.sys will agree with me here. Those problems lasted will into Windows '95 (which didn't come out until almost 1996) and the office suite didn't really get shoved in until Office '97.
MacOS had an 'integrated office suite' in 1986, maybe even before. They even had Hypercard as an 'application development platform' analogous to the Web with its Java applets and servlets. They had the Apple Desktop Bus before USB was even vaporware. They've been a full decade ahead of the curve and MS has been playing catchup.
By the MS Marketing Machine's own reasoning, we should all use Macs, they've been 'ready for the desktop' better and longer than either Windows or Linux.
Or maybe everyone should get a clue and just use what freaking works for them. I've been running Linux almost exclusively since 1994. It was ready for me eight years ago. It's total BS that MS keeps re-defining what it means to be 'ready for the desktop' and sheey idiocy that the entire industry forgets its own history and eats it all up in a crass feeding frenzy.
I haven't been able to download the document, so I can't comment totally. However, it seems to me like you're right, some of these are putting the cart before the horse.
It's always possible to discover a technology and have it useful before it's understood - consider gunpowder: it was around for hundreds of years in the West - thousands of years in the East - before the advent of modern theories of combustion. Hell, think about fire itself. So it's possible that they might get the Matrix before the 'direct brain link' by other means.
Also... you really can't tell, can you? We can make the future or we can take it on the chin. The people of Rome probably couldn't imagine anything that could come after... but here we are. How many times has this story been retold through history, known and unknown?
Think of how long medievel Europe lasted in the remains of the ruined Roman empire. Charlemagne was still calling it the Holy Roman Empire into the 800's. The Ottoman empire continued into the modern era. 'Kaiser' and 'Czar' both are derived from 'Caesar'. Parts of Hadrian's Wall still stand today.
So what does that all mean? Even if our civilization dies of technological culture shock, something will be left, and someone will survive. Technologically, we've surpassed Rome. Perhaps our civilization has more respect for its people, perhaps not. I like to think that it might.
Perhaps, if we fall victim to our own cleverness, those who come after in a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years, will learn from our mistakes. They'll have another chance to get it right where we failed, and they won't be saddled with 'political correctness' or the DMCA.
I don't think we should be shutting any plants down, either. All I'm saying is, let's not react first to the threat of 'radiation' because it's a big scary word. The bottom line is that everyone wants the benefits of cheap energy but nobody wants the waste products in their own back yard, and it's not as simple as 'Where do we put the fuel rods?'
Are you sure posting this is a good idea? Now Slashdot is a distribution channel for illegal circumvention devices, which is a terrorist act.
They'll be coming after YOU next.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Just as a matter of note, the water used to cool (American, commercial) reactors does not mix with the water used to moderate the reaction... eg, the water in the cooling towers never passed through the reactor vessel and is not radioactive, did not absorb neutrons, or anything like that.
The water used in the reactor vessel passes through a heat exchanger and transfers the heat to another cooling system, and that's what ends up in the cooling towers. You'll never touch 'steam heated by uranium', it's 'steam heated by other steam'.
Not all reactor designs are so safe. Be glad you live in the US. In former Soviet states, some reactors use liquid sodium as a moderator (at least, they use it in nuclear subs). I don't know all that much about power plants, but I've been told that this is very scary when it breaks.
So forget the radiation, a more immediate effect than radiation is 'thermal pollution' - eg all that heat has to go somewhere, and in coastal areas, putting it back in the ocean basically kills the ecosystem deader than the radiation ever could.
Hazards of an industrial civilization... but most of us would be dead already without it.
Heh. You have a point.
It's no big secret that I don't like Stallman.... however, he's had some good ideas and he gave us the GPL, one of the most useful pieces of software of the last 20 years (yes, contracts are software too!)
So why is it that he continually manages to irritate so many people? I think the answer is, you have to think a lot like RMS in order to understand what he's saying... particularly on the first try. As a result, he's prone to miscommunication. He appears confrontational because he frequently speaks his mind in a way that's going to get misinterpreted by everyone else. So is it our fault for not understanding his 'great mind'?
I don't think so. Richard, if you'd just have some respect for other people's 'user interfaces', you'd have a lot fewer problems, and do the community a whole world of good. RMS is not 'intuitive' or 'user friendly' for most of the world. Understanding how people communicate is critical to building effective interfaces to software. It's even more critical as a tool of persuasion. The Free Software community, like it or not, has a public face now, and you're it. Do you really want to keep hurting the community you built?
They can modify the license at any time, sure, but once a license with a particular user has been established, they can't arbitrarily rewrite the contract WITH THAT USER without some exchange of value.
Unlike a lot of service contracts with organizations out to screw the customer, they don't say 'We reserve the right to change this at any time without notice', and I don't think that they can. New users may be forced to accept the new license, and old users will be prevented from upgrading or patching their installations to newer versions, but there is no way that I can see (IANAL) that they could prevent you from checking your code out and using something else (CVS, SCCS, or whatever).
Since Linus (or someone Linus has a deal with) is now one of their customers, it appears that he's secure in the terms of that agreement even in the event of a 'wild hare'.
Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but I am going to get an opinion on this license from an IP lawyer that I know. I'm pretty sure that in the event of a Doomsday Scenario (like MS buys Bitmover and tries to hijack the kernel), the worst that will happen is that they'll get a copy of a bunch of data they could get from ftp.kernel.org anyway, and we'll lose a few days while Linus finds something else.
Remember that Version 1 of the GPL wasn't perfect either, that's why the FSF says to use Version 2 (or later). Perhaps further development of this license will yield a similarly-useful result.
(IANAL)
Well, Bitkeeper's license isn't GPL, nor do I think that it's been certified as an 'Open Source' license by Eric Raymond's definition. However, it's got some interesting features that are as interesting and powerful as the GPL, and that even work in the public interest.
You can get it for free (as in beer) and it says that it will revert to GPL if they go out of business (eg, their OpenLogging servers go down for more than 180 days)... which is an interesting clause that ensures that 'abandonware' becomes a public resource.
The one scary part is that you MUST submit metadata to their OpenLogging system, or pay money for a 'closed use' license. Now before you hurl, consider... all open source projects already have all their metadata (and all their source too!) out in the open!
Is this really so bad? People who don't want to share, have to pay... it sounds like it's punishing institutions that don't produce open source with Bitkeeper (individual use is exempt). Richard Stallman might be pleased!
Apart from that, the only other funny part of the license that I see, is you lose your license if you sue BitMover over intellectual property rights. I'm not sure what to make of that, I guess it's a way to cover their own butts. I'd be upset if Microsoft had it in their license, but here, it seems appropriate.
So while they aren't using the GPL or a BSD license or the Artistic license or any other common, popular OSS license, they ARE going out of their way to work with developers and users instead of exploiting them. That's a far cry from Microsoft or even 'linux-friendly' software companies like Oracle. They've found (even more) ways to write software and work with the public, without giving away the shop.
I'd say, on the whole, two thumbs up.
The general public is not now, nor has it EVER been, part of the dialogue of Science. Here I mean science as an instution, like banking and marriage is an instition.
The dialogue in science is people publishing papers. These papers are peer-reviewed by other people who also publish and have 'scientific credibility'. Scientific credibility is gained by publishing good papers and having academic credentials. There's a book by Bradley Latour that describes a 'scientific economy' based on credibility.
As such, the general public may be a spectator to the dialogue of science but does not participate, as the 'general public' isn't publishing and therefore isn't part of the economy.
The public gets disappointed when science doesn't live up to claims that they read into the dialogue which is, frankly, not taking place in the Real World anyway, and it's a mistake to expect that it should produce anything the Real World can use.
It's the public that PULLS things from the realm of science, develops expectations, and tries to change the Real World with it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. You can't blame science for those failures.
Now, science isn't perfect. The landscape of debate is subject to bloody revolutions in paradigm, like the changes from Ptolemy to Galileo to Newton to Einsten and beyond. Scientists play politics, too, and sometimes lose their objectivity when reviewing papers for publication. It doesn't change the Real World. Over the last 30 years, there have been a dozen opinions and 'proofs' on whether the Universe will expand forever, collapse in a 'big crunch', or eventually stop and stabilize. So what? Life goes on here on Earth. Nobody's jumping off of buildings because astronomers tell us one day the Sun will swallow the earth (oops... they changed their mind on that one, too! Did anyone notice?)
The usefulness of this review or the book it talks about is diminshed and tarnished for me by such a sensationalistic lead-in. Many, many Slashdot readers are familiar with the division between the general public as users of computer systems, and their own roles as the makers and maintainers of those systems. We never stop bitching about clueless users, 'we' always know better what to expect out of our machines than 'they' do, etc, etc. Ha ha. Very funny.
Stop and think for a minute why that happens. When your users expect things you didn't promise, is it because they read things into your claims you didn't intend? Is that your fault or theirs? Who do they blame for it? Who do YOU blame for it?
It cuts both ways, people. If you don't want science to disappoint you, don't expect it to do things it isn't meant to do. You may play chess better than your cat, but you'd look pretty stupid if your cat asked you to catch a mouse.
So where are the white-hats? I don't like either of these guys, neither has anything but the bottom line at heart, and it's just going to squash a lot of little people. Or result in nothing, like the DoJ lawsuit.
Face it. The US is all but sold to MS. The only thing that's going to bring the Borg down are their own mistakes.