Probably a while. But it will probably happen. Broken font rendering implementations are widespread - you can completely hose MacOS if you load a font with bogus data in it. Chances are there's a way to turn that into an exploit, but nobody's bothered in the past because there's no easy way to stuff a font down the computer's throat over the internet.
You're mistaken. You own the software. Whether it's BSD or GPL, you can sell it, because you own it (presuming, of course, that you actually wrote it yourself). The difference is that with BSD, if you ever release the source code (and if you didn't, who cares what license you use on it in-house?), anybody else can *also* sell it as a closed-source product.
With the GPL, they have to sell it as open source. It doesn't mean no-one will sell it, but for whatever reason a lot of companies are uncomfortable turning GPL software into a product, presumably because they have to release their own work. So, as it turns out, you can make a pretty nice living using a dual-license model, where you sell binaries, but you give away source.
No, that's not the answer. The answer is that they were a really big company, and were able to sell it through an existing sales channel alongside products that were already well-established. We do just fine selling our closed-source product - the fact that we weren't competing against a well-funded, established company selling the same thing allowed us to build our own sales channel and establish our own relationships.
It's nice that you have so much faith in the free market, but actually your conclusion is a tautology. Profitable ideas sell? Right. That's why you can call them profitable.
Generally speaking, massive patches are more trouble than they're worth. And I don't think it's reasonable to think that a small patch ought to get you a cut. From my own experience, a bug report is much, much less trouble than a patch, particularly if it's repeatable. Of course, once you have a repeatable bug, you're so close to writing a patch that the difference is trivial, but emotionally someone submitting a bug report is a lot less likely to be attached to owning what they did.
If you mean having your code used unknowingly by as many people as possible, without them having the ability to customize it, sure. Personally, I actually care that people be able to customize the code, even though very few choose to do so. To me, the right to tinker is *much* more important than the right to consume. And unfortunately the BSD license does not preserve the right to tinker.
I don't know if I'd necessarily call you a moron, but you were definitely mistaken. Open source developers do it because it works for them, not because they want to wear a hair shirt.
I don't have any complaints about the open source software I wrote that you probably use, because I did actually get some recognition for it. But we could never make money at it, because it was licensed under the BSD license. If I had it to do over again, there's no way I'd release it under the BSD license - what that meant was that all the open source people flamed me for not GPLing it, and the corporations took it and submarined it into their products, which they then sold in competition with the company that was paying me to write the software, so that despite having the best DHCP client and server at the time, we never made a penny on it.
Unfortunately my company went to closed-source rather than GPL, but after that experience I can't really blame them. So when I read Zed's rant, I was singing "right on, brother" the whole time.
Hm, that came off a little angrier than I intended. I think it would have been nuts for OpenMoko to continue supporting the Neo after they came out with the new model. But they made a lot of bad choices from the start, focusing on bells and whistles before they had basic phone functionality working, and consequently I just didn't have enough faith in them to be willing to drop another $400 on a phone that might work, sort of, someday. I think what they tried to do was brilliant, and I only wish they'd succeeded. It's always easy to second-guess in retrospect.
The problem with the OpenMoko was that it didn't work. And because there was no software to drive it when it was first released, nobody knew it didn't work until after they'd bought one. I have one in a box under Andrea's marimba. I really wish I could have gotten it to work, but there were bugs in the hardware, and when they released the new hardware they dropped any further support for the old hardware which, while broken, could have been made to work enough to still be useful. That was when I bought my iPhone.
The iPhone is the first cell phone I've owned that I wasn't desperate to get rid of within months of purchase. It's the first one that actually does what it promises to do. Despite being annoyingly locked up by Apple, it's so much less locked up than any other cell phone I've had the misfortune to own that the fact that it's locked up doesn't bother me much. Since most cell phone providers do their best to get the terms of purchase of any phone you buy to just below your threshold of disgust, something that's substantially below the threshold of disgust feels revolutionary.
Call it a metaphor, call it an illustrating example. The main reason I felt it was not a good example is that doing what the Planck telescope *actually* does is a lot more impressive to me than detecting a rabbit on the moon. The rabbit is so close it might as well be in your living room.
Perhaps both jobs are equally difficult, but mapping variances in the cosmic background radiation to a millionth of a degree kicks ass. Taking snapshots of the energizer bunny on the moon is boring by comparison.
Presumably the rabbit is protected somehow, or else it wouldn't be sitting. Of course, that protection would probably smooth out the variance in the amount of energy being radiated, and so make the measurement process more interesting...
Er, no. The variation in temperature between the rabbit and its surroundings is substantial. The variance being measured in the microwave background are tiny. The distinction between heat and temperature here doesn't matter (or if it does, you haven't yet explained why).
A rabbit sitting on the moon will be at a much different temperature than its surroundings, not a millionth of a degree kelvin. The only thing interesting about measuring the temperature of a rabbit on the moon is resolution, not sensitivity. So essentially completely the opposite of what the Planck telescope does.
Sorry, just had to release my inner pedant - this was too good to resist.
Er, no. HTML is meant to render at arbitrary sizes. The term "page" doesn't mean anything in that context. You don't need to convince "every author in the world" of anything - just convince the ones who are using HTML as their publication medium. Or use my other suggestion - paragraph identification metadata.
The ability to cite an HTML document is something that would indeed be useful. The ability to hard code page numbers into an HTML document isn't. The reason why academia and the press have been so resistant to HTML, historically, is that you don't get any control over page layout. Which means that you can't refer to things by page number.
The solution isn't to fix HTML so that you can number pages. It is to fix the bibliographic references to not use page numbers. Generally speaking, it's not hard to number documents by section, and you can make the numbering fine-grained enough for bibliographic references. Then refer to the chapter and section, rather than the page number in your bibliography, and you're done. No need to "fix" HTML.
It might make sense to ID paragraphs in HTML, so that you could simply refer to the paragraph ID in your bibliography. If this were simply document metadata, and didn't have anything to do with layout, it would work pretty well. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to renumber, because the ID would just be an arbitrary cookie, and wouldn't need to make sense to a human.
Of course, with hypertext, there's really no need for a bibliography anyway. Just link to the text you're referencing... But I realize that that's impractical in academia at the moment. I'm just saying...
I ask because that sounds like a horrible job. You might be better off moving to a cheaper place and getting a job as a barista.
However, if that solution doesn't work, then the next question is, is there a public transit option that will get you most of the way there in one ride? If so, get a folding bike, and ride to and from the transit option. You can chill while you're riding, so you won't have to unwind when you get home. Even if the public transit option takes longer, it may be worth it because you'll spend less time decompressing, and you won't be in that amped-up driving state of mind at the beginning and end of your work day.
I have a tikit from bike friday, and I love it.
Don't listen to the people who tell you that you should just make time for exercise. You wouldn't be asking us for help if that were true. I can never get psyched up to exercise for no reason other than to stay in shape, so I can relate. Figure out a way to work the exercise into your life, and you'll do it. Otherwise it'll fall by the wayside when things get busy which, it sounds like, they are.
Seriously? Most of his arguments are based on nonsense. E.g., there was wide speculation in the press and among alarmists that global warming was contributing to a different hurricane cycle, but this was a relatively new theory that was not widely accepted. He uses the uncertainty over this theory as a justification to cast doubt on global warming theory; whether global warming theory is right or wrong, this is just bad logic. It is however an excellent propaganda technique. I don't like propagandists, and I tend to assume that they're lying, so when I see someone using a propaganda tactic, that discredits them in my eyes.
He says the Greenland ice sheet isn't melting. It is, and faster than predicted, because people assumed the melt water would flow over the top of the ice sheet, when in fact it turns out that it's been flowing under the ice sheet.
He draws conclusions based on the notion that greenhouse gas concentration and global temperature are directly linked, meaning that if one increases we should observe an increase in the other, of the same degree. The atmosphere is a complex dynamic system, not an erlenmeyer flask. Drawing conclusions about the atmosphere based on what you learn playing with reagents in an erlenmeyer flask is the naive mistake of a person who thinks they know more than they do.
The first paragraph in the document sets out as its motivation that "the EPA might be blamed" if the conclusions of the IPCC report turn out to be wrong. This is just a fucked-up motivation for any "scientific" paper. The motivation for doing science is to figure out what's going on, not to avoid blame if you happen to be mistaken.
Actually, the introduction to the paper mainly makes him sound like a bureaucratic drone, precisely what you're claiming he isn't. Maybe he's still working because he needs the money, or enjoys having access, or whatever, but the bottom line is that this paper looks like it should never have escaped from the bowels of the EPA, and it looks like they were right to squash it.
How does global warming suggest that humans are evil? If you want evidence of evil humans, go to a war zone. Global warming is just a problem that, if we agree that it exists (and a preponderance of qualified students of the environment do so agree), needs to be addressed. Failing to address it would be stupid, and potentially fatal, but not evil.
The EPA is not a scientific body of climate scientists. They do employ climate scientists, but their bailiwick extends far beyond that, and indeed until recently they hadn't done any regulation relating to climate - they had been concentrating on clean air, clean water, stuff like that. So no, the fact that you've worked at the EPA for 40 years does not automatically make you qualified to render opinions on climate science. Statistically, it's very unlikely that a person would develop that particular skill set as a result of working at the EPA.
Yeah, it's just shocking that these scientists are so astoundingly incompetent that they don't take into account stuff like this. I mean, that sensor! They never found it! That's why we know about its failure. Er. Wait. No.
Actually, you've got to like having a government salary and benefits. The guy's longevity at the agency says nothing of his competence as a scientist. His lack of a PhD in atmospheric science also says nothing. The fact is that we have no reason to assume this guy is qualified. So the best thing to do is to read his paper. Which, by the way, makes him look like a loon.
...now clean it up. I know that sounds a bit harsh, but why do people expect government to be any different than anything else? In order for it to work well, it requires maintenance. You're basically asking that some country that's been properly maintained allow you in, even though you've demonstrated your inability to maintain the government you have now. In addition to being a bit unfair, that's pretty defeatist. The U.K. is not unsalvageable, but if everybody with sense leaves, it will be. Your proposed actions do not scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Probably the leaked documents contain child porn or something.
Probably a while. But it will probably happen. Broken font rendering implementations are widespread - you can completely hose MacOS if you load a font with bogus data in it. Chances are there's a way to turn that into an exploit, but nobody's bothered in the past because there's no easy way to stuff a font down the computer's throat over the internet.
You're mistaken. You own the software. Whether it's BSD or GPL, you can sell it, because you own it (presuming, of course, that you actually wrote it yourself). The difference is that with BSD, if you ever release the source code (and if you didn't, who cares what license you use on it in-house?), anybody else can *also* sell it as a closed-source product.
With the GPL, they have to sell it as open source. It doesn't mean no-one will sell it, but for whatever reason a lot of companies are uncomfortable turning GPL software into a product, presumably because they have to release their own work. So, as it turns out, you can make a pretty nice living using a dual-license model, where you sell binaries, but you give away source.
No, that's not the answer. The answer is that they were a really big company, and were able to sell it through an existing sales channel alongside products that were already well-established. We do just fine selling our closed-source product - the fact that we weren't competing against a well-funded, established company selling the same thing allowed us to build our own sales channel and establish our own relationships.
It's nice that you have so much faith in the free market, but actually your conclusion is a tautology. Profitable ideas sell? Right. That's why you can call them profitable.
Narh, you just made it impossible for anybody with a giant ego to contribute back. Which is a blessing in disguise.
Generally speaking, massive patches are more trouble than they're worth. And I don't think it's reasonable to think that a small patch ought to get you a cut. From my own experience, a bug report is much, much less trouble than a patch, particularly if it's repeatable. Of course, once you have a repeatable bug, you're so close to writing a patch that the difference is trivial, but emotionally someone submitting a bug report is a lot less likely to be attached to owning what they did.
If you mean having your code used unknowingly by as many people as possible, without them having the ability to customize it, sure. Personally, I actually care that people be able to customize the code, even though very few choose to do so. To me, the right to tinker is *much* more important than the right to consume. And unfortunately the BSD license does not preserve the right to tinker.
I don't know if I'd necessarily call you a moron, but you were definitely mistaken. Open source developers do it because it works for them, not because they want to wear a hair shirt.
I don't have any complaints about the open source software I wrote that you probably use, because I did actually get some recognition for it. But we could never make money at it, because it was licensed under the BSD license. If I had it to do over again, there's no way I'd release it under the BSD license - what that meant was that all the open source people flamed me for not GPLing it, and the corporations took it and submarined it into their products, which they then sold in competition with the company that was paying me to write the software, so that despite having the best DHCP client and server at the time, we never made a penny on it.
Unfortunately my company went to closed-source rather than GPL, but after that experience I can't really blame them. So when I read Zed's rant, I was singing "right on, brother" the whole time.
Hm, that came off a little angrier than I intended. I think it would have been nuts for OpenMoko to continue supporting the Neo after they came out with the new model. But they made a lot of bad choices from the start, focusing on bells and whistles before they had basic phone functionality working, and consequently I just didn't have enough faith in them to be willing to drop another $400 on a phone that might work, sort of, someday. I think what they tried to do was brilliant, and I only wish they'd succeeded. It's always easy to second-guess in retrospect.
The problem with the OpenMoko was that it didn't work. And because there was no software to drive it when it was first released, nobody knew it didn't work until after they'd bought one. I have one in a box under Andrea's marimba. I really wish I could have gotten it to work, but there were bugs in the hardware, and when they released the new hardware they dropped any further support for the old hardware which, while broken, could have been made to work enough to still be useful. That was when I bought my iPhone.
The iPhone is the first cell phone I've owned that I wasn't desperate to get rid of within months of purchase. It's the first one that actually does what it promises to do. Despite being annoyingly locked up by Apple, it's so much less locked up than any other cell phone I've had the misfortune to own that the fact that it's locked up doesn't bother me much. Since most cell phone providers do their best to get the terms of purchase of any phone you buy to just below your threshold of disgust, something that's substantially below the threshold of disgust feels revolutionary.
Call it a metaphor, call it an illustrating example. The main reason I felt it was not a good example is that doing what the Planck telescope *actually* does is a lot more impressive to me than detecting a rabbit on the moon. The rabbit is so close it might as well be in your living room.
Perhaps both jobs are equally difficult, but mapping variances in the cosmic background radiation to a millionth of a degree kicks ass. Taking snapshots of the energizer bunny on the moon is boring by comparison.
Presumably the rabbit is protected somehow, or else it wouldn't be sitting. Of course, that protection would probably smooth out the variance in the amount of energy being radiated, and so make the measurement process more interesting...
Er, no. The variation in temperature between the rabbit and its surroundings is substantial. The variance being measured in the microwave background are tiny. The distinction between heat and temperature here doesn't matter (or if it does, you haven't yet explained why).
A rabbit sitting on the moon will be at a much different temperature than its surroundings, not a millionth of a degree kelvin. The only thing interesting about measuring the temperature of a rabbit on the moon is resolution, not sensitivity. So essentially completely the opposite of what the Planck telescope does.
Sorry, just had to release my inner pedant - this was too good to resist.
Er, no. HTML is meant to render at arbitrary sizes. The term "page" doesn't mean anything in that context. You don't need to convince "every author in the world" of anything - just convince the ones who are using HTML as their publication medium. Or use my other suggestion - paragraph identification metadata.
The ability to cite an HTML document is something that would indeed be useful. The ability to hard code page numbers into an HTML document isn't. The reason why academia and the press have been so resistant to HTML, historically, is that you don't get any control over page layout. Which means that you can't refer to things by page number.
The solution isn't to fix HTML so that you can number pages. It is to fix the bibliographic references to not use page numbers. Generally speaking, it's not hard to number documents by section, and you can make the numbering fine-grained enough for bibliographic references. Then refer to the chapter and section, rather than the page number in your bibliography, and you're done. No need to "fix" HTML.
It might make sense to ID paragraphs in HTML, so that you could simply refer to the paragraph ID in your bibliography. If this were simply document metadata, and didn't have anything to do with layout, it would work pretty well. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to renumber, because the ID would just be an arbitrary cookie, and wouldn't need to make sense to a human.
Of course, with hypertext, there's really no need for a bibliography anyway. Just link to the text you're referencing... But I realize that that's impractical in academia at the moment. I'm just saying...
I ask because that sounds like a horrible job. You might be better off moving to a cheaper place and getting a job as a barista.
However, if that solution doesn't work, then the next question is, is there a public transit option that will get you most of the way there in one ride? If so, get a folding bike, and ride to and from the transit option. You can chill while you're riding, so you won't have to unwind when you get home. Even if the public transit option takes longer, it may be worth it because you'll spend less time decompressing, and you won't be in that amped-up driving state of mind at the beginning and end of your work day.
I have a tikit from bike friday, and I love it.
Don't listen to the people who tell you that you should just make time for exercise. You wouldn't be asking us for help if that were true. I can never get psyched up to exercise for no reason other than to stay in shape, so I can relate. Figure out a way to work the exercise into your life, and you'll do it. Otherwise it'll fall by the wayside when things get busy which, it sounds like, they are.
Seriously? Most of his arguments are based on nonsense. E.g., there was wide speculation in the press and among alarmists that global warming was contributing to a different hurricane cycle, but this was a relatively new theory that was not widely accepted. He uses the uncertainty over this theory as a justification to cast doubt on global warming theory; whether global warming theory is right or wrong, this is just bad logic. It is however an excellent propaganda technique. I don't like propagandists, and I tend to assume that they're lying, so when I see someone using a propaganda tactic, that discredits them in my eyes.
He says the Greenland ice sheet isn't melting. It is, and faster than predicted, because people assumed the melt water would flow over the top of the ice sheet, when in fact it turns out that it's been flowing under the ice sheet.
He draws conclusions based on the notion that greenhouse gas concentration and global temperature are directly linked, meaning that if one increases we should observe an increase in the other, of the same degree. The atmosphere is a complex dynamic system, not an erlenmeyer flask. Drawing conclusions about the atmosphere based on what you learn playing with reagents in an erlenmeyer flask is the naive mistake of a person who thinks they know more than they do.
The first paragraph in the document sets out as its motivation that "the EPA might be blamed" if the conclusions of the IPCC report turn out to be wrong. This is just a fucked-up motivation for any "scientific" paper. The motivation for doing science is to figure out what's going on, not to avoid blame if you happen to be mistaken.
Actually, the introduction to the paper mainly makes him sound like a bureaucratic drone, precisely what you're claiming he isn't. Maybe he's still working because he needs the money, or enjoys having access, or whatever, but the bottom line is that this paper looks like it should never have escaped from the bowels of the EPA, and it looks like they were right to squash it.
How does global warming suggest that humans are evil? If you want evidence of evil humans, go to a war zone. Global warming is just a problem that, if we agree that it exists (and a preponderance of qualified students of the environment do so agree), needs to be addressed. Failing to address it would be stupid, and potentially fatal, but not evil.
The EPA is not a scientific body of climate scientists. They do employ climate scientists, but their bailiwick extends far beyond that, and indeed until recently they hadn't done any regulation relating to climate - they had been concentrating on clean air, clean water, stuff like that. So no, the fact that you've worked at the EPA for 40 years does not automatically make you qualified to render opinions on climate science. Statistically, it's very unlikely that a person would develop that particular skill set as a result of working at the EPA.
Yeah, it's just shocking that these scientists are so astoundingly incompetent that they don't take into account stuff like this. I mean, that sensor! They never found it! That's why we know about its failure. Er. Wait. No.
If he were the lead guitarist in a rock band, that also wouldn't make him automatically wrong. What's your point?
Actually, you've got to like having a government salary and benefits. The guy's longevity at the agency says nothing of his competence as a scientist. His lack of a PhD in atmospheric science also says nothing. The fact is that we have no reason to assume this guy is qualified. So the best thing to do is to read his paper. Which, by the way, makes him look like a loon.
...now clean it up. I know that sounds a bit harsh, but why do people expect government to be any different than anything else? In order for it to work well, it requires maintenance. You're basically asking that some country that's been properly maintained allow you in, even though you've demonstrated your inability to maintain the government you have now. In addition to being a bit unfair, that's pretty defeatist. The U.K. is not unsalvageable, but if everybody with sense leaves, it will be. Your proposed actions do not scale.