Is the US government is too responsive to corporate greed? We, the consumers finance those corporations through our purchases and our stock portfolios. Feel your vote isn't heard on election day? Well it's heard loud and clear every time you open your wallet. Each dollar you spend finances the operations of the one you give it to. Drive a gas guzzler? You're financing the oil industry. Buy only organic locally grown produce? You are encouraging more of the same.
If you don't like cheap Chinese crap at Wallmart, but you buy it anyway, you are asking for more of it, and more Wallmarts as well.
I know I've gone a bit off topic, but this is something I feel strongly about.
You lay someone off here in the U.S.... that is money that is not going to be used to buy products that... the parent company makes.
Too true. You like banannas? Most banannas are picked in foreign countries where the pickers cannot afford to buy banannas. Someone, somewhere will always be able to afford banannas, while someone else will be willing to pick them for almost nothing. If shipping is cheap enough, a company can make a mint. Evil? Yes. Inevitable for software (which doesn't even require shipping)? Quite likely.
Tribal knowledge [must] stay within a company for future development. That is all gone, and personally the quality that comes from an outsourced job is short of atrocious. That comes from watching quite a few projects at two different companies go completey down in flames.
Outsourcing is a fad at them moment. It's working for some, so everyone wants to try it and many will jump in without understanding the risks and they will fail.
On the other hand, there's no reason why outsourcing can't work. Workers at home and abroad must document their work to preserve the "tribal knowledge". Again, short term, there is a huge training cost to train any new employee, but this is an up-front one-time cost.
Long term, through phone, email, and video-conferencing, foreign employees (at least the nocturnal ones) can become as much a part of the corporate culture as someone in the US. The kinks will be ironed out, and the promise of cheap, offshore programmers (wherever the cost of living is low enough) will become true. Laws and other factors may delay it, but it's inevetible.
So, how do we, the US code monkeys keep ourselves employed doing something we like and are good at? That is the ultimate question. Do we take a 40-60% paycut, sell the house, and continue doing what we did? Do we become managers or will they be outsourced too? Do we start our own companies? What aspect of our work cannot be outsourced? I can't think of one off the bat, but I'm really trying. Will everyone have to find their own answer or will one answer work for many of us. Any ideas?
Reflected or absorbed by the particles in the atmosphere? That is the question.
...how much is being reflected back into space... it could well be that the total solar energy absorbed by the ground+atmosphere is substantially less than it used to be
Or, as you implied, the sunlight might be absorbed by the particles in the air so that it's still warming the planet even though it's not reaching the ground.
I see why neither the environmentalists nor the polluting industries wanted to touch this with a 10 foot pole. It could mean that global warming will soon reverse itself, thus proving the environmentalists wrong. But it definitely means that we've messed up our atmosphere a lot more than we knew, which looks bad for the polluters. Yup. Ignoring it was much easier. It will be very interesting to see what the cat does now that it's out of the bag.
Solar roofing tiles are the way of the future. The DC current generated by photovoltaic cells degrades rapidly as it travels, and converting it to AC cuts about 20-35% of the net output. It's best to have the cells at the point of use.
It will be a damn expensive roof (at first) and require a room full of batteries (or hydrogen fuel cells), but still worth it for the "free" and "off the grid" electricity. Roofing is going to get a lot more sophisticated - each tile will actually have to plug into something to transmit its current to the batteries for later. Maybe the tile could contact with one conductive layer and the roofing nail with another. Leads could be attached to the two layers at one end of the roof - with adequite grounding in case of lightning!
Then, this will only work effectively in areas where the amount of light exceeds the energy drain of the appliances. None of these "alternative fuels" is a cure-all. And Global dimming could limit its effectiveness.
Two words: Library Card. It's free and widely available in most "civilized" countries.
Matt Damen in "Good Will Hunting" made fun of a student for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Harvard education you could get for $1.97 in late fees at your local library. As a non-college graduate who works with people whose average education is a Masters in CS, and whose wife has a Masters from Harvard, I can tell you he has a good point.
The books are great. Start with The Hobbit. They are my favorite books I have ever read.
P.S. If you should think from my post that a college degree is unnesecary, you should know that I am painfully finishing my college degree after a 10 year absence - one course at a time while working 40 hours a week and commuting 1.5 hours each way. I thought I was smart enough to drop out of college, but now I'm eating my humble pie - and I can tell you it tastes like shit! I think those people with MS degrees make more than I do even if I work harder and know more than some of them. It can also really help when applying for jobs. I want one (an MS) but I need my BA first.
The scouring of the shire was one of my favorite parts of the books. It made the rest of the books more real for me. You don't just blow up the Death Star and go home to a world that is suddenly rosy and new.
Also, it really showed the character development that had taken place. Merry, Pipin, Frodo, and Sam would have been killed or they would have silently obeyed their captors like the rest of the hobbits if they hadn't gone on the journey they had. Yet they still remembered their roots well enough to know how to rouse their old friends and relations in a time of desperate need. Merry and Pippin really grew up and came into their own in those chapters.
I think an author would be hard pressed to come up with a better denoumont to saving the world. It brought you down slowly from the destruction of the ring. The book did not end with a jolt, nor did I find the last half of the Return of the King to be booring. The level of excitement died out gradually, as day-to-day business returned very gradually, not to normal, but back to a new normal because nothing could be as it was.
Anyway, I was sorry it didn't appear in the movie, but I've still got the books. The first two movies were many times better than I thought they would be and I enjoyed them emensely. I liked that women had a more prominent role in the movies. A feminist couldn't read the Lord of The Rings without grimacing several times but they could watch the movies. I also thought the Two Towers did a brilliant job portraying Gollum and the Hobbits. They were just as I imagined them.
Though I actually liked Tom Bombadil, cutting him was a good call. He was basically irrelevant to the rest of the story. I would have made some of the battle scenes shorter (particularly in the Two Towers - they only made it half-way through the book!). Then we could have seen the scouring of the shire. But I'm really splitting hairs here. The movies are great. I can hardly wait until next week!
The Battle of Helms Deep was also described in great detail in the Two Towers book. It was a hard chapter to read though and I had to read it with a dictionary and draw a map at the same time; a map which I refined many times while reading. He used many words from Old English that are no longer used, or have changed meaning over the years. H.P. Lovecraft used a similar technique to give an ancient air to his stories: writing in an older, more formal, style. I can't remember all the antiquated words right now, but certainly, "gore" was one which he used to mean, "A small traingular piece of land" and I have never heard anyone else use it to mean that.
Thanks for your review. I can't wait to see the movie!
Right on. I wouldn't put them past attacking themselves just for the publicity.
Question: If they ever caught someone who DOS'd them, would they be able to prove monetary damages? If anything, attacks like this help SCO's legal offensive. And it's not as if the attacks are limiting their customer service in any way... beyond making it slightly harder for their customers to find out how much SCO is suing them for.
From Outlook to Evolution, every email client already supports encryption and digital signatures. You can generate either one already with free software and register it for free at the MIT keyserver or elsewhere. More and more people are going to start using these tools which are already available to them - money-managers will soon require you to use a digital signature when corresponding with them. Encrypted email will be an easy way to get your bank and mutual fund statements in the near future. Heck, I recently had to send an email with a digital signature just to remove a posting I had made to a google newsgroup! It was a posting about a hardware problem that no-one responded to and it was over a year old.
I think it will grow from there. It's only a short step for end-users to pay verisign or their credit-card company to consolidate their online ideities and verify that they are who they say they are. It's a baby step from there for spam filters to suspect any unsigned email for a while before they start blocking unsigned email altogether.
No planning, no legislation, just market forces, playing themselves out. The companies that need to will willingly invest because their customers will be willing to pay for security. So I guess I'm saying that end users will ultimately end up paying for reasonably spam-free email and that security and a verifiable online identity will be a part of that. Which is fairer than everyone in one or two countries paying (through taxes) for politicians and law enforcement to try to stop spammers (who will move to other countries) from doing their thing.
Imagine shopping securely online without a credit card. Secure web sites will just know you so that you don't have to remember dozens of IDs and passwords or keep them on a little sticky note under your keyboard. I believe people will pay for this level of ease of use and security. And those people will be able to live relatively spam-free.
Maybe things will be worse for those unwilling or unable to pay more for their connectivity. It's not fair, but that hasn't stopped "progress" before.
Basically, no matter what laws are written, I don't think that law enforcement will catch enough spammers and virus writers to make a difference before existing technologies are extended to fill the gap. And I think that gap is an opportunity where some companies will spend money while others make an enormous return on their investment.
In terms of writing three generations of software and extending standards - we're going to do that anyway. If not for spam, then for something else. That's what software companies and Open Source contributors do. Same thing with the retailers, and eveyone else. Doing it for spam is probably as good a reason as any other - and I think customers will pay for it. Some Spammers will rise to the challenge, but most will not.
P.S. I don't understand your last point:
... censure countries that don't play nice (and blacklist them, reducing their effectiveness), and think about how most of THAT cost is PAID FOR by the big bills that the marketting companies are going to receive for turning a blind eye to the problem.
I booted up this evening, got the up2date Red Hat Network notice, installed the Rsync patch in about 30 seconds, then surfed around. An hour later, I was reading/.. When I returned to the home page, I saw this article had just been posted. I'm glad to hear Fedora is on top of these things since I'll have to switch to it in a few months.
I sincerely hope you are right, and based on the comments of the guy who sold SpamCop, I think you probably are - at least in the short term.
I have a theory that anonymity is what makes the web so hospitable for spammers and crackers. Verify the identity of everyone sending or recieving data and spammers/crackers will personally acquire the e-reputation they deserve. Verification could be accomplished by registering digital certificates with Verisign or other agency and digitally signing all email and web sites. Mail servers and web browsers could reject mail or web sites from users with "bad karma". Maybe the karma system would be modeled after/.? Creating and registering a new identity must be sufficiently difficult that it will effectively deter impersonation.
I know it's a big brother theory, but having a big brother isn't inherently a bad thing. I haven't thought this through to it's logical conclusion, but I think that's the way things will end up. I'm viewing this Ironport/SpamCop arrangement as a stopgap measure until then. And things may have to get worse before they get better.
Nah. There will be others. It's just the biggest battle between good and evil on this issue. However this gets decided, it doesn't end here. Unless, of course, a bigger issue like global thermonuclear war gets in the way and ends all other issues.
If you're baffled, it's probably because you see SCO as a company who profits from selling things as apposed to suing people. Their latest shareholder statement seems to really emphasise their Intellectual Property as one of their three main sources of income, but they don't have much exciting to say about the other two. In that light, suing their "customers" is just fine. And so is letting their lawyer set their "business" strategy.
Keep in mind that if McBride does not do what is arguably best for the bottom line of the company, his shareholders can sue him. If you have a bunch of SCO stock and about a billion dollars lying around you can probably sue him for taking a short-sighted approach to keeping his company profitable. Not too many people are in that position though.
The thing that kills me is that SCO's stock is still around $14 (up from $1 in March but falling the past week) - which means that most investors believe that SCO will be worth more in the future. Are they banking on a buyout or a win in court? Yes, I'm shocked, but over the public's reaction. Not McBride's statements.
A bazaar in cathedral clothing...
on
The Open Code Market
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· Score: 5, Insightful
most of the success stories so far (Amazon, Google, etc.) are not new producers, but more efficient (and cheaper) middlemen.
+1 Perceptive
This solution helps to bring together two separated communities: Users and developers, cutting drastically (but not entirely) middlemen and their added costs... The OCM acts as clearing house by delivering the software to the client and the money to the developer
The communities are not separated. The high level of communication between developer, tester, and user is the greatest strength of OpenSource software. They are sometimes the same person! By introducing a "clearing house" you are adding a middleman and thereby reducing efficiency.
While the customer may be able to tell if the software works as requested, it cannot identify buggy, poorly written software, let alone know if the software presents a security risk. Thus, the OCM will also have to provide services as required.
+1 Perceptive
This is a difficult problem. Really difficult - and essentially unsolved by traditional development models. OpenSource itself is a solution to this problem. Code reviews, while one of the most useful tools for preventing these problems, are also one of the most labor-intensive (read "expensive").
consumers and businesses work for money, and they mistrust people who do not
Very true. But I believe this paper underrates the strength of (as Eric Raymond calls it) the gift culture. Essentially, OpenSource developers compete to give the biggest gift to the community. The bigger the gift, the more their standing within the community rises. This has worked pretty well the past 13 years or so.
While I applaud the effort to pay these people for their gifts, I think it tries to shove a square peg into a round hole here. It changes the motivation from "give a big gift" to "give the user what they asked for". That raises many problems:
What users ask for often isn't what they want. There's a curse (I think it's Russian) that goes, "May your every wish be instantly granted." Read any story about genies for examples of the problems with getting what you ask for.
Even if a specific enhancement meets a user's short-term needs (as this system encourages) there is little or no encouragement to provide an extensible solution. By comparison, "Giving the greatest gift" encourages long-term extensibility.
Even if the enhancement is extensible, it may break something else that used to work. Again, the compensation scheme is weak here.
The developer rating system would address these problems to some degree, but all ratings systems come with their own problems. Look at what OpenSource has accomplished so far. I use all OpenSource software at home, and much at work. Linux is rapidly penetrating corporate infrastructure - it's been the fastest growing operating system for years. What's broken about it?
Ultimately, I think this paper encourages one to think about the differences between OpenSource and traditional motivational schemes/business models. It is a very interesting read and a lot of thought obviously went into it. I personally believe that society as a whole has more to gain by embracing the benefits of sharing, than to see OpenSource become as systemitized and hierarchical as much of the rest of our society.
Allright. You have me basically convinced that SCOs claims are so outlandish that they can be proved groundless in a court of law. This brings up new questions for me though. Why did Microsoft pay SCO an undisclosed amount for Linux licenses plus 8 Million dollars? Why is SCO's stock price going up when they have crumby products and a groundless case? Someone is buying that stock.
OK. You've won some points here, but you still haven't convinced me that this case will be decided on issues.
Imagine SCO is in the courtroom and they have some code that is arguably similar to some code in Linux. With so much code, statistically, there must be some very similar sections. SCO says it's stolen. IBM says it isn't. Now how does a jury decide?
In order to make a rational decision, they need a context for understanding the information presented in the case. That context requires programming expertise that most jurrors will be lacking. The lawyers from both sides have to agree on which jurors hear the case, so the likelihood of programmers getting picked is slim to none - they might be "biassed".
So I still say it is 50% likely to revert back to a personality/publicity battle because the jurors will not be able to understand the technical details of this case.
P.S. If no-one steps up to "volunteer" what code is in violation, what do you bet SCO ends up using Eric Raymond's code similarity analyzer right before the trial to decide exactly what lines were "stolen".
Over-all, you make a very convincing argument. Your anlogy is somewhat misleading though:
A person shows up on your doorstep, says that some of the furniture in your house is actually stolen from him some time back, and although you bought it unknowing of the fact that it's stolen, you should still pay him money and of course return the stolen furniture.
If you paid for something without knowing that it was stolen it would be nice to give it back to the original owner, but I do not believe you are legally liable. If you use intellectual property in your product, even without knowing it was stolen, you are liable. By distributing or using stolen IP, you essentially become a thief. Not so with furniture.
A more accurate anology would be a new bakery that uses all original secret recipies they bought from some cook. An older baker claims that he too has a bakery that has been baking recipies for years before the new bakery opened and that some of his products taste exactly the same as those that the new bakery makes. The old baker refuses to say which ones but demands that the new baker pay him a licensing fee for stealing his secret recipes.
This issue is not so clear cut. Especially when you ask "what does the law require" instead of "what is the right thing to do."
Obviously, SCO (the old baker) will have to reveal the specific claims to the court (if the case goes to court) and can request to have the court documents sealed. But I don't think anyone can force them to make the claims public beforehand. Not when doing so would publicise SCO's "vital trade secrets." Can they? If they can, why haven't they?
SCO only needs to prove that a small piece of code was stolen. Show me a large commercial software product that DOESN'T have a small piece of code that's essentially a duplicate of some other proprietary code and I'll stop worrying. Most people just aren't weasily enough to sue over such minor infractions.
Incidentally, I believe that if there is a huge body of code essentially free if stolen IP, it's probably Linux. Hence the apparent stupidity of SCO.
I don't believe SCO has decided exactly what they will claim was stolen. They are probably hoping that someone will find the "stolen code" for them. Lame, but legal. SCO is simply playing the system for personal gain at the expense of anyone they can squeeze money out of.
If SCO has such a weak case, why did Microsoft give them 8 million dollars and another undisclosed additional sum of money for their Linux installations? (Does Microsoft even run Linux?) Why is SCO's share price going up in spite of their technical stupidity? Many people with money believe that SCO has a chance and they are putting that money where their mouth is.
Your argument seems solid in the company of technical people. But take your argument into a Bloomingdales or Filenes and stop 3 random people and try to explain this case to them. Would they choose the Scruffy Athiest Anarchist Hacker over the Successful Professional Morman Busisnessman? I would hope so, but I think not. Most people do not want to know what the GPL is, or what Linux is, or what Source Code is.
Last time I came out with this sentiment I was modded a troll, but I think I'll try this again because it seems to answer your question:
News Flash: the SCO case will not be decided by Slashdot readers. It will be decided by average Americans like the judge in a recent hacker case who was tripped up by the defendent using the technical term, "cut and paste" and had to ask, "you mean, with scissors?"
The SCO view: SCO is operating on the assumption that Open Source, by it's very nature, gives away the intellectual property that our capitalist computer industry is based on. The US government (and almost every other government) provides protection for inventors, authors, and corporations for their creations and trade secrets through patents and copyrights. This system has encouraged our country to rise from the "wretched refuse of [other countries] teeming shores" to the great nation it is today. SCO believes that Open Source software and the GPL short-circuit those protections in a way which is dangerous for business, discourages invention, and is ultimately bad for society as a result. Even if Open Source works in some sense, how can it compete with the grand designs of our forefathers which have proved their worth in the past however-many decades (centuries?).
SCO can not concieve of how a leaderless group who calls themselves "hackers" and (according to the media) prides themselves on not being outside the norms of society could possibly have anything good to contribute to that society. Nothing could delight SCO more than the electroinc attacks some hackers launched against SCOs web site. They will say to the court, "this is the kind of people who work on Open Source projects. Hackers will be hackers."
The Open Source view: Anyone who has selflessly given their time, energy, and expertise to an Open Soure project has done so in the spirit of giving to the community. The software they have created will always benefit the software community as a whole, and therefore improve the average quality of all software written by the community, and improve user experiences with software at the same time.
Summary: Each of the above viewpoints is based on faith. The first is about faith in the capitalist system, the second about faith in the power of giving and community. Unfortunately, the case will be judged by the arbitrators of the system that created copyrights and patents in the first place, and that could just come out in SCOs favor. Granted, SCO has been doing some things which could undermine its credibility. But if SCO's lawyers can keep this case about "Hardworking Capitalists" vs. "Anarchist Hackers" they have a pretty good chance of winning it.
I have to say that I am a Hard Working Capitalist by day, and an Open Source Hacker by night. Long before copyrights and patents, Jesus himself taught that sharing was good for society in the parable of the loaves and fishes, as well as other stories. The value of sharing is stressed in every other major religion, and Economics. Sharing has been proved good for society for millennia. SCO, while thinking it fights for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, is actually defending the "Me" generation it proclaims to hate. If they win this case, they are essentially making it illegal to share intellectual property, even if the inventor/author wishes to do so.
Open Source does not undermine existing copyrights or prevent people from obtaining future ones, it meerely provides an alternative that allows inventors/authors at their own discretion to give the fruits of their labors freely to the community for the benefit of all.
P.S. (RANT) Instead of moderating this with a -1 troll (you cowardly bastard), why not post an intellectual argument telling my why I am wrong so that we can have a debate here. I'm really sick of the amount of back-patting on this issue where people go on and on about how screwed SCO is while moderators silence dissenting oppinions.
Over the past several months, SCO has had discussions with several major companies for the purpose of bolstering SCO's intellectual property licensing and migration initiative.
Yeah, they are becoming more bold about their true purpose yet they still masquerade as a software company to give an air of legitimacy to their actions. Reminds me of Gator in some ways. I sincerely hope they get what's coming to them, but I'm a bit nervous about whether the judge/court will be capable of understanding the issues. To quote another/.er: "This case won't be decided by a jury of our peers." It will be decided by average people, most of whom are not capable of understanding what an operating system is.
I'll refuse to be 100% sure that Microsoft and/or Sun are behind SCO's actions until I see some sort of paper trail, but this makes me sure enough
The 8 million dollars Microsoft paid to SCO for licenses gave me a pretty strong feeling that they were supporting SCO's actions. Haven't heard a peep from Sun though.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could moderate this +1 insightful. This is a great comment.
You vote with your money.
Is the US government is too responsive to corporate greed? We, the consumers finance those corporations through our purchases and our stock portfolios. Feel your vote isn't heard on election day? Well it's heard loud and clear every time you open your wallet. Each dollar you spend finances the operations of the one you give it to. Drive a gas guzzler? You're financing the oil industry. Buy only organic locally grown produce? You are encouraging more of the same.
If you don't like cheap Chinese crap at Wallmart, but you buy it anyway, you are asking for more of it, and more Wallmarts as well.
I know I've gone a bit off topic, but this is something I feel strongly about.
Too true. You like banannas? Most banannas are picked in foreign countries where the pickers cannot afford to buy banannas. Someone, somewhere will always be able to afford banannas, while someone else will be willing to pick them for almost nothing. If shipping is cheap enough, a company can make a mint. Evil? Yes. Inevitable for software (which doesn't even require shipping)? Quite likely.
Outsourcing is a fad at them moment. It's working for some, so everyone wants to try it and many will jump in without understanding the risks and they will fail.
On the other hand, there's no reason why outsourcing can't work. Workers at home and abroad must document their work to preserve the "tribal knowledge". Again, short term, there is a huge training cost to train any new employee, but this is an up-front one-time cost.
Long term, through phone, email, and video-conferencing, foreign employees (at least the nocturnal ones) can become as much a part of the corporate culture as someone in the US. The kinks will be ironed out, and the promise of cheap, offshore programmers (wherever the cost of living is low enough) will become true. Laws and other factors may delay it, but it's inevetible.
So, how do we, the US code monkeys keep ourselves employed doing something we like and are good at? That is the ultimate question. Do we take a 40-60% paycut, sell the house, and continue doing what we did? Do we become managers or will they be outsourced too? Do we start our own companies? What aspect of our work cannot be outsourced? I can't think of one off the bat, but I'm really trying. Will everyone have to find their own answer or will one answer work for many of us. Any ideas?
Reflected or absorbed by the particles in the atmosphere? That is the question.
Or, as you implied, the sunlight might be absorbed by the particles in the air so that it's still warming the planet even though it's not reaching the ground.
I see why neither the environmentalists nor the polluting industries wanted to touch this with a 10 foot pole. It could mean that global warming will soon reverse itself, thus proving the environmentalists wrong. But it definitely means that we've messed up our atmosphere a lot more than we knew, which looks bad for the polluters. Yup. Ignoring it was much easier. It will be very interesting to see what the cat does now that it's out of the bag.
Solar roofing tiles are the way of the future. The DC current generated by photovoltaic cells degrades rapidly as it travels, and converting it to AC cuts about 20-35% of the net output. It's best to have the cells at the point of use.
It will be a damn expensive roof (at first) and require a room full of batteries (or hydrogen fuel cells), but still worth it for the "free" and "off the grid" electricity. Roofing is going to get a lot more sophisticated - each tile will actually have to plug into something to transmit its current to the batteries for later. Maybe the tile could contact with one conductive layer and the roofing nail with another. Leads could be attached to the two layers at one end of the roof - with adequite grounding in case of lightning!
Then, this will only work effectively in areas where the amount of light exceeds the energy drain of the appliances. None of these "alternative fuels" is a cure-all. And Global dimming could limit its effectiveness.
I had completely forgotten that. Thanks!
Interesting! I'll look for that next time I'm in Maine. I've never seen these in MA or VT.
Two words: Library Card. It's free and widely available in most "civilized" countries.
Matt Damen in "Good Will Hunting" made fun of a student for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Harvard education you could get for $1.97 in late fees at your local library. As a non-college graduate who works with people whose average education is a Masters in CS, and whose wife has a Masters from Harvard, I can tell you he has a good point.
The books are great. Start with The Hobbit. They are my favorite books I have ever read.
P.S. If you should think from my post that a college degree is unnesecary, you should know that I am painfully finishing my college degree after a 10 year absence - one course at a time while working 40 hours a week and commuting 1.5 hours each way. I thought I was smart enough to drop out of college, but now I'm eating my humble pie - and I can tell you it tastes like shit! I think those people with MS degrees make more than I do even if I work harder and know more than some of them. It can also really help when applying for jobs. I want one (an MS) but I need my BA first.
The scouring of the shire was one of my favorite parts of the books. It made the rest of the books more real for me. You don't just blow up the Death Star and go home to a world that is suddenly rosy and new.
Also, it really showed the character development that had taken place. Merry, Pipin, Frodo, and Sam would have been killed or they would have silently obeyed their captors like the rest of the hobbits if they hadn't gone on the journey they had. Yet they still remembered their roots well enough to know how to rouse their old friends and relations in a time of desperate need. Merry and Pippin really grew up and came into their own in those chapters.
I think an author would be hard pressed to come up with a better denoumont to saving the world. It brought you down slowly from the destruction of the ring. The book did not end with a jolt, nor did I find the last half of the Return of the King to be booring. The level of excitement died out gradually, as day-to-day business returned very gradually, not to normal, but back to a new normal because nothing could be as it was.
Anyway, I was sorry it didn't appear in the movie, but I've still got the books. The first two movies were many times better than I thought they would be and I enjoyed them emensely. I liked that women had a more prominent role in the movies. A feminist couldn't read the Lord of The Rings without grimacing several times but they could watch the movies. I also thought the Two Towers did a brilliant job portraying Gollum and the Hobbits. They were just as I imagined them.
Though I actually liked Tom Bombadil, cutting him was a good call. He was basically irrelevant to the rest of the story. I would have made some of the battle scenes shorter (particularly in the Two Towers - they only made it half-way through the book!). Then we could have seen the scouring of the shire. But I'm really splitting hairs here. The movies are great. I can hardly wait until next week!
The Battle of Helms Deep was also described in great detail in the Two Towers book. It was a hard chapter to read though and I had to read it with a dictionary and draw a map at the same time; a map which I refined many times while reading. He used many words from Old English that are no longer used, or have changed meaning over the years. H.P. Lovecraft used a similar technique to give an ancient air to his stories: writing in an older, more formal, style. I can't remember all the antiquated words right now, but certainly, "gore" was one which he used to mean, "A small traingular piece of land" and I have never heard anyone else use it to mean that.
Thanks for your review. I can't wait to see the movie!
Right on. I wouldn't put them past attacking themselves just for the publicity.
Question: If they ever caught someone who DOS'd them, would they be able to prove monetary damages? If anything, attacks like this help SCO's legal offensive. And it's not as if the attacks are limiting their customer service in any way... beyond making it slightly harder for their customers to find out how much SCO is suing them for.
From Outlook to Evolution, every email client already supports encryption and digital signatures. You can generate either one already with free software and register it for free at the MIT keyserver or elsewhere. More and more people are going to start using these tools which are already available to them - money-managers will soon require you to use a digital signature when corresponding with them. Encrypted email will be an easy way to get your bank and mutual fund statements in the near future. Heck, I recently had to send an email with a digital signature just to remove a posting I had made to a google newsgroup! It was a posting about a hardware problem that no-one responded to and it was over a year old.
I think it will grow from there. It's only a short step for end-users to pay verisign or their credit-card company to consolidate their online ideities and verify that they are who they say they are. It's a baby step from there for spam filters to suspect any unsigned email for a while before they start blocking unsigned email altogether.
No planning, no legislation, just market forces, playing themselves out. The companies that need to will willingly invest because their customers will be willing to pay for security. So I guess I'm saying that end users will ultimately end up paying for reasonably spam-free email and that security and a verifiable online identity will be a part of that. Which is fairer than everyone in one or two countries paying (through taxes) for politicians and law enforcement to try to stop spammers (who will move to other countries) from doing their thing.
Imagine shopping securely online without a credit card. Secure web sites will just know you so that you don't have to remember dozens of IDs and passwords or keep them on a little sticky note under your keyboard. I believe people will pay for this level of ease of use and security. And those people will be able to live relatively spam-free.
Maybe things will be worse for those unwilling or unable to pay more for their connectivity. It's not fair, but that hasn't stopped "progress" before.
Basically, no matter what laws are written, I don't think that law enforcement will catch enough spammers and virus writers to make a difference before existing technologies are extended to fill the gap. And I think that gap is an opportunity where some companies will spend money while others make an enormous return on their investment.
In terms of writing three generations of software and extending standards - we're going to do that anyway. If not for spam, then for something else. That's what software companies and Open Source contributors do. Same thing with the retailers, and eveyone else. Doing it for spam is probably as good a reason as any other - and I think customers will pay for it. Some Spammers will rise to the challenge, but most will not.
P.S. I don't understand your last point:
I booted up this evening, got the up2date Red Hat Network notice, installed the Rsync patch in about 30 seconds, then surfed around. An hour later, I was reading /.. When I returned to the home page, I saw this article had just been posted. I'm glad to hear Fedora is on top of these things since I'll have to switch to it in a few months.
I sincerely hope you are right, and based on the comments of the guy who sold SpamCop, I think you probably are - at least in the short term.
I have a theory that anonymity is what makes the web so hospitable for spammers and crackers. Verify the identity of everyone sending or recieving data and spammers/crackers will personally acquire the e-reputation they deserve. Verification could be accomplished by registering digital certificates with Verisign or other agency and digitally signing all email and web sites. Mail servers and web browsers could reject mail or web sites from users with "bad karma". Maybe the karma system would be modeled after /.? Creating and registering a new identity must be sufficiently difficult that it will effectively deter impersonation.
I know it's a big brother theory, but having a big brother isn't inherently a bad thing. I haven't thought this through to it's logical conclusion, but I think that's the way things will end up. I'm viewing this Ironport/SpamCop arrangement as a stopgap measure until then. And things may have to get worse before they get better.
Nah. There will be others. It's just the biggest battle between good and evil on this issue. However this gets decided, it doesn't end here. Unless, of course, a bigger issue like global thermonuclear war gets in the way and ends all other issues.
If you're baffled, it's probably because you see SCO as a company who profits from selling things as apposed to suing people. Their latest shareholder statement seems to really emphasise their Intellectual Property as one of their three main sources of income, but they don't have much exciting to say about the other two. In that light, suing their "customers" is just fine. And so is letting their lawyer set their "business" strategy.
Keep in mind that if McBride does not do what is arguably best for the bottom line of the company, his shareholders can sue him. If you have a bunch of SCO stock and about a billion dollars lying around you can probably sue him for taking a short-sighted approach to keeping his company profitable. Not too many people are in that position though.
The thing that kills me is that SCO's stock is still around $14 (up from $1 in March but falling the past week) - which means that most investors believe that SCO will be worth more in the future. Are they banking on a buyout or a win in court? Yes, I'm shocked, but over the public's reaction. Not McBride's statements.
Interesting site. I'll have to read the book and educate myself on more of the details.
I should have included the link to The Cathedral And The Bazaar in my original post.
+1 Perceptive
The communities are not separated. The high level of communication between developer, tester, and user is the greatest strength of OpenSource software. They are sometimes the same person! By introducing a "clearing house" you are adding a middleman and thereby reducing efficiency.
+1 Perceptive
This is a difficult problem. Really difficult - and essentially unsolved by traditional development models. OpenSource itself is a solution to this problem. Code reviews, while one of the most useful tools for preventing these problems, are also one of the most labor-intensive (read "expensive").
Allright. You have me basically convinced that SCOs claims are so outlandish that they can be proved groundless in a court of law. This brings up new questions for me though. Why did Microsoft pay SCO an undisclosed amount for Linux licenses plus 8 Million dollars? Why is SCO's stock price going up when they have crumby products and a groundless case? Someone is buying that stock.
OK. You've won some points here, but you still haven't convinced me that this case will be decided on issues.
Imagine SCO is in the courtroom and they have some code that is arguably similar to some code in Linux. With so much code, statistically, there must be some very similar sections. SCO says it's stolen. IBM says it isn't. Now how does a jury decide?
In order to make a rational decision, they need a context for understanding the information presented in the case. That context requires programming expertise that most jurrors will be lacking. The lawyers from both sides have to agree on which jurors hear the case, so the likelihood of programmers getting picked is slim to none - they might be "biassed".
So I still say it is 50% likely to revert back to a personality/publicity battle because the jurors will not be able to understand the technical details of this case.
P.S. If no-one steps up to "volunteer" what code is in violation, what do you bet SCO ends up using Eric Raymond's code similarity analyzer right before the trial to decide exactly what lines were "stolen".
Over-all, you make a very convincing argument. Your anlogy is somewhat misleading though:
If you paid for something without knowing that it was stolen it would be nice to give it back to the original owner, but I do not believe you are legally liable. If you use intellectual property in your product, even without knowing it was stolen, you are liable. By distributing or using stolen IP, you essentially become a thief. Not so with furniture.
A more accurate anology would be a new bakery that uses all original secret recipies they bought from some cook. An older baker claims that he too has a bakery that has been baking recipies for years before the new bakery opened and that some of his products taste exactly the same as those that the new bakery makes. The old baker refuses to say which ones but demands that the new baker pay him a licensing fee for stealing his secret recipes.
This issue is not so clear cut. Especially when you ask "what does the law require" instead of "what is the right thing to do."
Obviously, SCO (the old baker) will have to reveal the specific claims to the court (if the case goes to court) and can request to have the court documents sealed. But I don't think anyone can force them to make the claims public beforehand. Not when doing so would publicise SCO's "vital trade secrets." Can they? If they can, why haven't they?
SCO only needs to prove that a small piece of code was stolen. Show me a large commercial software product that DOESN'T have a small piece of code that's essentially a duplicate of some other proprietary code and I'll stop worrying. Most people just aren't weasily enough to sue over such minor infractions.
Incidentally, I believe that if there is a huge body of code essentially free if stolen IP, it's probably Linux. Hence the apparent stupidity of SCO.
I don't believe SCO has decided exactly what they will claim was stolen. They are probably hoping that someone will find the "stolen code" for them. Lame, but legal. SCO is simply playing the system for personal gain at the expense of anyone they can squeeze money out of.
If SCO has such a weak case, why did Microsoft give them 8 million dollars and another undisclosed additional sum of money for their Linux installations? (Does Microsoft even run Linux?) Why is SCO's share price going up in spite of their technical stupidity? Many people with money believe that SCO has a chance and they are putting that money where their mouth is.
Your argument seems solid in the company of technical people. But take your argument into a Bloomingdales or Filenes and stop 3 random people and try to explain this case to them. Would they choose the Scruffy Athiest Anarchist Hacker over the Successful Professional Morman Busisnessman? I would hope so, but I think not. Most people do not want to know what the GPL is, or what Linux is, or what Source Code is.
No offense to Bloomingdales and Filenes shoppers.
Last time I came out with this sentiment I was modded a troll, but I think I'll try this again because it seems to answer your question:
News Flash: the SCO case will not be decided by Slashdot readers. It will be decided by average Americans like the judge in a recent hacker case who was tripped up by the defendent using the technical term, "cut and paste" and had to ask, "you mean, with scissors?"
The SCO view:
SCO is operating on the assumption that Open Source, by it's very nature, gives away the intellectual property that our capitalist computer industry is based on. The US government (and almost every other government) provides protection for inventors, authors, and corporations for their creations and trade secrets through patents and copyrights. This system has encouraged our country to rise from the "wretched refuse of [other countries] teeming shores" to the great nation it is today. SCO believes that Open Source software and the GPL short-circuit those protections in a way which is dangerous for business, discourages invention, and is ultimately bad for society as a result. Even if Open Source works in some sense, how can it compete with the grand designs of our forefathers which have proved their worth in the past however-many decades (centuries?).
SCO can not concieve of how a leaderless group who calls themselves "hackers" and (according to the media) prides themselves on not being outside the norms of society could possibly have anything good to contribute to that society. Nothing could delight SCO more than the electroinc attacks some hackers launched against SCOs web site. They will say to the court, "this is the kind of people who work on Open Source projects. Hackers will be hackers."
The Open Source view:
Anyone who has selflessly given their time, energy, and expertise to an Open Soure project has done so in the spirit of giving to the community. The software they have created will always benefit the software community as a whole, and therefore improve the average quality of all software written by the community, and improve user experiences with software at the same time.
Summary:
Each of the above viewpoints is based on faith. The first is about faith in the capitalist system, the second about faith in the power of giving and community. Unfortunately, the case will be judged by the arbitrators of the system that created copyrights and patents in the first place, and that could just come out in SCOs favor. Granted, SCO has been doing some things which could undermine its credibility. But if SCO's lawyers can keep this case about "Hardworking Capitalists" vs. "Anarchist Hackers" they have a pretty good chance of winning it.
I have to say that I am a Hard Working Capitalist by day, and an Open Source Hacker by night. Long before copyrights and patents, Jesus himself taught that sharing was good for society in the parable of the loaves and fishes, as well as other stories. The value of sharing is stressed in every other major religion, and Economics. Sharing has been proved good for society for millennia. SCO, while thinking it fights for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, is actually defending the "Me" generation it proclaims to hate. If they win this case, they are essentially making it illegal to share intellectual property, even if the inventor/author wishes to do so.
Open Source does not undermine existing copyrights or prevent people from obtaining future ones, it meerely provides an alternative that allows inventors/authors at their own discretion to give the fruits of their labors freely to the community for the benefit of all.
P.S. (RANT)
Instead of moderating this with a -1 troll (you cowardly bastard), why not post an intellectual argument telling my why I am wrong so that we can have a debate here. I'm really sick of the amount of back-patting on this issue where people go on and on about how screwed SCO is while moderators silence dissenting oppinions.
Yeah, they are becoming more bold about their true purpose yet they still masquerade as a software company to give an air of legitimacy to their actions. Reminds me of Gator in some ways. I sincerely hope they get what's coming to them, but I'm a bit nervous about whether the judge/court will be capable of understanding the issues. To quote another /.er: "This case won't be decided by a jury of our peers." It will be decided by average people, most of whom are not capable of understanding what an operating system is.
The 8 million dollars Microsoft paid to SCO for licenses gave me a pretty strong feeling that they were supporting SCO's actions. Haven't heard a peep from Sun though.