No one should benefit personally in a community driven environment.
And here I thought that the entire point of a community driven environment was that everyone benefited personally. How naive of me.
Seriously though, this is bollocks. Even the GPL, the most community-driven statement ever drafted, is fine with people benefiting personally from GPLed code.
What's really interesting is that a lot of these ideas had actually been considered before the internet came into being, and have existed as part of the scientific community for centuries. Karl Popper's name seems to come up a lot, I really must read his book "Open Society".
I'm not saying that there's something intrinsically wrong with following the law (I'm a moral relativist so that would be rather inconsistent of me). I'm just saying that if a company behaves in a way I consider unethical (the Nestle baby milk thing, sweatshop labour, illegal monopoly etc) I'll tend to avoid supporting them financially where at all possible. Hopefully this will help counteract the natural incentives for them to behave in a legal yet immoral fashion.
It's not so much a matter of laws as a matter of morality. If a law goes against my personal morality, I will not obey it. Therefore, if Microsoft obeys immoral Chinese laws then we can only conclude that either a) it has no willpower whatsoever or b) it has no problem with censorship of journalists. Either way, the negative publicity it gets as a result would, in an ideal world, cause that company some pain. That way companies will have an incentive to operate according to the morality of the world they live in, rather than acting entirely to line their own pocketbooks.
It's not an ideal method of controlling corporations, but it's fairly effective nonetheless.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the founding documents of the USA state that you can't be mistreated for exercising your freedoms. They just say that the Government won't join in with the mistreatment.
If I recall correctly, they're actually double-counting some vulnerabilities in common software - once for Linux, once for OS/X, once for Sun Solaris etc (I think that was right - can anyone confirm?). None of this was malicious - this survey was never intended to be rigorous and the people doing the counting made that quite clear. However, it does mean that any attempts to judge the relative merits of the various operating systems are somewhat fruitless.
The point of solar power is that, rather than being converted directly to heat when it hits the ground, sunlight can instead be converted to electrical potentials. So no, it does exactly the opposite of what you say.
Incidentally, does the thought of messing around with oceanic temperature gradients bother anyone slightly? It's probably not on a scale nearly wide enough to destabilise any currents, but it'd be good to have an oceanographer's opinion on this.
They're not saying that the voter gets given a copy, they're saying that a copy gets stuck in a box so that in an emergency the total can be double-checked. Basically the only reason they're not calling these bits of paper the ballots is that you can only have one ballot and that's the signal inside the computer. Best of both worlds - fast effortless counting that you can double-check in an emergency.
You need to to open up google and look into the "Birthday Problem". Then you will see while the probability of catching any particular individual is small, the probabililty of catching some individual is actually much higher than you think.
Ex. The probability that two people share a birthday = 1/365, but the probability that in a group of 60 individuals that there are 2 people that share a birthday is 99.4%.
Dude. I'm a Cambridge university maths undergrad (third year). I've been aware of the birthday problem since I was about 13. I'm now aware of the problem's foundation in elementary combinatorics (haven't got to Ramsey theory yet though). Trust me, it doesn't apply here.
"it's just a matter of time before somebody uses all of my proxies in series for criminal activities."
Not really - if everyone uses, say, three proxies at a time and your proxies represent 1% of the available ones (this would be a very generous estimate), that would mean only one in every million connections was only using your proxies. Not really worth waiting for.
Even this isn't strictly accurate as most people with any brains would not pick two proxies with similar IP addresses. This means you'd have to get accounts with dozens of different service providers, probably in different countries, which would make it extremely hard to operate even 1% of the anonymous proxy resource.
Like you say, no-one's perfect. So when the government or Big Business wants to smear an activist, or a homophobic police commander wants to avoid having them orrible faggots on his force, it'll be fairly easy for them to find some reason to kick these people out.
My worry isn't that this'll be used against anyone - as many people have pointed out, that's technologically impractical at present. My worry is that, when someone in power is already pissed off with you, they have one more tool to help destroy your life on top of the usual ones.
Cambridge University (UK) doesn't have that many pranks to its name*, but those that do exist are doozies. My favourite one is where one of the big stone balls that line one of the bridges was removed for cleaning. A bunch of students got a big chunk of polystyrene, shaped and painted it appropriately, and placed it in the ball's position. When a punt went underneath, they all got into position and slooooooowly pushed it off.
I'm told that the people who jumped out of the punt were slightly annoyed by this.
Then there was the time that pink panther footprints appeared going up a College belltower. The master of the college decided that this was unacceptable so sent out a note saying that the pawprints had to come down. The next day, there were a set of pawprints coming down the tower too...
* Anyone in cambridge who wants to rectify this situation, get in touch!
Does he think that the advent of Firefox et al signals an end to Microsoft dominance of the browser market? If so, does he think this will be good or bad for Opera as a company?
Because it took three fucking days to find a single laptop supplier willing to ship laptops without Linux, that's why. I'll accept that MS isn't a monopoly when it isn't so bloody painful to boycott them.
If you click through to the original comment by the administrator who removed the list, he didn't have any clue what the hell their point was either - this is just a damn compatibility list, they're not distributing anything other than a list of names - but removed it anyway just in case.
Well, I was thinking more of a -1 Bitter And Twisted really, but whatever. Actually I figured that there was about a 1 in 3 chance that someone would know somewhere in the UK that doesn't insist on bundling XP with everything.
Slashdot Mirror
If popularity were truly what dictated worminess, Apache would have been overrun long ago.
I think you need to sue your proofreader, mate...
Seriously though, this is bollocks. Even the GPL, the most community-driven statement ever drafted, is fine with people benefiting personally from GPLed code.
What's really interesting is that a lot of these ideas had actually been considered before the internet came into being, and have existed as part of the scientific community for centuries. Karl Popper's name seems to come up a lot, I really must read his book "Open Society".
I'm not saying that there's something intrinsically wrong with following the law (I'm a moral relativist so that would be rather inconsistent of me). I'm just saying that if a company behaves in a way I consider unethical (the Nestle baby milk thing, sweatshop labour, illegal monopoly etc) I'll tend to avoid supporting them financially where at all possible. Hopefully this will help counteract the natural incentives for them to behave in a legal yet immoral fashion.
It's not so much a matter of laws as a matter of morality. If a law goes against my personal morality, I will not obey it. Therefore, if Microsoft obeys immoral Chinese laws then we can only conclude that either a) it has no willpower whatsoever or b) it has no problem with censorship of journalists. Either way, the negative publicity it gets as a result would, in an ideal world, cause that company some pain. That way companies will have an incentive to operate according to the morality of the world they live in, rather than acting entirely to line their own pocketbooks.
It's not an ideal method of controlling corporations, but it's fairly effective nonetheless.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the founding documents of the USA state that you can't be mistreated for exercising your freedoms. They just say that the Government won't join in with the mistreatment.
The longer that Microsoft manages to stay in China, the longer the Chinese military will have to put up with bluescreens (redscreens?). Works for me.
If I recall correctly, they're actually double-counting some vulnerabilities in common software - once for Linux, once for OS/X, once for Sun Solaris etc (I think that was right - can anyone confirm?). None of this was malicious - this survey was never intended to be rigorous and the people doing the counting made that quite clear. However, it does mean that any attempts to judge the relative merits of the various operating systems are somewhat fruitless.
The point of solar power is that, rather than being converted directly to heat when it hits the ground, sunlight can instead be converted to electrical potentials. So no, it does exactly the opposite of what you say.
I knew I missed something...
Incidentally, does the thought of messing around with oceanic temperature gradients bother anyone slightly? It's probably not on a scale nearly wide enough to destabilise any currents, but it'd be good to have an oceanographer's opinion on this.
Aquethermal, if you please! It's only solar in the sense that all power on Earth apart from geothermal is solar.
They're not saying that the voter gets given a copy, they're saying that a copy gets stuck in a box so that in an emergency the total can be double-checked. Basically the only reason they're not calling these bits of paper the ballots is that you can only have one ballot and that's the signal inside the computer. Best of both worlds - fast effortless counting that you can double-check in an emergency.
"it's just a matter of time before somebody uses all of my proxies in series for criminal activities."
Not really - if everyone uses, say, three proxies at a time and your proxies represent 1% of the available ones (this would be a very generous estimate), that would mean only one in every million connections was only using your proxies. Not really worth waiting for.
Even this isn't strictly accurate as most people with any brains would not pick two proxies with similar IP addresses. This means you'd have to get accounts with dozens of different service providers, probably in different countries, which would make it extremely hard to operate even 1% of the anonymous proxy resource.
Like you say, no-one's perfect. So when the government or Big Business wants to smear an activist, or a homophobic police commander wants to avoid having them orrible faggots on his force, it'll be fairly easy for them to find some reason to kick these people out.
My worry isn't that this'll be used against anyone - as many people have pointed out, that's technologically impractical at present. My worry is that, when someone in power is already pissed off with you, they have one more tool to help destroy your life on top of the usual ones.
Won't someone think of the artists' children? If you don't fileshare, they'll get EATEN!!!
Cambridge University (UK) doesn't have that many pranks to its name*, but those that do exist are doozies. My favourite one is where one of the big stone balls that line one of the bridges was removed for cleaning. A bunch of students got a big chunk of polystyrene, shaped and painted it appropriately, and placed it in the ball's position. When a punt went underneath, they all got into position and slooooooowly pushed it off.
I'm told that the people who jumped out of the punt were slightly annoyed by this.
Then there was the time that pink panther footprints appeared going up a College belltower. The master of the college decided that this was unacceptable so sent out a note saying that the pawprints had to come down. The next day, there were a set of pawprints coming down the tower too...
* Anyone in cambridge who wants to rectify this situation, get in touch!
Does he think that the advent of Firefox et al signals an end to Microsoft dominance of the browser market? If so, does he think this will be good or bad for Opera as a company?
Cos using Windows all night gives me a fucking awful headache by morning.
Because it took three fucking days to find a single laptop supplier willing to ship laptops without Linux, that's why. I'll accept that MS isn't a monopoly when it isn't so bloody painful to boycott them.
If you click through to the original comment by the administrator who removed the list, he didn't have any clue what the hell their point was either - this is just a damn compatibility list, they're not distributing anything other than a list of names - but removed it anyway just in case.
Well, I was thinking more of a -1 Bitter And Twisted really, but whatever. Actually I figured that there was about a 1 in 3 chance that someone would know somewhere in the UK that doesn't insist on bundling XP with everything.
Where can I get this without Windows preinstalled?
Well, last thing I heard he'd been kicked off one case for being a nutjob, so maybe he does have all day to muck about.