In any case, the hax0r kiddie who steals a copy of Autocad had better do so covertly -- for serious damages and possible criminal responsibility await if he gets caught.
[...]
All things considered, why steal software that isn't yours? If they won't give it to you for free on your terms, make your own.
Exactly. And this is why companies like Adobe who peddle high-priced software for the masses will eventually lose to Free Software. If the risk of using proprietary software when you can't afford to acquire it properly gets too high, then you'll use something that is truly free even if it isn't as good as the proprietary version -- as long as the truly free version is good enough. And when you eventually get to the point where you are in a position where you influence purchasing decisions, are you going to then encourage your company to buy the software that you have no familiarity with, or are you going to encourage them to use the same software that you are familiar with, and is free to boot? You'll recommend the software you're familiar with, and the fact that it's free to the company will be an extra bonus.
Multiply that by tens or even hundreds of thousands of times over and what do you get? A failed proprietary product, and possibly even a failed software company, that's what.
The only exception to this is software that has no true equivalent, such as operating systems, and software that's cheap enough that even the pirates and poor college students can afford it. Windows doesn't really have an equivalent because nothing else out there will run the programs it runs.
SQL NULLs are the worst thing since unslicable bread. They break boolean logic. You would think that if (X = Y) is false, then (X != Y) would be true. With SQL, if either X or Y or both are NULL, then any expression evaluating it is false.
No wonder you think SQL NULLs are the worst thing -- you can't even get the semantics right.
When either X or Y (or both) are NULL, then any expression evaluating it is NULL. Not false. Not true. NULL. Any SQL implementation that behaves differently is broken.
It's not the SQL standard's fault if your code's logic can't handle that case. Nor is it the standard's fault that you can't see fit to NOT USE the NULL feature when you don't want to (and any reasonable database even goes so far as to give you the option of making *sure* you don't use it -- that's what the NOT NULL declaration when defining a column is for).
Getting rid of NULL isn't going to help you when you suddenly discover that you really DO need to be able to represent "missing data" somehow.
Then you have Hitler's (and many other Nazis) obsession with the occult.
Yeah. Good thing a famous American archaeologist managed to foil their attempts to grab the Ark of the Covenant. Otherwise we'd all be speaking German now.
If privacy policies can't be enforced since people don't read them and hence "expectation of privacy is low", are EULAs unenforcable since companies know people don't read them?
No, EULAs will remain enforceable, because individuals are second-class citizens in the United States today.
Or, more specifically here, IBM's version of it: "If you sue IBM, we will destroy you." Doing so serves to discourage "sue Big Blue" as an exit strategy for other failing companies
It's not sufficient to kill SCO in order to achieve this. You have to remove the financial incentive from all the players. That means the CEO (who doesn't give a rat's ass if the ship sinks as long as he gets his golden parachute), the board members (who aren't, AFAIK, personally liable if the ship sinks -- the whole point of forming a corporation these days is to insulate the board members against any kind of liability), and the lawyers (who always get paid no matter what). Especially the lawyers.
If the lawyers knew that by filing these frivolous suits, they would lose their shirt and not just their case, they would be much more hesitant to even consider bringing suit. But as it stands now, the lawyers themselves have complete immunity, because they're "just the messenger".
Well, because the lawyers have such a large financial stake in bringing suit, they're not just a messenger, they're very much involved, and therefore they should be just as culpable for any losses incurred.
Have a look at the manifesto and the other interesting selection of papers and ideas at The Libre Society that is trying to theorise these developments...
What, is this a joke or something?
The front page of that website reads like a the kind of management-speak bullshit that Dilbert-style middle management likes to spout. "The Libre Society is committed to theorising the copyleft, free/libre and open-source movements"?? And that's just the front page. I don't have the time to waste reading a bunch of management-speak crap.
Moglen and Lessig are both very persuasive (If you got a bit of free time, read "Free Culture" by the latter) I hope that upon hearing their arguments European Commission will be wise enough to reconsider its position on software patents.
No amount of eloquence or quality of argument is as persuasive as a sufficiently large wad of cash (even if said wad of cash is used indirectly). This is why the EU Commission will, in the end, not listen to Moglen and Lessig, and will instead listen to Microsoft and the other multinational corporations.
That's because almost all modern governments are either repressive dictatorships (e.g., China) or are completely bought and paid for by the big multinationals.
The repressive dictatorships want to control the flow of information in order to maintain their power, and the big multinationals want to control the flow of information in order to maximize their profit.
A digital commons is an anathema to both.
And so, in time, the digital commons will disappear in a fog of eternal copyrights and patents. The USPTO today allows patents on everything, including (I seem to recall reading) things which were previously patented (where said previous patent has expired). This practice will continue and will get worse. And the EU will eventually mandate patents on everything (including software), too, since the EU Commission just has to keep approving it and sending it back to the EU Parliament until enough pressure has been brought to bear on the EU Parliament by the multinationals that they pass it. That won't take long -- almost everyone has a price, which means that almost everyone can be bought and paid for. Those that can't will probably tend to have "accidents" much more often than those that can.
You think I'm too cynical? 20 years ago, anyone who suggested that software would be patentable in the future would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory nutcase. But it happened. 30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room. But it passed anyway.
Look at the long-term trends. See if you can say with a straight face that I'm wrong after following the long-term trends to their logical conclusion.
Richard Stallman's "right to read" dystopia is a mere hint of what's to come.
If a patent application were immediately published as you suggest, companies would be reluctant to file because their inventions would be picked up immediately by the competition. The company may not be successful in getting the patent they want, which means they will have given the invention to the competition for free.
That's too fucking bad for them, then. They're going after a monopoly, after all. Going after a monopoly should be risky.
The decision to patent or not is one that should involve significant tradeoffs for everyone who considers patenting something. But right now, there are no real tradeoffs if you're a large corporation: the filing fees are nothing compared to the benefits of having the patent.
We won't see any real improvement in the patent arena until that changes.
Now for the REAL question - with evidence that Microsoft was behind the feeding of SCO, will the DoJ find the balls to actually investigate? Perhaps if the SEC launches action against the SCOzos...
You actually expect any arm of the government to actually do something against Microsoft?
<snicker>
And you think that the DoJ's previous behavior is because they lack balls rather than because they're on the take?
Heresay: My sensei also said that another instructor he knew tried to take down a mugger who had a knife and he ended up dead with multiple stab wounds. This would explain the development of my sensei's simpler "hand it over" technique.
Okay, then what, exactly, is the purpose of martial arts? If they don't give you an edge in combat then there's no practical reason beyond exercise for learning them, right?
I mean, learning a martial art properly (especially to the degree necessary to be able to teach it) requires a great deal of dedication, discipline, time, and effort. If it doesn't even give you an edge in combat in rough proportion to the time and effort, then it seems like a waste.
This is an example of how countries in Europe are *not* run by large corporations, but by the people (at least compared to the US).
Oh, yeah? Then how do you explain the EUCD? How do you explain the EU commission's blatant disregard of its own parliament? How do you explain that this whole patent thing hasn't been dropped like a hot potato after the population clearly and unequivocally voiced its displeasure? This and the EUCD shouldn't even be an issue right now if your countries actually listened to their populations.
Countries in Europe may not be run by large corporations to the same degree that the U.S. is, but large corporations have enough influence over there that it won't be long before Europe looks just like the U.S. in that regard.
Because as it stands right now, large corporations are pushing for laws, like the EUCD, across the EU that will give them greater power. And the more power they have, the more control they'll have over your countries. So you'd better get them under control now, before it's too late (like it is in the U.S.).
If you're building a company, and offshored labor is a lot cheaper than local labor, then pray tell why would you build it with local labor? The answer is that you probably won't. And that is how most companies, new and old, will answer the question.
Because you are selling to Americans? And if no American has a job, then you can't sell it to them.
And guess what? You don't pay your overseas workers enough to afford one of your products either.
Hiring people from other countries to replace american workers, when your primary source of customers is American a zero sum game. If only one person offshores their product, then they win, but if everyone does it, everyone loses.
I completely agree with this. I'm not arguing in favor of offshoring, I'm arguing against it, by showing what the likely long-term consequences will be, and why things will go the way I predict. And except for real increases in efficiency (meaning, being able to produce more per man-hour), economics as a whole is basically a zero-sum game.
Not that it'll make any difference, mind you: the people who have the power to control how this goes don't listen to people like us. Rather, they're the very people who are pushing for this.
For that to be true, you have to assume not only that most "middle class" workers are employed in positions that can be easily outsourced and that all positions that can be easily outsourced will be, but also that not enough jobs will be created to offset a significant portion of the jobs lost to outsourcing.
No, all I have to assume is that the vast majority of middle-class jobs are the kind that don't require a local physical presence, which is absolutely true and becoming more true all the time as technology improves (the fact that offshoring is viable now is because of technology). The rest follows from the economics of the situation: offshore labor costs much less than local labor.
As for new job creation, new jobs don't arise as a result of greater availability of manpower, they arise as a result of greater demand for labor, but greater demand for labor only occurs when there's something that someone with money needs to have done that isn't currently being done. You don't hire more people to do your yard just because you can afford to pay more people, you hire just enough to get the job done. And that's true everywhere.
And even if there is an increase in available jobs, the economics of offshoring guarantees that those jobs will preferentially be offshored, and will remain local only when the company in question has no other choice. Again, the economics of the situation demands this.
Add to that the fact that there is already some backlash occurring against outsourcing, and I don't get all the gloom and doom.
Backlash doesn't make any difference any more. The fact that the war in Iraq happened despite very heavy and vocal opposition should be enough to convince you that the government (which sets up the rules the corporations play by) doesn't give a crap what the people think anymore. And they have all the guns, so they don't have to. The government is now almost completely in the pockets of the large corporations, and has been for quite some time.
The more you lower the standard of living in a country, the less people will be concerned with innovation and the more effort they'll need to spend just to stay afloat.
Yes, exactly. This can't be emphasized enough: the lower the standard of living, the greater the percentage of a person's labor that is spent on barely surviving.
Offshoring forces entire countries' economies to compete with each other for the labor market, and the only variable that's available to tweak is the standard of living, or how much resources the average person has above and beyond that which is needed to barely survive. Think about what that means for a second:
Almost everything we take for granted isn't strictly needed for bare survival: running water, sewage, shelter, clothing, shoes, electricity, any form of transportation other than walking, etc. But every one of those things costs money, and therefore ultimately adds to the cost of the labor provided by people who have those things. When entire countries' economies are competing with each other, countries with fewer of those things will be able to provide cheaper labor than those with more, so the economies of those that have more will suffer, and thus some of those services will disappear because they must: the country in question will no longer be able to afford to keep them.
That doesn't sound like a promising future to me. It sounds like a nightmare. There's hope in the knowledge that eventually it'll be better for a country in such a situation to cut off all economic ties with the rest of the world and bootstrap its own economy from scratch. But only certain countries with abundant local natural resources can get away with that. Throw a bit of imperialism into the equation and countries which try that might find themselves staring into the barrel of a gun, pointed at them by the military of the country which hosts the multinational corporations that want access to an endless supply of slave labor.
If you're building a company, and offshored labor is a lot cheaper than local labor, then pray tell why would you build it with local labor? The answer is that you probably won't. And that is how most companies, new and old, will answer the question.
The greater the availability of cheap offshored labor, the worse the prospects for local labor. And therefore, the higher the local unemployment rate.
It'd be one thing if offshoring was a gain in economic efficiency, but it's not, because the amount of human labor expended to do a job remains the same, if it doesn't actually increase. That means that offshoring has to be analyzed in the context of a zero-sum game (economics is zero sum unless there are gains in efficiency involved, because the money transactions themselves are zero-sum). And in the context of a zero-sum game, offshoring is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes (those who are losing jobs) to the upper classes (those who own, run, or have significant investment in corporations), because at least some of the money saved from offshoring is going towards additional payouts to the CEOs, upper management, board members, and large investors.
The move towards offshoring won't help the U.S. economy, which gets its strength from the middle class. It'll destroy it, because it'll destroy the middle class. And it might (depending on how far it goes) destroy the world economy as well, because it'll force entire countries' economies to compete with each other with only one variable determining who wins: the standard of living (the amount of resources the average person has above and beyond that which is needed to barely survive). That's because the lower the standard of living, the fewer resources being used by the population, and thus the lower the cost of that population, and thus the lower the cost of using that population as labor.
Which means that the end result will look a lot like the middle ages did: people were either insanely wealthy or dirt poor, with very little variation in between. Most were dirt poor, and little more than slaves.
To give more details, the questioning was framed to guage the willingness of American Marines to fire upon American citizens who forceable resisted attempts to disarm them.
Interesting. But I'm betting that the answer I assume they gave, that they'd find it difficult to do, is not an accurate one. Remember: military personnel are trained to kill almost instinctively. They're also trained to follow orders no matter how strange they may seem, because that's sometimes required to win wars (or so they're taught, and there's probably some truth to it). Many people have argued that because of these things, the military is poorly suited to act as a police force, and they're probably right.
But consider what the police would do if someone they were trying to disarm was forcibly resisting them. Would they fire on such a person? They have, many times. And if the police, who are supposed to be more restrained in such situations, would do so, then what in the world would make you think that military personnel would even hesitate?
And lest you think that somehow American civilians are "special" and would be treated "differently", remember what countless military organizations in many countries throughout the world have done to their own civilians throughout history, then look at what our military has proven itself willing to do to everyone else it has been told was "the enemy". It's not much of a stretch to say that they'd be willing to do the same thing to American civilians, as long as those civilians were labelled "the enemy" -- as they surely would be if they were revolutionaries.
History has shown over and over and over again how easy it is to call someone your enemy, to think of them as somehow lesser than yourself and thus worthy of death. Those in the military routinely do this. They have to, because they otherwise could not justify to themselves the things they do.
You leave out a third possibility. War is hell. People exposed to hellish conditions will behave unpredictably.
The people in the military are specifically trained to deal with such conditions. The conditions on the battlefield are no less hellish than those in a prison, especially when you're not one of the prisoners. The breakdown of discipline in the military to the degree necessary to explain the "unpredictability" seen in the U.S. troops who run these prisons is far more than what would be required to cause the military to lose most of its effectiveness on the battlefield, where strict discipline and control means the difference between victory and defeat.
Like I said, there's no way past the logic. Not that I can see, anyway.
I do believe that the 2 million figure also includes dead South Vietnamese.
Actually, that 2 million is a very conservative estimate. The Vietnamese estimate it at 1 million Vietnamese combatants killed and 4 million civilians.
But either way, the North Vietnamese lost at least an order of magnitude more combatants than the U.S. did, and maybe 4 times that number of civilians, so my point stands: the civilians were cannon fodder, not effective combatants, against the U.S. military.
And you keep talking about what the government would do when fighting for its own survival. I submit to you that once wholesale butchery of civillians is even considered, the government that we have now will already be dead.
I'm not talking about the government we already have, I'm talking about the police state that we're headed straight for. Yes, the government we have (or, rather, the one we idealize) will be dead. It's almost dead now, because it no longer answers to its people, only its corporations.
I'm talking about the government that the civilian population would have good reason to rise up in arms against. And what I'm saying is that such an uprising would have no chance
The same voting machines that have just been completely decertified in the entire state of California, forcing election officials to offer paper ballots as well? Think again.
That's just one state. With a relatively liberal population. Which probably has a stronger anti-Bush sentiment than most. And which probably has a larger percentage of computer nerds who understand these things than most.
If you read back through other Slashdot threads on this subject, you'll see that many people were surprised that California actually rejected the voting machines. That means that California is probably an exceptional case, rather than an average one. I'm betting that most of the other states will put the voting machines into place.
But even if only half the states use voting machines, it's enough to give Bush the election: the outcomes in the states with voting machines would simply have to be "adjusted" just enough to slightly more than compensate for whatever lead the other guy has in those states without.
Bush doesn't have to win by much, he just has to win. In fact, it's less likely that the election results will be questioned if he wins by a small margin.
Only if the vast majority of the states in the U.S. reject the voting machines outright is Bush likely to lose this election. I don't think that's going to happen.
Big guns don't mean much when 1/2 the population of the US owns guns, and you are not sure which of that group is against you. Trying to take guns from hunters is a sure way to turn them against you.
If you're the head of a police state and you're not sure of which part of some group of people is against you, then you do the obvious thing: you eliminate all of those people. Or at least, in this case, disarm them. Because as unwilling as such people might be to give up their firearms, if the choice is that or death, many will choose life. Only a small subset will choose to fight.
And remember, this is a police state we're talking about here. Those in power don't give a crap what the general population thinks. If they did, it wouldn't be a police state: it would be a democracy.
Deer rifles are often more powerful than the typical military gun. Sure the military has bigger guns, but they are not useful in all situations, and those big guns can be taken out with by a good sniper. (deer hunting similar to sniping)
You don't get it, do you? A good sniper rifle is no match for an M-1 Abrams tank, or a 2000 pound bomb dropped from 30,000 feet, or a nuke dropped from 60,000 feet, or a modern biological or chemical weapon, or even a modern C-130 gun platform (you know, the kind with 105mm howitzers on board).
I don't know why, but people have a lot of trouble wrapping their brain around the idea that the U.S. military would use the big weapons against its own civilian population, but you have to assume they will if the survival of their own government is at stake.
That said, the military of course will try to be as surgical about it as possible, if only to minimize the amount of new recruits the revolutionaries get. But make no mistake: the revolutionaries will be considered "the enemy", just like they were by the English government during the American Revolution. The U.S. military has a large enough variety of sufficiently powerful and surgical weapons that no civilian population can hope to win against it. And the revolutionaries would have to win. It's not enough to simply be a nuisance like terrorists are, because the objective is to remove the sitting government from power, and you can't accomplish that without winning a military victory.
I don't know who would win a revolution in the US. It depends on just how mad the population is.
No, sorry, none of that matters. Not when the military has an advantage of between thousands and millions to one due to their weaponry.
Ask yourself this: how much of a chance would the civilian population have if they didn't have any firearms? Then ask yourself how the firearms they do have could possibly make the difference between victory and defeat in the face of the full arsenal of the U.S. military. You can't just assume that the civilians will win. You have to have a good, solid reason for believing they will. In the face of those odds, I don't see what such a reason could possibly be.
No, the only way the revolution could possibly succeed is if the U.S. military either gets in on the side of the revolutionaries or if it stays out of the conflict entirely. Otherwise it doesn't matter how angry the population gets. The list of successful civilian uprisings against well-armed totalitarian regimes in the 20th century is miniscule, if there were any at all. That alone should clue you into the likely outcome of a revolution against the U.S. government, which is supported by the most powerful military the world has ever seen in its entire history.
Vietnam was not a revolution in action, it was a real war with two sides and well-defined borders. And the reason the U.S. didn't simply walk all over the North Vietnamese is twofold:
The North Vietnamese had real weaponry, including lots of SAMs, fighters, lots of well-trained infrantry, etc. So they put up a real resistance. Even so, the U.S. military would have walked all over them if it weren't for...
... the U.S. hampered itself severely as a result of the fear that a larger power like the U.S.S.R. would step into the conflict in a major way. As a result, many targets, like Hanoi, were considered "off limits". Only after Nixon started bombing Hanoi did the North Vietnamese came to the negotiating table, but not soon after that Hanoi was put back onto the "off limits" list.
No, if anything, Vietnam is an excellent example of how a civilian population, even if reasonably well-armed compared with the U.S. civilian population, has no chance against a modern military. How is it an example of that? Well, notice that South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese almost immediately after the U.S. military pulled out of the region. This essentially proves that a civilian population can't overcome a well-armed military on its own. And the North Vietnamese had already suffered a lot of casualties before the U.S. pulled out, whereas in a revolution here in the U.S., the revolutionaries would be going up against a fresh military force which is much more heavily armed than it was during Vietnam and would be much more willing to pull out all the stops than in Vietnam (since the survival of the government it serves is at stake).
If this is a foregone conclusion, why then did the Clinton Administration ask the Marines if they'd be willing to fire on American civillians?
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but if I had to guess, it would be because the situation was different. It wasn't a case of the U.S. government being forced to fight for its own survival, so there wasn't the imperative to declare the American civilians in question "enemy combatants" like they certainly would be in the case of a revolution.
The 7 individuals implicated in no way represent the whole of the US military.
Oh yeah? The press in the U.S. is starting to talk about how the goings on at Abu Ghraib are not an isolated incident. And if it's not an isolated incident, then only one of two things are possible:
The U.S. military does not have enough discipline within its ranks to properly control the behavior of its people, or
the goings on were known to those relatively high in the chain of command and were either ignored (and thus tacitly approved of) or explicitly approved.
So either the U.S. military is highly undisciplined, which would also tend to make it an ineffective fighting force (not likely, given its demonstrated effectiveness in multiple combat situations), or it has no problem treating "the enemy" as if it has no rights of any kind. Take your pick, but there's no escaping the logic.
Vietnam? Farmers with cheap Russian and Chinese rifles as well as some home made booby traps did a pretty good job against these advanced military weapons.
Oh yeah? Then how do you explain the 2 million dead Vietnamese compared with the 50 thousand dead U.S. military personnel? And that's when the civilians had the help of the North Vietnamese military! That's a 20 to 1 advantage in favor of the U.S. military, and that's when the U.S. military was hampered by limitations placed on them by the politicians! You call that a "pretty good job"???
No, sorry, Vietnam illustrates vividly how a purely civilian population has no chance against a well-trained and well-armed military.
By whom? Which government? What would National Guard units do? Would they obey the federal authority or the state, especially if asked to turn on their own people?
The U.S. federal government, in this case. Would the National Guard obey the authority of the state or of the feds? Good question, but not terribly relevant in the end. The National Guard is usually outfitted with relatively outdated weapons compared with what the U.S. military has, and they certainly don't have any of the big weapons the U.S. military has.
But the National Guard would certainly make it a little more of a match than it would be otherwise...
The Battle Of Athens is a great example of how corruption in the goverment can be stopped by an armed populace.
That example is irrelevant here, because the government in question has somewhere between a thousands to one and a millions to one advantage in firepower, depending on which weapons they choose to deploy.
The peashooters the civilian population controls will make barely a dent in the outcome.
Remember, this is completely different than Iraq or any other "war of occupation". In this case, the government's very survival will be at stake, so it will have no reservations about making use of its most advanced and deadly weaponry on the civilian population, if that's what it takes to remain in control.
And since the military will do whatever it's told to do, as long as it can be convinced that the people it's targeting are "the enemy", there's little hope of the military siding with the revolutionaries. The experience in Iraq with respect to the handling of prisoners proves that the military as a whole has no problem ignoring even the most basic of civil rights and treating "the enemy" like dirt.
Remember: most revolutions involve a relatively small number of people as a percentage of the total population, so the government will have no trouble making the revolutionaries appear to be terrorists or whatever the bad-guy-name-of-the-day happens to be, so there's little reason to believe that the military will side with the revolutionaries.
So: case closed. The 2nd Amendment doesn't mean shit anymore like it did back when it was drafted, because modern weaponry is so advanced and lethal that those who wield them have an advantage over those who don't so large that the framers couldn't possibly imagine it.
Be prepared for the U.S. to become a true police state, because it is coming. It's only a matter of time. And most people won't care. After all, people have been living under oppressive totalitarian governments across the globe for almost all of human history, so why should we believe they'll suddenly not tolerate it now?
Oh: and Bush will win this next election, because the people who make the voting machines will make sure of it. Count on it.
I tend to think like you do, Cisco sees this as something that is essential to the future of TCP as a viable standard and will not charge an arm and a leg for a license.
You're right. They won't... at first.
But then, once their standard is implemented basically everywhere, they'll suddenly change the terms, so that anyone who wants to create a new implementation of any kind (which includes upgrades to existing versions, etc.) will have to pay handsomely for the privilege.
You're an idiot if you don't think any major corporation will refrain from taking maximum advantage of power like that. Major corporations don't give a shit about the welfare of the community, or of their customers, or of anyone but their major shareholders. They care only about their bottom line and about milking everything they own for all it's worth, in the short term (and bust out the "we're just maximizing shareholder value!" excuse when it harms someone, even their own long-term prospects).
So excuse us for being skeptical of any "good will" claims on the part of any significant corporation or their supporters. We as a community and as a society have been burned too many times before to believe them anymore.
...if it gets past the patent office (who here doubts that it will? I don't).
The reason is that this is basically a patch to a protocol. The TCP protocol itself was a novel invention. But most patches to protocols, or to code to fix a particular problem, are fairly obvious to someone skilled in the requisite arts. Generally, the nature of the bug is what determines the solution, and often the solution is obvious to someone who is familiar with the protocol (or code) and the problem in question.
If this gets through then you can expect a lot of patents to be filed on patches to many things, including open source projects. And that means that unless the code is protected by something like the GPL (which requires a patent license grant as a condition of redistribution), the projects (and those who maintain and use them) will be vulnerable to patent infringement suits.
This is going to get nasty. But I think most of us who have been keeping track of this nonsense already know that.
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Exactly. And this is why companies like Adobe who peddle high-priced software for the masses will eventually lose to Free Software. If the risk of using proprietary software when you can't afford to acquire it properly gets too high, then you'll use something that is truly free even if it isn't as good as the proprietary version -- as long as the truly free version is good enough. And when you eventually get to the point where you are in a position where you influence purchasing decisions, are you going to then encourage your company to buy the software that you have no familiarity with, or are you going to encourage them to use the same software that you are familiar with, and is free to boot? You'll recommend the software you're familiar with, and the fact that it's free to the company will be an extra bonus.
Multiply that by tens or even hundreds of thousands of times over and what do you get? A failed proprietary product, and possibly even a failed software company, that's what.
The only exception to this is software that has no true equivalent, such as operating systems, and software that's cheap enough that even the pirates and poor college students can afford it. Windows doesn't really have an equivalent because nothing else out there will run the programs it runs.
No wonder you think SQL NULLs are the worst thing -- you can't even get the semantics right.
When either X or Y (or both) are NULL, then any expression evaluating it is NULL. Not false. Not true. NULL. Any SQL implementation that behaves differently is broken.
It's not the SQL standard's fault if your code's logic can't handle that case. Nor is it the standard's fault that you can't see fit to NOT USE the NULL feature when you don't want to (and any reasonable database even goes so far as to give you the option of making *sure* you don't use it -- that's what the NOT NULL declaration when defining a column is for).
Getting rid of NULL isn't going to help you when you suddenly discover that you really DO need to be able to represent "missing data" somehow.
Yeah. Good thing a famous American archaeologist managed to foil their attempts to grab the Ark of the Covenant. Otherwise we'd all be speaking German now.
No, EULAs will remain enforceable, because individuals are second-class citizens in the United States today.
It's not sufficient to kill SCO in order to achieve this. You have to remove the financial incentive from all the players. That means the CEO (who doesn't give a rat's ass if the ship sinks as long as he gets his golden parachute), the board members (who aren't, AFAIK, personally liable if the ship sinks -- the whole point of forming a corporation these days is to insulate the board members against any kind of liability), and the lawyers (who always get paid no matter what). Especially the lawyers.
If the lawyers knew that by filing these frivolous suits, they would lose their shirt and not just their case, they would be much more hesitant to even consider bringing suit. But as it stands now, the lawyers themselves have complete immunity, because they're "just the messenger".
Well, because the lawyers have such a large financial stake in bringing suit, they're not just a messenger, they're very much involved, and therefore they should be just as culpable for any losses incurred.
What, is this a joke or something?
The front page of that website reads like a the kind of management-speak bullshit that Dilbert-style middle management likes to spout. "The Libre Society is committed to theorising the copyleft, free/libre and open-source movements"?? And that's just the front page. I don't have the time to waste reading a bunch of management-speak crap.
No amount of eloquence or quality of argument is as persuasive as a sufficiently large wad of cash (even if said wad of cash is used indirectly). This is why the EU Commission will, in the end, not listen to Moglen and Lessig, and will instead listen to Microsoft and the other multinational corporations.
That's because almost all modern governments are either repressive dictatorships (e.g., China) or are completely bought and paid for by the big multinationals.
The repressive dictatorships want to control the flow of information in order to maintain their power, and the big multinationals want to control the flow of information in order to maximize their profit.
A digital commons is an anathema to both.
And so, in time, the digital commons will disappear in a fog of eternal copyrights and patents. The USPTO today allows patents on everything, including (I seem to recall reading) things which were previously patented (where said previous patent has expired). This practice will continue and will get worse. And the EU will eventually mandate patents on everything (including software), too, since the EU Commission just has to keep approving it and sending it back to the EU Parliament until enough pressure has been brought to bear on the EU Parliament by the multinationals that they pass it. That won't take long -- almost everyone has a price, which means that almost everyone can be bought and paid for. Those that can't will probably tend to have "accidents" much more often than those that can.
You think I'm too cynical? 20 years ago, anyone who suggested that software would be patentable in the future would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory nutcase. But it happened. 30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room. But it passed anyway.
Look at the long-term trends. See if you can say with a straight face that I'm wrong after following the long-term trends to their logical conclusion.
Richard Stallman's "right to read" dystopia is a mere hint of what's to come.
The above is enough to make me lose whatever faith I had in people's ability to spell. :-)
That's too fucking bad for them, then. They're going after a monopoly, after all. Going after a monopoly should be risky.
The decision to patent or not is one that should involve significant tradeoffs for everyone who considers patenting something. But right now, there are no real tradeoffs if you're a large corporation: the filing fees are nothing compared to the benefits of having the patent.
We won't see any real improvement in the patent arena until that changes.
You actually expect any arm of the government to actually do something against Microsoft?
<snicker>
And you think that the DoJ's previous behavior is because they lack balls rather than because they're on the take?
Bwahahahaha!
Okay, then what, exactly, is the purpose of martial arts? If they don't give you an edge in combat then there's no practical reason beyond exercise for learning them, right?
I mean, learning a martial art properly (especially to the degree necessary to be able to teach it) requires a great deal of dedication, discipline, time, and effort. If it doesn't even give you an edge in combat in rough proportion to the time and effort, then it seems like a waste.
Oh, yeah? Then how do you explain the EUCD? How do you explain the EU commission's blatant disregard of its own parliament? How do you explain that this whole patent thing hasn't been dropped like a hot potato after the population clearly and unequivocally voiced its displeasure? This and the EUCD shouldn't even be an issue right now if your countries actually listened to their populations.
Countries in Europe may not be run by large corporations to the same degree that the U.S. is, but large corporations have enough influence over there that it won't be long before Europe looks just like the U.S. in that regard.
Because as it stands right now, large corporations are pushing for laws, like the EUCD, across the EU that will give them greater power. And the more power they have, the more control they'll have over your countries. So you'd better get them under control now, before it's too late (like it is in the U.S.).
I completely agree with this. I'm not arguing in favor of offshoring, I'm arguing against it, by showing what the likely long-term consequences will be, and why things will go the way I predict. And except for real increases in efficiency (meaning, being able to produce more per man-hour), economics as a whole is basically a zero-sum game.
Not that it'll make any difference, mind you: the people who have the power to control how this goes don't listen to people like us. Rather, they're the very people who are pushing for this.
No, all I have to assume is that the vast majority of middle-class jobs are the kind that don't require a local physical presence, which is absolutely true and becoming more true all the time as technology improves (the fact that offshoring is viable now is because of technology). The rest follows from the economics of the situation: offshore labor costs much less than local labor.
As for new job creation, new jobs don't arise as a result of greater availability of manpower, they arise as a result of greater demand for labor, but greater demand for labor only occurs when there's something that someone with money needs to have done that isn't currently being done. You don't hire more people to do your yard just because you can afford to pay more people, you hire just enough to get the job done. And that's true everywhere.
And even if there is an increase in available jobs, the economics of offshoring guarantees that those jobs will preferentially be offshored, and will remain local only when the company in question has no other choice. Again, the economics of the situation demands this.
Backlash doesn't make any difference any more. The fact that the war in Iraq happened despite very heavy and vocal opposition should be enough to convince you that the government (which sets up the rules the corporations play by) doesn't give a crap what the people think anymore. And they have all the guns, so they don't have to. The government is now almost completely in the pockets of the large corporations, and has been for quite some time.
Yes, exactly. This can't be emphasized enough: the lower the standard of living, the greater the percentage of a person's labor that is spent on barely surviving.
Offshoring forces entire countries' economies to compete with each other for the labor market, and the only variable that's available to tweak is the standard of living, or how much resources the average person has above and beyond that which is needed to barely survive. Think about what that means for a second:
Almost everything we take for granted isn't strictly needed for bare survival: running water, sewage, shelter, clothing, shoes, electricity, any form of transportation other than walking, etc. But every one of those things costs money, and therefore ultimately adds to the cost of the labor provided by people who have those things. When entire countries' economies are competing with each other, countries with fewer of those things will be able to provide cheaper labor than those with more, so the economies of those that have more will suffer, and thus some of those services will disappear because they must: the country in question will no longer be able to afford to keep them.
That doesn't sound like a promising future to me. It sounds like a nightmare. There's hope in the knowledge that eventually it'll be better for a country in such a situation to cut off all economic ties with the rest of the world and bootstrap its own economy from scratch. But only certain countries with abundant local natural resources can get away with that. Throw a bit of imperialism into the equation and countries which try that might find themselves staring into the barrel of a gun, pointed at them by the military of the country which hosts the multinational corporations that want access to an endless supply of slave labor.
Which will also then be offshored.
If you're building a company, and offshored labor is a lot cheaper than local labor, then pray tell why would you build it with local labor? The answer is that you probably won't. And that is how most companies, new and old, will answer the question.
The greater the availability of cheap offshored labor, the worse the prospects for local labor. And therefore, the higher the local unemployment rate.
It'd be one thing if offshoring was a gain in economic efficiency, but it's not, because the amount of human labor expended to do a job remains the same, if it doesn't actually increase. That means that offshoring has to be analyzed in the context of a zero-sum game (economics is zero sum unless there are gains in efficiency involved, because the money transactions themselves are zero-sum). And in the context of a zero-sum game, offshoring is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes (those who are losing jobs) to the upper classes (those who own, run, or have significant investment in corporations), because at least some of the money saved from offshoring is going towards additional payouts to the CEOs, upper management, board members, and large investors.
The move towards offshoring won't help the U.S. economy, which gets its strength from the middle class. It'll destroy it, because it'll destroy the middle class. And it might (depending on how far it goes) destroy the world economy as well, because it'll force entire countries' economies to compete with each other with only one variable determining who wins: the standard of living (the amount of resources the average person has above and beyond that which is needed to barely survive). That's because the lower the standard of living, the fewer resources being used by the population, and thus the lower the cost of that population, and thus the lower the cost of using that population as labor.
Which means that the end result will look a lot like the middle ages did: people were either insanely wealthy or dirt poor, with very little variation in between. Most were dirt poor, and little more than slaves.
Interesting. But I'm betting that the answer I assume they gave, that they'd find it difficult to do, is not an accurate one. Remember: military personnel are trained to kill almost instinctively. They're also trained to follow orders no matter how strange they may seem, because that's sometimes required to win wars (or so they're taught, and there's probably some truth to it). Many people have argued that because of these things, the military is poorly suited to act as a police force, and they're probably right.
But consider what the police would do if someone they were trying to disarm was forcibly resisting them. Would they fire on such a person? They have, many times. And if the police, who are supposed to be more restrained in such situations, would do so, then what in the world would make you think that military personnel would even hesitate?
And lest you think that somehow American civilians are "special" and would be treated "differently", remember what countless military organizations in many countries throughout the world have done to their own civilians throughout history, then look at what our military has proven itself willing to do to everyone else it has been told was "the enemy". It's not much of a stretch to say that they'd be willing to do the same thing to American civilians, as long as those civilians were labelled "the enemy" -- as they surely would be if they were revolutionaries.
History has shown over and over and over again how easy it is to call someone your enemy, to think of them as somehow lesser than yourself and thus worthy of death. Those in the military routinely do this. They have to, because they otherwise could not justify to themselves the things they do.
The people in the military are specifically trained to deal with such conditions. The conditions on the battlefield are no less hellish than those in a prison, especially when you're not one of the prisoners. The breakdown of discipline in the military to the degree necessary to explain the "unpredictability" seen in the U.S. troops who run these prisons is far more than what would be required to cause the military to lose most of its effectiveness on the battlefield, where strict discipline and control means the difference between victory and defeat.
Like I said, there's no way past the logic. Not that I can see, anyway.
Actually, that 2 million is a very conservative estimate. The Vietnamese estimate it at 1 million Vietnamese combatants killed and 4 million civilians.
But either way, the North Vietnamese lost at least an order of magnitude more combatants than the U.S. did, and maybe 4 times that number of civilians, so my point stands: the civilians were cannon fodder, not effective combatants, against the U.S. military.
I'm not talking about the government we already have, I'm talking about the police state that we're headed straight for. Yes, the government we have (or, rather, the one we idealize) will be dead. It's almost dead now, because it no longer answers to its people, only its corporations.
I'm talking about the government that the civilian population would have good reason to rise up in arms against. And what I'm saying is that such an uprising would have no chance
That's just one state. With a relatively liberal population. Which probably has a stronger anti-Bush sentiment than most. And which probably has a larger percentage of computer nerds who understand these things than most.
If you read back through other Slashdot threads on this subject, you'll see that many people were surprised that California actually rejected the voting machines. That means that California is probably an exceptional case, rather than an average one. I'm betting that most of the other states will put the voting machines into place.
But even if only half the states use voting machines, it's enough to give Bush the election: the outcomes in the states with voting machines would simply have to be "adjusted" just enough to slightly more than compensate for whatever lead the other guy has in those states without.
Bush doesn't have to win by much, he just has to win. In fact, it's less likely that the election results will be questioned if he wins by a small margin.
Only if the vast majority of the states in the U.S. reject the voting machines outright is Bush likely to lose this election. I don't think that's going to happen.
If you're the head of a police state and you're not sure of which part of some group of people is against you, then you do the obvious thing: you eliminate all of those people. Or at least, in this case, disarm them. Because as unwilling as such people might be to give up their firearms, if the choice is that or death, many will choose life. Only a small subset will choose to fight.
And remember, this is a police state we're talking about here. Those in power don't give a crap what the general population thinks. If they did, it wouldn't be a police state: it would be a democracy.
You don't get it, do you? A good sniper rifle is no match for an M-1 Abrams tank, or a 2000 pound bomb dropped from 30,000 feet, or a nuke dropped from 60,000 feet, or a modern biological or chemical weapon, or even a modern C-130 gun platform (you know, the kind with 105mm howitzers on board).
I don't know why, but people have a lot of trouble wrapping their brain around the idea that the U.S. military would use the big weapons against its own civilian population, but you have to assume they will if the survival of their own government is at stake.
That said, the military of course will try to be as surgical about it as possible, if only to minimize the amount of new recruits the revolutionaries get. But make no mistake: the revolutionaries will be considered "the enemy", just like they were by the English government during the American Revolution. The U.S. military has a large enough variety of sufficiently powerful and surgical weapons that no civilian population can hope to win against it. And the revolutionaries would have to win. It's not enough to simply be a nuisance like terrorists are, because the objective is to remove the sitting government from power, and you can't accomplish that without winning a military victory.
No, sorry, none of that matters. Not when the military has an advantage of between thousands and millions to one due to their weaponry.
Ask yourself this: how much of a chance would the civilian population have if they didn't have any firearms? Then ask yourself how the firearms they do have could possibly make the difference between victory and defeat in the face of the full arsenal of the U.S. military. You can't just assume that the civilians will win. You have to have a good, solid reason for believing they will. In the face of those odds, I don't see what such a reason could possibly be.
No, the only way the revolution could possibly succeed is if the U.S. military either gets in on the side of the revolutionaries or if it stays out of the conflict entirely. Otherwise it doesn't matter how angry the population gets. The list of successful civilian uprisings against well-armed totalitarian regimes in the 20th century is miniscule, if there were any at all. That alone should clue you into the likely outcome of a revolution against the U.S. government, which is supported by the most powerful military the world has ever seen in its entire history.
Vietnam was not a revolution in action, it was a real war with two sides and well-defined borders. And the reason the U.S. didn't simply walk all over the North Vietnamese is twofold:
No, if anything, Vietnam is an excellent example of how a civilian population, even if reasonably well-armed compared with the U.S. civilian population, has no chance against a modern military. How is it an example of that? Well, notice that South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese almost immediately after the U.S. military pulled out of the region. This essentially proves that a civilian population can't overcome a well-armed military on its own. And the North Vietnamese had already suffered a lot of casualties before the U.S. pulled out, whereas in a revolution here in the U.S., the revolutionaries would be going up against a fresh military force which is much more heavily armed than it was during Vietnam and would be much more willing to pull out all the stops than in Vietnam (since the survival of the government it serves is at stake).
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but if I had to guess, it would be because the situation was different. It wasn't a case of the U.S. government being forced to fight for its own survival, so there wasn't the imperative to declare the American civilians in question "enemy combatants" like they certainly would be in the case of a revolution.
Oh yeah? The press in the U.S. is starting to talk about how the goings on at Abu Ghraib are not an isolated incident. And if it's not an isolated incident, then only one of two things are possible:
So either the U.S. military is highly undisciplined, which would also tend to make it an ineffective fighting force (not likely, given its demonstrated effectiveness in multiple combat situations), or it has no problem treating "the enemy" as if it has no rights of any kind. Take your pick, but there's no escaping the logic.
Oh yeah? Then how do you explain the 2 million dead Vietnamese compared with the 50 thousand dead U.S. military personnel? And that's when the civilians had the help of the North Vietnamese military! That's a 20 to 1 advantage in favor of the U.S. military, and that's when the U.S. military was hampered by limitations placed on them by the politicians! You call that a "pretty good job"???
No, sorry, Vietnam illustrates vividly how a purely civilian population has no chance against a well-trained and well-armed military.
[on Bush]
The U.S. federal government, in this case. Would the National Guard obey the authority of the state or of the feds? Good question, but not terribly relevant in the end. The National Guard is usually outfitted with relatively outdated weapons compared with what the U.S. military has, and they certainly don't have any of the big weapons the U.S. military has.
But the National Guard would certainly make it a little more of a match than it would be otherwise...
That example is irrelevant here, because the government in question has somewhere between a thousands to one and a millions to one advantage in firepower, depending on which weapons they choose to deploy.
The peashooters the civilian population controls will make barely a dent in the outcome.
Remember, this is completely different than Iraq or any other "war of occupation". In this case, the government's very survival will be at stake, so it will have no reservations about making use of its most advanced and deadly weaponry on the civilian population, if that's what it takes to remain in control.
And since the military will do whatever it's told to do, as long as it can be convinced that the people it's targeting are "the enemy", there's little hope of the military siding with the revolutionaries. The experience in Iraq with respect to the handling of prisoners proves that the military as a whole has no problem ignoring even the most basic of civil rights and treating "the enemy" like dirt.
Remember: most revolutions involve a relatively small number of people as a percentage of the total population, so the government will have no trouble making the revolutionaries appear to be terrorists or whatever the bad-guy-name-of-the-day happens to be, so there's little reason to believe that the military will side with the revolutionaries.
So: case closed. The 2nd Amendment doesn't mean shit anymore like it did back when it was drafted, because modern weaponry is so advanced and lethal that those who wield them have an advantage over those who don't so large that the framers couldn't possibly imagine it.
Be prepared for the U.S. to become a true police state, because it is coming. It's only a matter of time. And most people won't care. After all, people have been living under oppressive totalitarian governments across the globe for almost all of human history, so why should we believe they'll suddenly not tolerate it now?
Oh: and Bush will win this next election, because the people who make the voting machines will make sure of it. Count on it.
You're right. They won't ... at first.
But then, once their standard is implemented basically everywhere, they'll suddenly change the terms, so that anyone who wants to create a new implementation of any kind (which includes upgrades to existing versions, etc.) will have to pay handsomely for the privilege.
You're an idiot if you don't think any major corporation will refrain from taking maximum advantage of power like that. Major corporations don't give a shit about the welfare of the community, or of their customers, or of anyone but their major shareholders. They care only about their bottom line and about milking everything they own for all it's worth, in the short term (and bust out the "we're just maximizing shareholder value!" excuse when it harms someone, even their own long-term prospects).
So excuse us for being skeptical of any "good will" claims on the part of any significant corporation or their supporters. We as a community and as a society have been burned too many times before to believe them anymore.
The reason is that this is basically a patch to a protocol. The TCP protocol itself was a novel invention. But most patches to protocols, or to code to fix a particular problem, are fairly obvious to someone skilled in the requisite arts. Generally, the nature of the bug is what determines the solution, and often the solution is obvious to someone who is familiar with the protocol (or code) and the problem in question.
If this gets through then you can expect a lot of patents to be filed on patches to many things, including open source projects. And that means that unless the code is protected by something like the GPL (which requires a patent license grant as a condition of redistribution), the projects (and those who maintain and use them) will be vulnerable to patent infringement suits.
This is going to get nasty. But I think most of us who have been keeping track of this nonsense already know that.