How does the law prevent criminals from doing anything, exactly? Criminals break laws; that's why they are criminals.
If you want your children to be safe, you must actively protect them. Laws only provide for justice after the fact. What good is that if your child is kidnapped, raped, or killed?
Furthermore, the purpose of the Internet is not to educate children, it's to connect people. Not everyone needs to be connected to your children. Your children don't need unsupervised access to the entire online world. Nobody is obligated to make it suitable for children, nor should they.
That said, unsolicated spam, pornographic or otherwise, is reaching nightmare proportions. I can't see how giving children direct access to SMTP-based email can be anything but a mistake at this point in time. For children, white-list correspondence should be the rule, not the exception.
I had a ][+ and I still have my IIGS in a box somewhere. The best feature of all time was the ability to go into the assembly monitor, write code, disassemble, review, modify, patch and tweak the machine on the fly. Beyond any doubt, my ability to code everything from device drivers to applications began there.
I also learned a lot about writing software quickly without using either an assembler or a compiler. Save often though. The//e had a built in assembler, but I only had a ][+ so I wrote my own. Then, using that assembler, I wrote a more powerful one and bootstrapped my way up. It took an entire summer. That was a good summer.
The IIGS was simply awesome. By the time I put it away, it had a video overlay card, 15MHz processor, 500MB SCSI external hard drive, and a full 8MB of RAM. I had gone through two power supplies and three motherboards over 10 years. Other than the monitor, it probably still works today. Wonder if I could get a proper pin out on the monitor and hook it up.
Ahhh... I don't get nostalgic very often, but damn , that was good stuff. With the exception of Linux, everything after the IIGS has been a real bore. I even considered leaving computer work altogether; there was nothing left to explore. As they say at ubergeek, I'm a "super villian" now so my computer life has become much more exciting.
Fortunately for me, my wife appreciates my enthusiasm for computers. But then, that's why I married her.
If you've ever seen an "expert" witness demolished in court, you'd think otherwise. Even people who are proficient in their field can get dinged pretty badly on the stand. Brain for brain, I'm betting the Open Source gurus will outperform anybody that SCO can bribe into taking the stand. One can argue the facts, or one can argue the law. SCO has neither, and that will be easily demonstrable in court.
Warp and woof and wefting
By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 29 May 2003, 09:55
MAXTOR AND HITACHI don't have factories in China, right?
Well only half right. Yesterday, a Hitachi representative in Europe called us to say reports of problems with high capacity drives couldn't possibly be true "because Hitachi doesn't manufacture drives in China".
One reader pointed out to us that as he was penning his email he was looking at a high end Hitachi drive which bore the clear message "made in China".
Should be interesting to see how this really pans out.
Juries do not need to understand kernel code. They need to hear testimony from expert witnesses. Both parties will provide them, lawyers will do their best to refute their testimony, and the jurors will decide who is more convincing.
I'll put my money on the Open Source experts any day.
Nice to see that people are impatient enough to get out of SCOX that it can't wait for tomorrow. I wonder what the people who are buying are thinking? The volume is low, maybe a handful of knuckleheads at the most. Hopefully, the price will continue down first thing in the morning after investors have had a night to sleep on it.
During a lay-over in Seoul I watched the Korean security staff at the airport insult, berate, and hassle the Japanese travelers who were changing planes. Language difficulties seemed to be the trigger. When we finally landed in Osaka, it was the Korean passengers' turn for abuse.
I should point out that the Japanese did this with substantially more style. Whereas the Koreans were openly hostile in Seoul, the Japanese were cold and suspicious. A Korean could spend a lot of extra time going through Japanese customs.
Being an American, I experienced no problems at either end, and I waltzed through Japanese customs in under five minutes. This was in 1994. The climate may have changed since then.
I am reminded of a document describing how compilers are like women and assemblers like men. Googled for it, but didn't find it.
The line I remembered was "things you've been doing for years that seemed OK are now suddenly wrong." I consider myself a pretty astute programmer, but every new compiler version seem to have some new warning to add.
As a result, I consider my relationship with my compiler no less volatile than that with my wife. Keeps me on my toes anyway.
Having attended the conference, I'd like to add a couple points.
Few people who presented at the conference have any doubt that they will be able to obtain their objectives. Many pointed out that financing is a hassle, but the single obstacle that everyone had collectively in mind was that of FAA licensing. No license, no launch. Period.
It does not matter if you launch from Florida, the ocean, or Australia. If you are a U.S. citizen, you must obtain a launch license from the FAA. Failure do so will land you fines and probably even jail time.
Now the good news. Obtaining a license is less complicated than many of us previously believed. As of yet, no licenses have been granted for civialian, manned, suborbital flights. XCOR is in the queue and pushing heavily; I believe that they will likely be the first to receive one, and more power to them. Meanwhile, groups like Armadillo Aerospace have recently begun the process, and I expect that they will be able to draft behind XCOR through the obvious portions of the licensing procedure.
The FAA itself has over 80 people dedicated to making civilian space access work. The delay is in determining how to properly balance the needs of the budding civilian space industry with the very serious safety needs of the people living down-range. This is very uncharted territory, and the FAA (AST) is no hurry to reach any conclusions. The policy is literally being formed as the applicants complete the process since the laws as specified are not sufficiently complete. Anyone wishing to be part of this process is encouraged to attend the COMSTAC meeting on May 21st. This is effectively a town-meeting for civilian space access.
The real bottleneck is the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). All the groups who are seeking launch licenses are being held up on environmental impact issues. Plus, where you launch from will ultimately determine when you launch since the environmental impact studies for some sites are not complete. Launching from White Sands would be preferable to the Oklahoma "spaceport" as the White Sands studies were completed years ago.
If anyone has any questions about the conference, I'd be happy to reply them. Overall, I think many of the people at the conference will either die in the process or entirely fail to get off the ground. Someone will succeeded however and in a couple years, probably even me.
You seem to be reading more into this situation than it actually warrants. The laws, as written, give him one and only one immediate recourse to being solicited illegally- to sue. He did that. End of story. If he was suing people as a matter of harrasement, different story. He did not, nor did he indicate that he would consider it. His point was that the barrier to small claims court was lower than he expected and given that, he could see how it could be further used and probably even abused.
How else would you prefer that the situation have been resolved? Call the District Attorney? Drive over and disconnect their equipment? Harrass the telemarketers? I would say that his reaction to the situation was entire proportionate.
9 out of 10 calls on my land line are solicitors, and I don't give the number out to anyone but family. My office phone rings and disconnects continuously from 5PM to 9PM whenever I work late. I'd prefer to give the CEO of Telemarketers Inc. a swift kick in the nuts for every call I receive, but I think that $500 is a reasonable compromise. Plus it keeps me out of jail.
I am seriously looking forward to the National Do Not Call List. If I start getting calls after registering, I will be a frequent visitor of small claims court.
For what it's worth, some companies are required to use code escrow for reasons dealing with financial liability. One place that I worked escrowed the source for every release as well as the development tree on a regular basis. I don't know who required it, but it could well have been a bank, a customer, or a regulatory agency. Data was provided on CDROM and the escrow company verified that the data received matched the declared checksums.
I'm pretty sure we're on the same page here, but in the event that these questions were not rhetorical, I'd like to answer some of them based on my understanding. As a backgrounder, IANAL, but I make extensive use of the GPL, LGPL, and GFDL.
You asked a couple questions and stated some hypothetical situations which I address below:
Can you call a kernel Linux if it is not the Linux kernel (being, say, a vendor-supplied kernel instead)?
A vendor supplied kernel based on the Linux source code is still the Linux kernel, even if it's a fork. Calling a new operating system Linux or calling an existing product Linux though it is not based on the original kernel is almost certainly a trademark violation. As Linus Torvalds owns the trademark, he can do as he will with respect to enforcement, and in fact he must, lest he lose the trademark status. Ultimately, the question would be answered in a court of law, if it ever made it that far.
[Could Microsoft], in fact, legally offer software "under the GPL" where the GPL was, in fact, a standard MicroSoft EULA, so long as it wasn't based on the GNU GPL?
While the Free Software Foundation does not appear to have trademarked the term "GPL," it would not be difficult to demonstrate in court that the requirements for common law trademark have been met. Consequently, the FSF would be in a position to bring litigation against anyone who was diluting the GPL brand.
[Could someone] modify the file COPYING in a package to give the distributor more rights or less responsibilities?
Modifying the COPYING file will not change the license. You seem to answer this yourself at the end of the paragraph. In order to avoid violating the license, you can only distribute the file with the original license.
As far as using copyright law to protect the entirety of the license; this seems reasonable enough. If someone wants to make wholesale changes, they should just write their own. The GPL is very well thought out; I don't think there are any pieces that could be removed without introducing a self-defeating loophole.
I don't think that Ben Franklin would be worried if people knew that Thomas Jefferson was on his buddy list. Voluntary disclosure is fine. Involuntary disclosure is not. -Hope
Having spent four years working in power-market modeling, forecasting, and optimization, I must at least point out the various inefficiencies in this model.
Generation capacity must be forecast for not only consumption but contingencies. Spinning reserve is fine and gas-powered generators get the job done, but this does not solve n-minus-one transmission line failures. Nor does it address the issue of peak-energy consumption exceeding network capacities.
If it becomes feasible to store power more efficiently and in large quantities, then power can be generated continuously through-out the day and consumed as needed. This has the effect of reducing peak transmission rates, with the additional side-effect of limiting network failures. Isolated nodes can consume their reserves without going completely black on disconnect.
Personally, I think charging consumers spot rates for power would do more for improving efficiencies all around, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Ideally, one would purchase a storage device, charge it at 2AM when power is cheap and consume that power at 12PM when it's hot and power is expensive. Smaller units will be practical long before entire cities are using them.
The problem with nuclear is economic. The de-commissioning costs of these plants exceed the revenue of the generated power. This is one of the major reasons no new plants are being built in the U.S. Once the older plants came due for de-commissioning and the price tag was passed around the table, no one wanted to pay for any new ones. The proposed plant in San Antonio, Texas was partially scuttled because the decom burden went to the taxpayers. They declined.
As far as making third and fourth languages easier to learn, for English speakers at least, learning Japanese may be more beneficial as a second language than say, French.
I say this because, since learning Japanese, I have found non-germanic, non-romance languages much easier to pick up, and languages that I was doing poorly in have since improved. I believe this is due to the grammatical structure being reversed and the nearly complete inability to guess at the meaning of most words based on previous language experience (loan words not withstanding). In some ways, learning two very different languages requires the brain to reorganize in such a way that language learning becomes more generalized, more efficient, whereas with languages that are similar, you are merely constructing and adapting to the exceptions and differences.
This is very big news. Microsoft's compiler CL.EXE makes many non-obvious Win32 API calls before it gets down to business. These calls were not implemented immediately because they are used by very few programs. Even after the calls were implemented, CL.EXE would routinely crash (as of maybe October or November 2002). If the Microsoft compiler now runs on Wine, we have achieved a major step forward.
Okay, so you can use Visual C++ compiler under WINE. Is that terribly surprising when WINE can run MS-Office for the most part?
At first glance, you might think so, but it's more complicated than that. The Microsoft compiler CL.EXE has many peculiar dependencies that were not addressed immediately simply because the functionality was not in MS-Office. If they've gotten this running, it's an improvement over the last couple months. Compiling MS apps on Linux will be my primary use of Wine, so if this is working now, it's news, good news in fact, to me.
I don't publish my private affairs; I encrypt sensitive documents to keep them private.
I do publish documents for public consumption. Outside of copyright, I have no control over what happens to that data afterwards. To try to control who can read those documents and under what conditions is both unreasonable and impractical.
The only way to keep your trade secrets out of the public is through expensive safeguards. The more important the information, the higher the expense. DRM may provide some of this infrastructure to corporations, but I don't see it replacing existing methods of maintaining confidential information.
Access control mechanisms have been available for decades. DRM has merely centralized access control and increased the number and complexity of the failure modes. In the worst case, not even the system administrator can rescue a document from the file system if certain aspects of the DRM system have failed.
In the end, I believe, DRM will prove to be nothing more than an ineffective burden.
There are better ways to do things.
Your position is that the value of the derivative code can be determined by subtracting the monetary values of the two products. That "idea" is basic commodity theory. Source code, GPL'd or otherwise, is not a commodity, and you are therefore "comparing apples and oranges." It's really that simple.
Using the same flawed "logic," you can prove black is white, Ray Charles is God, or anything else that trips your fancy. This is called making "fallacious arguments" which is what I accused you of from the beginning.
The fact that I can sell Apache webserver for more than zero dollars blows a hole through your argument. There are markets for this software in which you do not participate for which the cost will never be zero. To state otherwise is simply incorrect.
By "available to everyone", I don't mean that private changes must be returned to the public. I mean precisely what the GPL stipulates, that if the code makes it back to the public, it will be available to everyone, and under the same license. Private sales don't concern me. Preventing the purchaser from returning the code to the public does. If he has no intention of doing that, then that's perfectly fine.
Besides which, if someone thinks that they can take my code and their million dollars to turn a profit, more power to them. Since I probably would never have entered into a business arrangement with them in the first place, it's not really my loss. I'm plenty busy investing my code, time, and money in other dealings.
Your understanding of economic theory is a perfect example of how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I've been studying economic theory for over a decade. I work with economists every day. You are misapplying commodity theory, a common mistake, but worse because you fail to realize that software cannot be a commodity. You've misapplied the theory and arrived at an incorrect conclusion.
This morning, March wheat opened at $3.11 on the CBOT (Chicago) and $3.80 in Minneapolis. There are many types of wheat, but in this case, these two could be considered fungible*; it is therefore reasonable to suggest that the difference in price could include transportation costs. This is a correct application of the theory.
Your version of Apache webserver is not equivalent to the original; it is not fungible. If it is not fungible, it is not a commodity. If it is not a commodity, and you apply commodity theory to it, you will arrive at an incorrect, illogical conclusion. Hence, I accused you of making a fallacious argument.
To further press the matter, you provide a common dictionary reference for market value while failing to understand that there is no "open market" for GPL'd code. In one sense, there is no single market because there is no central clearing of transactions, and in another sense, there are hundreds of millions of markets, each independently governed by supply and demand. Consequently, there is no single market price, and it is certainly not zero. The fact that I can sell original Redhat CDs at cost and exact duplicates at half cost, speaks volumes. If they were fungible, this would not be possible. As it is, they are not even in the same market.
Your understanding of monetary value is completely one dimensional, literally. You do not take into account who the transaction involved, what the circumstances were, or when the transaction occurred. The going price for Gentoo Linux is not zero, it is what the market will bear. The going price for Apache is not zero, it is what the market will bear. The going price for GCC is not zero, it is what the market will bear. Your understanding of what constitutes a market is completely flawed so your understanding of monetary value is likewise flawed.
-Hope
fungible - being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation.
I should also add that code is not a commodity; treating it as such will result in bad logical arguments. You cannot subtract the value of two distinct items and come to any conclusion about their relative values.
Secondly, the statement that "the GPL'd code is not what they are buying because they can get [it] for free," is incorrect. They cannot get it for free. Nothing is free.
After adding bandwidth costs, CD replication costs, all the time spent during the transaction, you might come up with a value of say, $10.00. Repeat with a stream of zeroes, and you might have a valuation of $-1.00, (ie. you'd have to pay someone to take such a CD). By this similarly flawed logic, the value of the GPL'd code is now $11.00, at least as compared to empty data.
Slashdot Mirror
How does the law prevent criminals from doing anything, exactly? Criminals break laws; that's why they are criminals.
If you want your children to be safe, you must actively protect them. Laws only provide for justice after the fact. What good is that if your child is kidnapped, raped, or killed?
Furthermore, the purpose of the Internet is not to educate children, it's to connect people. Not everyone needs to be connected to your children. Your children don't need unsupervised access to the entire online world. Nobody is obligated to make it suitable for children, nor should they.
That said, unsolicated spam, pornographic or otherwise, is reaching nightmare proportions. I can't see how giving children direct access to SMTP-based email can be anything but a mistake at this point in time. For children, white-list correspondence should be the rule, not the exception.
-Hope
I had a ][+ and I still have my IIGS in a box somewhere. The best feature of all time was the ability to go into the assembly monitor, write code, disassemble, review, modify, patch and tweak the machine on the fly. Beyond any doubt, my ability to code everything from device drivers to applications began there.
//e had a built in assembler, but I only had a ][+ so I wrote my own. Then, using that assembler, I wrote a more powerful one and bootstrapped my way up. It took an entire summer. That was a good summer.
I also learned a lot about writing software quickly without using either an assembler or a compiler. Save often though. The
The IIGS was simply awesome. By the time I put it away, it had a video overlay card, 15MHz processor, 500MB SCSI external hard drive, and a full 8MB of RAM. I had gone through two power supplies and three motherboards over 10 years. Other than the monitor, it probably still works today. Wonder if I could get a proper pin out on the monitor and hook it up.
Ahhh... I don't get nostalgic very often, but damn , that was good stuff. With the exception of Linux, everything after the IIGS has been a real bore. I even considered leaving computer work altogether; there was nothing left to explore. As they say at ubergeek, I'm a "super villian" now so my computer life has become much more exciting.
Fortunately for me, my wife appreciates my enthusiasm for computers. But then, that's why I married her.
-Hope
If you've ever seen an "expert" witness demolished in court, you'd think otherwise. Even people who are proficient in their field can get dinged pretty badly on the stand. Brain for brain, I'm betting the Open Source gurus will outperform anybody that SCO can bribe into taking the stand. One can argue the facts, or one can argue the law. SCO has neither, and that will be easily demonstrable in court.
-Hope
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9740
An excerpt: Should be interesting to see how this really pans out.
-Hope
Juries do not need to understand kernel code. They need to hear testimony from expert witnesses. Both parties will provide them, lawyers will do their best to refute their testimony, and the jurors will decide who is more convincing.
I'll put my money on the Open Source experts any day.
-Hope
The number you have dialed has been disconnected. Please check the number and dial again...
SCOX 6.60 -2.11 -24.23% Vol:1,978,948 4:00pm 05/28/03
After Hours 6.28 -0.32 -4.85% Vol:34,600 Last:4:46pm 05/28/03
Nice to see that people are impatient enough to get out of SCOX that it can't wait for tomorrow. I wonder what the people who are buying are thinking? The volume is low, maybe a handful of knuckleheads at the most. Hopefully, the price will continue down first thing in the morning after investors have had a night to sleep on it.
-HopeOS
During a lay-over in Seoul I watched the Korean security staff at the airport insult, berate, and hassle the Japanese travelers who were changing planes. Language difficulties seemed to be the trigger. When we finally landed in Osaka, it was the Korean passengers' turn for abuse.
I should point out that the Japanese did this with substantially more style. Whereas the Koreans were openly hostile in Seoul, the Japanese were cold and suspicious. A Korean could spend a lot of extra time going through Japanese customs.
Being an American, I experienced no problems at either end, and I waltzed through Japanese customs in under five minutes. This was in 1994. The climate may have changed since then.
-Hope
I am reminded of a document describing how compilers are like women and assemblers like men. Googled for it, but didn't find it.
The line I remembered was "things you've been doing for years that seemed OK are now suddenly wrong." I consider myself a pretty astute programmer, but every new compiler version seem to have some new warning to add.
As a result, I consider my relationship with my compiler no less volatile than that with my wife. Keeps me on my toes anyway.
-HopeOS
Having attended the conference, I'd like to add a couple points.
Few people who presented at the conference have any doubt that they will be able to obtain their objectives. Many pointed out that financing is a hassle, but the single obstacle that everyone had collectively in mind was that of FAA licensing. No license, no launch. Period.
It does not matter if you launch from Florida, the ocean, or Australia. If you are a U.S. citizen, you must obtain a launch license from the FAA. Failure do so will land you fines and probably even jail time.
Now the good news. Obtaining a license is less complicated than many of us previously believed. As of yet, no licenses have been granted for civialian, manned, suborbital flights. XCOR is in the queue and pushing heavily; I believe that they will likely be the first to receive one, and more power to them. Meanwhile, groups like Armadillo Aerospace have recently begun the process, and I expect that they will be able to draft behind XCOR through the obvious portions of the licensing procedure.
The FAA itself has over 80 people dedicated to making civilian space access work. The delay is in determining how to properly balance the needs of the budding civilian space industry with the very serious safety needs of the people living down-range. This is very uncharted territory, and the FAA (AST) is no hurry to reach any conclusions. The policy is literally being formed as the applicants complete the process since the laws as specified are not sufficiently complete. Anyone wishing to be part of this process is encouraged to attend the COMSTAC meeting on May 21st. This is effectively a town-meeting for civilian space access.
The real bottleneck is the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). All the groups who are seeking launch licenses are being held up on environmental impact issues. Plus, where you launch from will ultimately determine when you launch since the environmental impact studies for some sites are not complete. Launching from White Sands would be preferable to the Oklahoma "spaceport" as the White Sands studies were completed years ago.
If anyone has any questions about the conference, I'd be happy to reply them. Overall, I think many of the people at the conference will either die in the process or entirely fail to get off the ground. Someone will succeeded however and in a couple years, probably even me.
-HopeOS
You seem to be reading more into this situation than it actually warrants. The laws, as written, give him one and only one immediate recourse to being solicited illegally- to sue. He did that. End of story. If he was suing people as a matter of harrasement, different story. He did not, nor did he indicate that he would consider it. His point was that the barrier to small claims court was lower than he expected and given that, he could see how it could be further used and probably even abused.
How else would you prefer that the situation have been resolved? Call the District Attorney? Drive over and disconnect their equipment? Harrass the telemarketers? I would say that his reaction to the situation was entire proportionate.
9 out of 10 calls on my land line are solicitors, and I don't give the number out to anyone but family. My office phone rings and disconnects continuously from 5PM to 9PM whenever I work late. I'd prefer to give the CEO of Telemarketers Inc. a swift kick in the nuts for every call I receive, but I think that $500 is a reasonable compromise. Plus it keeps me out of jail.
I am seriously looking forward to the National Do Not Call List. If I start getting calls after registering, I will be a frequent visitor of small claims court.
-Hope
For what it's worth, some companies are required to use code escrow for reasons dealing with financial liability. One place that I worked escrowed the source for every release as well as the development tree on a regular basis. I don't know who required it, but it could well have been a bank, a customer, or a regulatory agency. Data was provided on CDROM and the escrow company verified that the data received matched the declared checksums.
-Hope
You asked a couple questions and stated some hypothetical situations which I address below:
A vendor supplied kernel based on the Linux source code is still the Linux kernel, even if it's a fork. Calling a new operating system Linux or calling an existing product Linux though it is not based on the original kernel is almost certainly a trademark violation. As Linus Torvalds owns the trademark, he can do as he will with respect to enforcement, and in fact he must, lest he lose the trademark status. Ultimately, the question would be answered in a court of law, if it ever made it that far.
While the Free Software Foundation does not appear to have trademarked the term "GPL," it would not be difficult to demonstrate in court that the requirements for common law trademark have been met. Consequently, the FSF would be in a position to bring litigation against anyone who was diluting the GPL brand.
Modifying the COPYING file will not change the license. You seem to answer this yourself at the end of the paragraph. In order to avoid violating the license, you can only distribute the file with the original license.
As far as using copyright law to protect the entirety of the license; this seems reasonable enough. If someone wants to make wholesale changes, they should just write their own. The GPL is very well thought out; I don't think there are any pieces that could be removed without introducing a self-defeating loophole.
-Hope
I don't think that Ben Franklin would be worried if people knew that Thomas Jefferson was on his buddy list. Voluntary disclosure is fine. Involuntary disclosure is not. -Hope
Having spent four years working in power-market modeling, forecasting, and optimization, I must at least point out the various inefficiencies in this model.
Generation capacity must be forecast for not only consumption but contingencies. Spinning reserve is fine and gas-powered generators get the job done, but this does not solve n-minus-one transmission line failures. Nor does it address the issue of peak-energy consumption exceeding network capacities.
If it becomes feasible to store power more efficiently and in large quantities, then power can be generated continuously through-out the day and consumed as needed. This has the effect of reducing peak transmission rates, with the additional side-effect of limiting network failures. Isolated nodes can consume their reserves without going completely black on disconnect.
Personally, I think charging consumers spot rates for power would do more for improving efficiencies all around, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Ideally, one would purchase a storage device, charge it at 2AM when power is cheap and consume that power at 12PM when it's hot and power is expensive. Smaller units will be practical long before entire cities are using them.
Cheers.
-Hope
The problem with nuclear is economic. The de-commissioning costs of these plants exceed the revenue of the generated power. This is one of the major reasons no new plants are being built in the U.S. Once the older plants came due for de-commissioning and the price tag was passed around the table, no one wanted to pay for any new ones. The proposed plant in San Antonio, Texas was partially scuttled because the decom burden went to the taxpayers. They declined.
-Hope
As far as making third and fourth languages easier to learn, for English speakers at least, learning Japanese may be more beneficial as a second language than say, French.
I say this because, since learning Japanese, I have found non-germanic, non-romance languages much easier to pick up, and languages that I was doing poorly in have since improved. I believe this is due to the grammatical structure being reversed and the nearly complete inability to guess at the meaning of most words based on previous language experience (loan words not withstanding). In some ways, learning two very different languages requires the brain to reorganize in such a way that language learning becomes more generalized, more efficient, whereas with languages that are similar, you are merely constructing and adapting to the exceptions and differences.
Who knows?
-Hope
This is very big news. Microsoft's compiler CL.EXE makes many non-obvious Win32 API calls before it gets down to business. These calls were not implemented immediately because they are used by very few programs. Even after the calls were implemented, CL.EXE would routinely crash (as of maybe October or November 2002). If the Microsoft compiler now runs on Wine, we have achieved a major step forward.
-Hope
-Hope
I don't publish my private affairs; I encrypt sensitive documents to keep them private.
I do publish documents for public consumption. Outside of copyright, I have no control over what happens to that data afterwards. To try to control who can read those documents and under what conditions is both unreasonable and impractical.
The only way to keep your trade secrets out of the public is through expensive safeguards. The more important the information, the higher the expense. DRM may provide some of this infrastructure to corporations, but I don't see it replacing existing methods of maintaining confidential information.
Access control mechanisms have been available for decades. DRM has merely centralized access control and increased the number and complexity of the failure modes. In the worst case, not even the system administrator can rescue a document from the file system if certain aspects of the DRM system have failed.
In the end, I believe, DRM will prove to be nothing more than an ineffective burden. There are better ways to do things.
-Hope
Well. On that we probably agree. -Hope
Your position is that the value of the derivative code can be determined by subtracting the monetary values of the two products. That "idea" is basic commodity theory. Source code, GPL'd or otherwise, is not a commodity, and you are therefore "comparing apples and oranges." It's really that simple.
Using the same flawed "logic," you can prove black is white, Ray Charles is God, or anything else that trips your fancy. This is called making "fallacious arguments" which is what I accused you of from the beginning.
The fact that I can sell Apache webserver for more than zero dollars blows a hole through your argument. There are markets for this software in which you do not participate for which the cost will never be zero. To state otherwise is simply incorrect.
-Hope
By "available to everyone", I don't mean that private changes must be returned to the public. I mean precisely what the GPL stipulates, that if the code makes it back to the public, it will be available to everyone, and under the same license. Private sales don't concern me. Preventing the purchaser from returning the code to the public does. If he has no intention of doing that, then that's perfectly fine.
Besides which, if someone thinks that they can take my code and their million dollars to turn a profit, more power to them. Since I probably would never have entered into a business arrangement with them in the first place, it's not really my loss. I'm plenty busy investing my code, time, and money in other dealings.
-Hope
Your understanding of economic theory is a perfect example of how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I've been studying economic theory for over a decade. I work with economists every day. You are misapplying commodity theory, a common mistake, but worse because you fail to realize that software cannot be a commodity. You've misapplied the theory and arrived at an incorrect conclusion.
This morning, March wheat opened at $3.11 on the CBOT (Chicago) and $3.80 in Minneapolis. There are many types of wheat, but in this case, these two could be considered fungible*; it is therefore reasonable to suggest that the difference in price could include transportation costs. This is a correct application of the theory.
Your version of Apache webserver is not equivalent to the original; it is not fungible. If it is not fungible, it is not a commodity. If it is not a commodity, and you apply commodity theory to it, you will arrive at an incorrect, illogical conclusion. Hence, I accused you of making a fallacious argument.
To further press the matter, you provide a common dictionary reference for market value while failing to understand that there is no "open market" for GPL'd code. In one sense, there is no single market because there is no central clearing of transactions, and in another sense, there are hundreds of millions of markets, each independently governed by supply and demand. Consequently, there is no single market price, and it is certainly not zero. The fact that I can sell original Redhat CDs at cost and exact duplicates at half cost, speaks volumes. If they were fungible, this would not be possible. As it is, they are not even in the same market.
Your understanding of monetary value is completely one dimensional, literally. You do not take into account who the transaction involved, what the circumstances were, or when the transaction occurred. The going price for Gentoo Linux is not zero, it is what the market will bear. The going price for Apache is not zero, it is what the market will bear. The going price for GCC is not zero, it is what the market will bear. Your understanding of what constitutes a market is completely flawed so your understanding of monetary value is likewise flawed.
-Hope
fungible - being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation.
I should also add that code is not a commodity; treating it as such will result in bad logical arguments. You cannot subtract the value of two distinct items and come to any conclusion about their relative values.
Secondly, the statement that "the GPL'd code is not what they are buying because they can get [it] for free," is incorrect. They cannot get it for free. Nothing is free.
After adding bandwidth costs, CD replication costs, all the time spent during the transaction, you might come up with a value of say, $10.00. Repeat with a stream of zeroes, and you might have a valuation of $-1.00, (ie. you'd have to pay someone to take such a CD). By this similarly flawed logic, the value of the GPL'd code is now $11.00, at least as compared to empty data.
Economic theory just doesn't work this way.
-Hope