Uhm, why would MS do this?.NET is designed to be and sold as a "cross platform" solution--a real way to do Java's "write once, run anywhere" line.
For the same reason they did it with Java - if it's "write once, run anywhere", then why would you buy Windows licenses? Microsoft (quite naturally) wants everyone to run a Windows server and a Windows client, and having Linux be able to take either role with ease doesn't give them the leverage they need to continue their marketshare.
I've been playing around with the Mono implementation of C#, and it's pretty good. It's not quite as good at RAD tasks as Python, but it has some advantages, and the syntax is much easier to play with than C or Java (but again, not quite as easy as Python, but I'm biased in that regard).
However, Mono suffers from the fact that they're trying to play follow the leader by following Microsoft's implementation rather than creating a system of libraries from scratch. Microsoft has a history of pulling the old "embrace and extend" trick, and I fear something similar may happen here.
My guess is that Microsoft will significantly alter the.NET APIs for Longhorn, leaving Mono behind with older legacy libraries that are no longer interoperable with the Microsoft compiler and the rest of the Windows-using world. Needless to say, that would be bad for the Mono team.
Still, if Mono can remain independent, it could very well have a bright future. The Mono team has done a great job of implementing most of the 1.0.NET API, and the mcs compiler is pretty fast. The GTK bindings are quite nice for such an early release.
Still, the cognitive dissonance of compiling a Linux program and getting a file with an.exe extension is rather difficult...
Every state that has followed Communism has become totalitarian/authoritarian. The Soviet Union, mainland China, North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Angola, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Poland, the list goes on.
In fact, Communism has probably killed more people than any ideology in the history of the world. 40 million dead in the Great Leap Forwards, 30 million killed in Stalinist purges, millions killed in Africa and Asia, the list goes on once again.
As I've noted before, Communism invariably leads to Stalinism/authoritarianism/totalitarianism because Communism is based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of human nature and political reality. You can't create a Communist state without making it authoritarian because in order to be Communist the state must control the means of production, and once that is achieved the state controls everything. The wisdom of the classical liberals is that they deliberately knew that the state could not be trusted with absolute power and that if it had it, tyranny would be the result.
Communism is interesting in terms of political theory, but like Plato's Republic or Bacon's New Atlantis, it wouldn't be something you'd want to try in the real world.
Cuba is a one-party state that restricts nearly all avenues of political dissent. The government severely curtails basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, movement, and to a fair trial. While it has long sought to silence its critics by using short term-detentions, house arrests, travel restrictions, threats, surveillance, criminal prosecutions, politically motivated dismissals from employment, and other forms of harassment, the government's intolerance of dissenting voices intensified considerably in 2003. In March, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, police detained scores of political dissidents and others viewed as "counter-revolutionary" in their thinking. By early April, the defendants--who included such prominent figures as Raul Rivero, the poet and journalist, and Hector Palacios, a leader in the pro-democracy movement--had been sentenced to long stays in prison.
Cuba is only a nice place if you ignore massive and widespread violations of human rights, secret police, and a totalitarian government. Moreover, if you had gone outside the government-censored tourist zones you'd see one of the most repressed places in the Western Hemisphere.
I utterly hate the thought that communism is killing hundres of millions of people. Communism is not bad per se. You are thinking of Stalinism.
...and Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge, and the VietCong, and the Cuban government...
The point being that Communism is inherently flawed, and will invariably turn totalitarian. There has never been a government in history that has experimented in communism and not become totalitarian. The state does not "wither away" as Marx said it would, it only attempts to cement its own power. Marx started with the wrong assumption about human nature, and you can't build a government based on excessively utopian assumptions and expect it to ever work in the real world.
I utterly hate the analogy that FOSS is communistic. First of all, last time I checked, FOSS hadn't killed hundreds of millions of people as communism had. Second, it doesn't work on a philosophical level.
Communism is based on a centralized command system in which the state controls the means of production in the name of the people. Of course, this never works out as only a fool would automatically presume the interests of the state and the interests of the people are exactly the same.
In software development, this is closer to the closed source model - the state (ie Microsoft) orders that a task be done and the apparatchiks do it. Granted, Microsoft doesn't kill those that fail, and Microsoft is nowhere near as corrupt as the former Soviet Union, but the overal concept of centralization remains the same.
FOSS development is more like anarchocapitalism than anyone else. No one is forced to open their code, but programmers like myself do so because that's how we rationally get the most benefits. Granted, I could sell my products and perhaps make some money, but I couldn't recoup the costs of development without putting as much time into marketing as I do programming - and I don't care to do that.
The essence of capitalism is free exchange - which is why capitalism requires a free society in order to function well. Without the concept of the right of property, the GPL or other FOSS licenses would be meaningless. If I can't "own" my code, I can't dictate the license terms, and we're back to the state of nature. In the state of nature, everything is free for the taking - so long as you're cunning enough to take it. The whole reason government exists is to prevent that from happening by creating the social contract. (Which is why the statement that sacrificing liberty for security is wrong - that's the whole point of government itself, but I digress.)
FOSS devlopers give out their code because it provides them with the greatest rational benefit, not because some centralized authority tells them they must. That isn't communism, that's capitalism, and that's why the FOSS development model is doing exactly what capitalist economies do to state-planned economies - dynamically growing faster and more agile with each passing day.
3000 people in the US in the last few years. Why do we keep quoting that like such a horrific number? It's not.
You tell that to the families who lost their loved ones because our intelligence services couldn't share information with local police.
Also, remember that when the next attack takes out an entire city. Or if it's a biological attack, when it wipes out several percent of the entire country.
Except that goes against the very idea of government itself. The whole point of civil governance is that we give up certain liberties (like the right to kill people) in order to gain the safety of civil governance. The very Lockean concept of government is that we sacrifice our absolute liberty in the name of the protection of the state.
Furthermore, the PATRIOT Act is not "temporary safety" it is a measure designed to protect us from a very real threat that has already killed well over 3,000 people in the last few years.
Every time someone dredges out this quotation it is to make an argument without substance. That quotation is not some truism, and it usually ends up as a dodge from actually discussing the issues behind the PATRIOT Act.
I seem to have heard a similar rumor about the price of the iPod mini being $99, and look how that turned out.
Microsoft is already selling consoles at a rather hefty loss, and there's only so much to be gained by selling them at an even bigger loss. Even Microsoft doesn't have bottomless pockets, and the problem with selling a product as a loss-leader is that the more you sell the worse your short-term financial hit is. Selling a product as a loss-leader assumes that the people who buy that product will buy additional services at a higher markup later.
The problem with moving the cost of an X-Box to $99 is that you're hitting a market demographic that's far less likely to spend the $$$ to get something like XBox Live or a large number of additional profit-gaining accessories.
Now, if Microsoft came out with some deal that you could buy an XBox for $99 if you commit to 6 months or a year of XBox Live, that might work. Elsewise don't be lining up at the store to get your $99 XBox...
This is why I recommend people read the PATRIOT Act before commenting on it. For reference, the specific statutes that accomplish this are Title II Section 203(b) which increases the ability for law enforcment agencies to share wiretap information and Title II Section 203(d) which allows for the sharing of data accumulated in FISA searches.
Furthermore, Title VII also specifically modifies the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. 3796h) to remove specific statutory limits to information sharing between law enforcement agencies.
I wasn't a fan of the previous administration (although I am liberal and dislike GWB fairly intensely), but the extra provisions in the PA overstep a lot of bounds. For example, the library provision also forbids the donors of information to notify you of a search, a provision that is not consistent with previous law. In addition, I don't believe that a search for library info. has to be approved by a judge, but only by a clerk - this significantly lowers the barrier to getting a warrant.
That is simply incorrect. From Section 215:
(Each application under this section shall be made to)`(B) a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court;
Furthermore, it is only logical that the government have the right to delay the notification of a search. (The PATRIOT Act does not allow for notification to be cancelled, but delayed under such time as the threat of a terrorist attack is no longer a concern.) If there's a reasonable suspicion that someone just put a nuke under San Francisco, the very last thing we need to do is tip off the terrorists before we've had a chance to find it.
The standard for issuing a search warrant does not change - there must be "probable cause" for such a search, meaning that a crime does not necessarily have to have been committed before such a search would be authorized. The rules under the PATRIOT Act are the same rules that would be applied to any other criminal case in that a judge would have to be consulted and a warrant issued. The only difference is that the PATRIOT Act makes this process swifter and allows for such searches to occur without the knowledge of the suspect.
This is only logical, as trying to uncover information about a terrorist cell doesn't exactly work when that terrorist cell knows they're being hunted.
I'm sure that I'm distinctely in the minority here, but I think the criticisms of the PATRIOT Act are entirely blown out of proportion. I've actually read the PATRIOT Act, and I see very little that matches the wild claims that have been levied against it.
Take for example the infamous Section 215 that civil libertarians claim allows law enforcement to search your library records. Except this power requires the consent of a federal judge, no library records have ever been searched, and such provisions have already been used in other criminal cases. Library records were searched in the hunt for Andrew Cunanan, the man who shot fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997, and to hunt down the Zodiac killer in New York in 1990. Yet no one raised a fuss about these searches. It is clear that there is a direct double standard at play, fueled by ignorance of the law.
Most of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act specifically extend already existing powers specifically to fight terrorism. Most of them were already codified in law under earlier racketeering statutes such as RICO. Yet no one seemed to question those moves then.
The fact remains that our rights were abused far more heinously during the War on Drugs and the term of Janet Reno as AG than they ever were under Ashcroft. No-knock warrants are far more suspect as far as civil rights are concerned than extending provisions of RICO to terrorism. I fail to see the logic of a system that gives greater protections to Mohammad Atta than it does to Tony Soprano.
If PATRIOT is repealed, it means that that such basic elements as tighter information sharing between federal agencies will be struck down as well. Had those protections existed in 2001, the events of September 11 would never have happened. Several 9/11 conspirators were pulled over just before the attacks - but because the police didn't have access to immigration records or terrorist watch lists they were let go with only a warning. Another event like that is simply intolerable.
The fact is 9/10ths of the arguments against PATRIOT are based in a sense of partisan politics rather than a rational examination of law. Had PATRIOT been a creation of Clinton Administration I doubt anyone would be talking about it, but in a country where partisanship overwhelms common sense on both sides rational discussion about the best way to protect this country from the clear and present danger of terrorism is difficult to find.
What's very interesting about the Opportunity landing is that they managed to come down in the middle of a 20-meter diameter crater on the Martian surface. This means that they can study sub-surface details that would normally be beyond the reach of the rover's instruments. Also, the crater isn't very steep, meaning that they should have no problem driving out of it and into the next crater over.
Meridiani Planum is certainly one of the more interesting parts of Mars we've yet seen. It will be interesting to get a better understanding of what's causing all that interesting surface topography as well as exploring the composition of the surface.
The OS on the Spirit lander was created by Wind River - details are here. As with any OS designed for deep-space uses there are multiple redundancies on virtually every aspect of the system.
The Militarization Of Space
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The fact remains that the militarization is space is virtually inevitable - if not by us, by someone else. One of the reasons for the Chinese Shenzhou manned-spaceflight program is to put electronic and optical intelligence platforms in orbit. The rear section of the Shenzhou orbiter is left in low Earth orbit where it can be used for photographic and electronic surveillance. Just as our space program lead to more advanced space-based intelligence platforms, the Chinese are doing much the same.
What's more worrying is the threat of satellite hunter-killer devices. Imagine if someone developed the technology to knock out the GPS grid - both our military and our economy would suffer greatly.
We can't naively assume that space will only be used for peaceful means, and if we don't take the initiative in ensuring that we have adaquate countermeasures we take on significant risk.
On the other hand, the process is going to be slow. Space exploration is very expensive, and only a major power can afford significant investments in space. We're not going to see al-Qaeda or even North Korea develop a sat-killer any time soon.
Chances are we'll see a new space race between the US and China, with the moon being the primary goal for both. The technological advancements from such a race will be as important as the advancements we got from Apollo. New materials, new energy source, new biotechnology are all potential spin-offs from space exploration.
Rather than fear increased space travel, we should be welcoming it. Yes, there will be a military presence in space, but the benefits of space exploration far outweigh the risks.
The iPod Mini is about $50 too expensive for what it is. The problem with expanding iPod sales is that there a lot of us (myself included) who don't particularly care to shell out more than $150 for a portable music player. Yeah, the iPod is insanely great and all, but I don't have $300 to shell out for what is basically a luxury item.
What is the target market for this device? If you're going to spend $249 for a device with less than a third of the capacity of a model only $50 more, you're not going to buy the mini iPod. In essence, Apple isn't opening a new market but cannibalizing sales of their existing market, if that. I don't see this as being a big seller unless the price point significantly drops.
Worse of all, Apple has opened the market for another company to produce an iPod knockoff that offers 2GB of storage for $130-$150 that would fill that niche market that iPod Mini could have filled. If they partner with another service (read Wal-Mart or Napster), they can take the market from Apple easily.
This has been Apple's problem from the beginning. They produce great tech that is wonderful for early adopters, but they don't know how to compete in the larger market. iTunes is nice, but if they lose the low-cost MP3 player market they're already ceding ground to competitors that can loss-lead them into the ground. (Again, read Wal-Mart).
The mini iPod is going to be a major disappointment for Apple and shows a real lack of vision. The high-end MP3 player market is going to reach saturation at some point, and the iPod won't be able to break out of its niche without substantial price drops. Meanhile, another company will use the lower-cost market to dominate the field and reduce the marketshare of the underlying technology Apple is based on. (Read AAC). It's how IBM and clones took over the PC market in the 80's and 90's, and it's how someone else has the same opportunity to do so for the digital music market now.
There is a way of disproving Rugg's hoax theory (or at least the part of Kelley's involvement in creating such a hoax).
If the manuscript is significantly older than it's first appearance in the court of Rudolf II between 1576-1611, then it's highly unlikely it's a hoax created to dupe Rudolf. Furthermore, if there was no connection between John Dee and the MS then they theory about Kelley seems unlikely.
Now, Rugg's theory can't be disproven without knowing more about the Voynich text, in which case the mystery wouldn't exist. The problem with Rugg's theory is that even if one *could* produce a Voynich-like text that doesn't mean that the Voynich manuscript is a product of that process.
My guess is that the Voynich manuscript is an Italian alchemical work in a highly bizarre cipher system - but my theory can't be proven either.
As Rugg's site mentions, the only way to prove or disprove the Voynich mystery is to come up with some kind of translation - which is always been the case even before Rugg's theory.
I've studied the Voynich manuscript before, and the possibility of a hoax seems just as unlikely as many of the theories that have been floating about. Yes, the language of the Voynich manuscript could be an elaborate hoax, but Rugg's analysis only proves what is already widely known.
The problem of creating such an elaborate hoax is that even Rugg's theory doesn't explain all the features of the Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble an actual document when viewed with analytical techniques that wouldn't be developed later. Occam's Razor makes it seem more likely that there some kind of language operating in the manuscript than a random system of patterns. Then again, there's no real way of knowing.
There are some images of the text of the Voynich Manuscript available here. Analysis of the text and the illustrations support the theory that the manuscript has defined sections on astrology, herbal medicine, and other subjects. There have been some serious and some rediculous theories about the manuscript from the intriguing notion that the Voynich text is mathematically similar to East Asian languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, or that the Voynich manuscript is written in an ancient form of Ukrainian. (I've read the supposed translation of it from the Ukrainian, and it hardly makes sense given that the manuscript's illustations don't match the text of the supposed translation.)
After reading through Lomborg's book and the responses to it, I've determined that there is one tested scientific theory inherent in global warming. Unfortunately it has more to do with psychology than earth sciences.
In 1972 a psychologist named Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink, a theory that postulated that people within a group will think alike, or as he put it:
[Groupthink is] a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. (Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. pg. 9)
In other words, when you get a group of people together with a similar worldview and ask them to process some information, they will process that information in such a way as to coincide with their worldview.
The theory of groupthink is a tremendously useful model for analyzing public policy decisionmaking. Many articles have been written that apply this model to everything from the Cuban Missle Crisis (Graham Allison's indispensible Essence of Decision for those who might be interested in foreign-policy decisionmaking theory) to the decisions over the war in Iraq.
Scientists are not immune from groupthink. The consensus in January of this year was that the incident of ice hitting the space shuttle Columbia was not a major issue of concern. Those who did believe otherwise were dissuaded by others. Of course, the consensus was wrong in the issue and the dissenters were correct.
Global warming is more a consequence of groupthink than of sound science. It is pseudo-science to argue that a system as complex and chaotic as the environment can be predicted with any accuracy over long periods of time. We can't even predict the weather over a given chunk of territory with scientifically reproducable accuracy, yet one is to believe that we can say that the Earth's average temperature will rise x number of degrees by 2100?
The fact is that such claims are unverfiable and irreproducable, and rely on computer weather models that would respond as a model would be expected to but could have no relationship with the real world. Yet we're being asked to base our entire way of life based around flimsy assertions that cannot be proven or disproven scientifically.
So why are scientists behaving so unscientifically?
Because they have been given a worldview in which "polluters" should be stopped using science. In essence, the people who grew up watching Captain Planet are now out there either consciously or unconsciously trying to make the evidence fit their preordained worldview.
Those who dissent, like Lomborg, are practically apostates to the prevailing conventional wisdom. Lomborg is instantly assumed to be in the "pockets of big corporations" and trying to "defend the polluters." Lomborg's arguments are being treated as wrong on a prima facie basis and the prevailing conventional wisdom is being upheld - exactly the way in which Janis would describe for a group in the throws of groupthink.
Certainly pollution isn't good, but the way in which critics have attacked Lomborg have shown a shocking willingness to abandon dispassionate and objective science in favor of using science as a tool of public policy. When such an attitude becomes prevalent, real science falls behind. The scientific community deserves a black eye for this, and the way in which global warming is treated as a prima facie truth rather than a flimsy scientific theory is not hard science - it's a function of personal and professional bias on the part of many in the scientific community.
I cut too soon. The statute does read "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and precedent has protection for both. "Science" could be considered roughly analogous to copyright in the original definition of the word, while patent law would fall into the "useful Arts" meaning. In fact, there are protections for both, although copyright generally has weaker statutory protections than does patent law, although even that is changing with the DMCA and other attempts at strengthening copyright law.
(As a diclaimer, IANAL, but I have read Eldred and I am familiar with public policy issues on copyright.)
Straw man is the correct term for this letter, as the entire case McBride makes is on a complete misunderstanding of both the GPL and Eldred.
First of all, his use of Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution illustrates absolutely nothing. There is nothing in the GPL that precludes or infringes upon this statute in the least. Congress has the power to grant exclusive rights to a creation but has no power to legally mandate what the terms of those rights are. (See Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City 383 US 1.) Congress has the right to grant me a patent, and if I want to take that patented product and license it to whomever, there is nothing that Constitutionally prevents me from doing so. In other words, if IBM patents a new storage device and they want to make those specifications publicly available through GPLed drivers they have every right to do so. If they want to license such technology to only one company, they may do so. If they want to take every existing model and shove it up their ass, they have every legal right to do so.
Furthermore, precedent sets that the patent power is limited only for the purpose of the "progress of science" - as Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc 489 US 141 states:
Implicit in the Patent Clause itself [is the understanding that] free exploition of ideas will be the rule, to which the federal protection of a patent is the exception. Moreover, the ultimate goal of the patent system is to bring new designs and technologies into the public domain through disclosure."
What McBride argues is that the public domain itself is somehow contradictory to the very notion of copyright, and argument which simply does not hold to much scrutiny. Even the majority opinion in Eldred acknowledges that the Constitution does not allow for a perpetual system of copyright, and that at some point material must fall into the public domain.
The argument that profit motive is the best way of ensuring the public good is fine, but it is essentially a non-sequitor in this case. If the Linux kernel contains SCO code then that code has to be legally removed. However, SCO has no right to dictate that only proprietary licenses are legally valid, and that argument does nothing to advance their particular case. Moreover, any judge who has to rule on such a prima facie idiotic argument will quickly rule that SCO has no legal ground. The GPL is, as many have already mentioned, based on an acknowledgement of copyright law and relies on copyright law as a basis for its licensing terms. SCO has no right to say that a copyright holder must use a proprietary license any more than Red Hat says that SCO must drop all claims to their proprietary source code. There is no legal foundation for such a position and McBride clearly has no understanding of the revelant law.
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For the same reason they did it with Java - if it's "write once, run anywhere", then why would you buy Windows licenses? Microsoft (quite naturally) wants everyone to run a Windows server and a Windows client, and having Linux be able to take either role with ease doesn't give them the leverage they need to continue their marketshare.
I've been playing around with the Mono implementation of C#, and it's pretty good. It's not quite as good at RAD tasks as Python, but it has some advantages, and the syntax is much easier to play with than C or Java (but again, not quite as easy as Python, but I'm biased in that regard).
However, Mono suffers from the fact that they're trying to play follow the leader by following Microsoft's implementation rather than creating a system of libraries from scratch. Microsoft has a history of pulling the old "embrace and extend" trick, and I fear something similar may happen here.
My guess is that Microsoft will significantly alter the .NET APIs for Longhorn, leaving Mono behind with older legacy libraries that are no longer interoperable with the Microsoft compiler and the rest of the Windows-using world. Needless to say, that would be bad for the Mono team.
Still, if Mono can remain independent, it could very well have a bright future. The Mono team has done a great job of implementing most of the 1.0 .NET API, and the mcs compiler is pretty fast. The GTK bindings are quite nice for such an early release.
Still, the cognitive dissonance of compiling a Linux program and getting a file with an .exe extension is rather difficult...
Every state that has followed Communism has become totalitarian/authoritarian. The Soviet Union, mainland China, North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Angola, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Poland, the list goes on.
In fact, Communism has probably killed more people than any ideology in the history of the world. 40 million dead in the Great Leap Forwards, 30 million killed in Stalinist purges, millions killed in Africa and Asia, the list goes on once again.
As I've noted before, Communism invariably leads to Stalinism/authoritarianism/totalitarianism because Communism is based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of human nature and political reality. You can't create a Communist state without making it authoritarian because in order to be Communist the state must control the means of production, and once that is achieved the state controls everything. The wisdom of the classical liberals is that they deliberately knew that the state could not be trusted with absolute power and that if it had it, tyranny would be the result.
Communism is interesting in terms of political theory, but like Plato's Republic or Bacon's New Atlantis, it wouldn't be something you'd want to try in the real world.
Cuba is only a nice place if you ignore massive and widespread violations of human rights, secret police, and a totalitarian government. Moreover, if you had gone outside the government-censored tourist zones you'd see one of the most repressed places in the Western Hemisphere.
...and Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge, and the VietCong, and the Cuban government...
The point being that Communism is inherently flawed, and will invariably turn totalitarian. There has never been a government in history that has experimented in communism and not become totalitarian. The state does not "wither away" as Marx said it would, it only attempts to cement its own power. Marx started with the wrong assumption about human nature, and you can't build a government based on excessively utopian assumptions and expect it to ever work in the real world.
I utterly hate the analogy that FOSS is communistic. First of all, last time I checked, FOSS hadn't killed hundreds of millions of people as communism had. Second, it doesn't work on a philosophical level.
Communism is based on a centralized command system in which the state controls the means of production in the name of the people. Of course, this never works out as only a fool would automatically presume the interests of the state and the interests of the people are exactly the same.
In software development, this is closer to the closed source model - the state (ie Microsoft) orders that a task be done and the apparatchiks do it. Granted, Microsoft doesn't kill those that fail, and Microsoft is nowhere near as corrupt as the former Soviet Union, but the overal concept of centralization remains the same.
FOSS development is more like anarchocapitalism than anyone else. No one is forced to open their code, but programmers like myself do so because that's how we rationally get the most benefits. Granted, I could sell my products and perhaps make some money, but I couldn't recoup the costs of development without putting as much time into marketing as I do programming - and I don't care to do that.
The essence of capitalism is free exchange - which is why capitalism requires a free society in order to function well. Without the concept of the right of property, the GPL or other FOSS licenses would be meaningless. If I can't "own" my code, I can't dictate the license terms, and we're back to the state of nature. In the state of nature, everything is free for the taking - so long as you're cunning enough to take it. The whole reason government exists is to prevent that from happening by creating the social contract. (Which is why the statement that sacrificing liberty for security is wrong - that's the whole point of government itself, but I digress.)
FOSS devlopers give out their code because it provides them with the greatest rational benefit, not because some centralized authority tells them they must. That isn't communism, that's capitalism, and that's why the FOSS development model is doing exactly what capitalist economies do to state-planned economies - dynamically growing faster and more agile with each passing day.
I am not a native Chinese speaker (or even a remotely good Chinese speaker), but here's some tasty bits of Firefly Mandarin dialog:
Tai-kong suo-yo de shing-chiou doh sai-jin wu di pigu: Stuff all the planets in the universe up my ass!
Huh choo-shung huh tza-jiao duh!: Filthy fornicators of livestock!
Nee ta ma duh. Tyen-shia suo-yo duh run doh gai si! - F--- everyone in the universe to death!
3000 people in the US in the last few years. Why do we keep quoting that like such a horrific number? It's not.
You tell that to the families who lost their loved ones because our intelligence services couldn't share information with local police.
Also, remember that when the next attack takes out an entire city. Or if it's a biological attack, when it wipes out several percent of the entire country.
Except that goes against the very idea of government itself. The whole point of civil governance is that we give up certain liberties (like the right to kill people) in order to gain the safety of civil governance. The very Lockean concept of government is that we sacrifice our absolute liberty in the name of the protection of the state.
Furthermore, the PATRIOT Act is not "temporary safety" it is a measure designed to protect us from a very real threat that has already killed well over 3,000 people in the last few years.
Every time someone dredges out this quotation it is to make an argument without substance. That quotation is not some truism, and it usually ends up as a dodge from actually discussing the issues behind the PATRIOT Act.
I seem to have heard a similar rumor about the price of the iPod mini being $99, and look how that turned out.
Microsoft is already selling consoles at a rather hefty loss, and there's only so much to be gained by selling them at an even bigger loss. Even Microsoft doesn't have bottomless pockets, and the problem with selling a product as a loss-leader is that the more you sell the worse your short-term financial hit is. Selling a product as a loss-leader assumes that the people who buy that product will buy additional services at a higher markup later.
The problem with moving the cost of an X-Box to $99 is that you're hitting a market demographic that's far less likely to spend the $$$ to get something like XBox Live or a large number of additional profit-gaining accessories.
Now, if Microsoft came out with some deal that you could buy an XBox for $99 if you commit to 6 months or a year of XBox Live, that might work. Elsewise don't be lining up at the store to get your $99 XBox...
This is why I recommend people read the PATRIOT Act before commenting on it. For reference, the specific statutes that accomplish this are Title II Section 203(b) which increases the ability for law enforcment agencies to share wiretap information and Title II Section 203(d) which allows for the sharing of data accumulated in FISA searches.
Furthermore, Title VII also specifically modifies the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. 3796h) to remove specific statutory limits to information sharing between law enforcement agencies.
That is simply incorrect. From Section 215:
Furthermore, it is only logical that the government have the right to delay the notification of a search. (The PATRIOT Act does not allow for notification to be cancelled, but delayed under such time as the threat of a terrorist attack is no longer a concern.) If there's a reasonable suspicion that someone just put a nuke under San Francisco, the very last thing we need to do is tip off the terrorists before we've had a chance to find it.
The standard for issuing a search warrant does not change - there must be "probable cause" for such a search, meaning that a crime does not necessarily have to have been committed before such a search would be authorized. The rules under the PATRIOT Act are the same rules that would be applied to any other criminal case in that a judge would have to be consulted and a warrant issued. The only difference is that the PATRIOT Act makes this process swifter and allows for such searches to occur without the knowledge of the suspect.
This is only logical, as trying to uncover information about a terrorist cell doesn't exactly work when that terrorist cell knows they're being hunted.
I'm sure that I'm distinctely in the minority here, but I think the criticisms of the PATRIOT Act are entirely blown out of proportion. I've actually read the PATRIOT Act, and I see very little that matches the wild claims that have been levied against it.
Take for example the infamous Section 215 that civil libertarians claim allows law enforcement to search your library records. Except this power requires the consent of a federal judge, no library records have ever been searched, and such provisions have already been used in other criminal cases. Library records were searched in the hunt for Andrew Cunanan, the man who shot fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997, and to hunt down the Zodiac killer in New York in 1990. Yet no one raised a fuss about these searches. It is clear that there is a direct double standard at play, fueled by ignorance of the law.
Most of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act specifically extend already existing powers specifically to fight terrorism. Most of them were already codified in law under earlier racketeering statutes such as RICO. Yet no one seemed to question those moves then.
The fact remains that our rights were abused far more heinously during the War on Drugs and the term of Janet Reno as AG than they ever were under Ashcroft. No-knock warrants are far more suspect as far as civil rights are concerned than extending provisions of RICO to terrorism. I fail to see the logic of a system that gives greater protections to Mohammad Atta than it does to Tony Soprano.
If PATRIOT is repealed, it means that that such basic elements as tighter information sharing between federal agencies will be struck down as well. Had those protections existed in 2001, the events of September 11 would never have happened. Several 9/11 conspirators were pulled over just before the attacks - but because the police didn't have access to immigration records or terrorist watch lists they were let go with only a warning. Another event like that is simply intolerable.
The fact is 9/10ths of the arguments against PATRIOT are based in a sense of partisan politics rather than a rational examination of law. Had PATRIOT been a creation of Clinton Administration I doubt anyone would be talking about it, but in a country where partisanship overwhelms common sense on both sides rational discussion about the best way to protect this country from the clear and present danger of terrorism is difficult to find.
What's very interesting about the Opportunity landing is that they managed to come down in the middle of a 20-meter diameter crater on the Martian surface. This means that they can study sub-surface details that would normally be beyond the reach of the rover's instruments. Also, the crater isn't very steep, meaning that they should have no problem driving out of it and into the next crater over.
Meridiani Planum is certainly one of the more interesting parts of Mars we've yet seen. It will be interesting to get a better understanding of what's causing all that interesting surface topography as well as exploring the composition of the surface.
The OS on the Spirit lander was created by Wind River - details are here. As with any OS designed for deep-space uses there are multiple redundancies on virtually every aspect of the system.
The fact remains that the militarization is space is virtually inevitable - if not by us, by someone else. One of the reasons for the Chinese Shenzhou manned-spaceflight program is to put electronic and optical intelligence platforms in orbit. The rear section of the Shenzhou orbiter is left in low Earth orbit where it can be used for photographic and electronic surveillance. Just as our space program lead to more advanced space-based intelligence platforms, the Chinese are doing much the same.
What's more worrying is the threat of satellite hunter-killer devices. Imagine if someone developed the technology to knock out the GPS grid - both our military and our economy would suffer greatly.
We can't naively assume that space will only be used for peaceful means, and if we don't take the initiative in ensuring that we have adaquate countermeasures we take on significant risk.
On the other hand, the process is going to be slow. Space exploration is very expensive, and only a major power can afford significant investments in space. We're not going to see al-Qaeda or even North Korea develop a sat-killer any time soon.
Chances are we'll see a new space race between the US and China, with the moon being the primary goal for both. The technological advancements from such a race will be as important as the advancements we got from Apollo. New materials, new energy source, new biotechnology are all potential spin-offs from space exploration.
Rather than fear increased space travel, we should be welcoming it. Yes, there will be a military presence in space, but the benefits of space exploration far outweigh the risks.
The iPod Mini is about $50 too expensive for what it is. The problem with expanding iPod sales is that there a lot of us (myself included) who don't particularly care to shell out more than $150 for a portable music player. Yeah, the iPod is insanely great and all, but I don't have $300 to shell out for what is basically a luxury item.
What is the target market for this device? If you're going to spend $249 for a device with less than a third of the capacity of a model only $50 more, you're not going to buy the mini iPod. In essence, Apple isn't opening a new market but cannibalizing sales of their existing market, if that. I don't see this as being a big seller unless the price point significantly drops.
Worse of all, Apple has opened the market for another company to produce an iPod knockoff that offers 2GB of storage for $130-$150 that would fill that niche market that iPod Mini could have filled. If they partner with another service (read Wal-Mart or Napster), they can take the market from Apple easily.
This has been Apple's problem from the beginning. They produce great tech that is wonderful for early adopters, but they don't know how to compete in the larger market. iTunes is nice, but if they lose the low-cost MP3 player market they're already ceding ground to competitors that can loss-lead them into the ground. (Again, read Wal-Mart).
The mini iPod is going to be a major disappointment for Apple and shows a real lack of vision. The high-end MP3 player market is going to reach saturation at some point, and the iPod won't be able to break out of its niche without substantial price drops. Meanhile, another company will use the lower-cost market to dominate the field and reduce the marketshare of the underlying technology Apple is based on. (Read AAC). It's how IBM and clones took over the PC market in the 80's and 90's, and it's how someone else has the same opportunity to do so for the digital music market now.
There is a way of disproving Rugg's hoax theory (or at least the part of Kelley's involvement in creating such a hoax).
If the manuscript is significantly older than it's first appearance in the court of Rudolf II between 1576-1611, then it's highly unlikely it's a hoax created to dupe Rudolf. Furthermore, if there was no connection between John Dee and the MS then they theory about Kelley seems unlikely.
Now, Rugg's theory can't be disproven without knowing more about the Voynich text, in which case the mystery wouldn't exist. The problem with Rugg's theory is that even if one *could* produce a Voynich-like text that doesn't mean that the Voynich manuscript is a product of that process.
My guess is that the Voynich manuscript is an Italian alchemical work in a highly bizarre cipher system - but my theory can't be proven either.
As Rugg's site mentions, the only way to prove or disprove the Voynich mystery is to come up with some kind of translation - which is always been the case even before Rugg's theory.
I've studied the Voynich manuscript before, and the possibility of a hoax seems just as unlikely as many of the theories that have been floating about. Yes, the language of the Voynich manuscript could be an elaborate hoax, but Rugg's analysis only proves what is already widely known.
The problem of creating such an elaborate hoax is that even Rugg's theory doesn't explain all the features of the Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble an actual document when viewed with analytical techniques that wouldn't be developed later. Occam's Razor makes it seem more likely that there some kind of language operating in the manuscript than a random system of patterns. Then again, there's no real way of knowing.
There are some images of the text of the Voynich Manuscript available here. Analysis of the text and the illustrations support the theory that the manuscript has defined sections on astrology, herbal medicine, and other subjects. There have been some serious and some rediculous theories about the manuscript from the intriguing notion that the Voynich text is mathematically similar to East Asian languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, or that the Voynich manuscript is written in an ancient form of Ukrainian. (I've read the supposed translation of it from the Ukrainian, and it hardly makes sense given that the manuscript's illustations don't match the text of the supposed translation.)
In the meantime, this site offers more information on modern translation efforts including a font for the Voynich script. (Which would make a lovely way of annoying co-workers by switching their default system font to Voynich text...)
After reading through Lomborg's book and the responses to it, I've determined that there is one tested scientific theory inherent in global warming. Unfortunately it has more to do with psychology than earth sciences.
In 1972 a psychologist named Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink, a theory that postulated that people within a group will think alike, or as he put it:
In other words, when you get a group of people together with a similar worldview and ask them to process some information, they will process that information in such a way as to coincide with their worldview.
The theory of groupthink is a tremendously useful model for analyzing public policy decisionmaking. Many articles have been written that apply this model to everything from the Cuban Missle Crisis (Graham Allison's indispensible Essence of Decision for those who might be interested in foreign-policy decisionmaking theory) to the decisions over the war in Iraq.
Scientists are not immune from groupthink. The consensus in January of this year was that the incident of ice hitting the space shuttle Columbia was not a major issue of concern. Those who did believe otherwise were dissuaded by others. Of course, the consensus was wrong in the issue and the dissenters were correct.
Global warming is more a consequence of groupthink than of sound science. It is pseudo-science to argue that a system as complex and chaotic as the environment can be predicted with any accuracy over long periods of time. We can't even predict the weather over a given chunk of territory with scientifically reproducable accuracy, yet one is to believe that we can say that the Earth's average temperature will rise x number of degrees by 2100?
The fact is that such claims are unverfiable and irreproducable, and rely on computer weather models that would respond as a model would be expected to but could have no relationship with the real world. Yet we're being asked to base our entire way of life based around flimsy assertions that cannot be proven or disproven scientifically.
So why are scientists behaving so unscientifically?
Because they have been given a worldview in which "polluters" should be stopped using science. In essence, the people who grew up watching Captain Planet are now out there either consciously or unconsciously trying to make the evidence fit their preordained worldview.
Those who dissent, like Lomborg, are practically apostates to the prevailing conventional wisdom. Lomborg is instantly assumed to be in the "pockets of big corporations" and trying to "defend the polluters." Lomborg's arguments are being treated as wrong on a prima facie basis and the prevailing conventional wisdom is being upheld - exactly the way in which Janis would describe for a group in the throws of groupthink.
Certainly pollution isn't good, but the way in which critics have attacked Lomborg have shown a shocking willingness to abandon dispassionate and objective science in favor of using science as a tool of public policy. When such an attitude becomes prevalent, real science falls behind. The scientific community deserves a black eye for this, and the way in which global warming is treated as a prima facie truth rather than a flimsy scientific theory is not hard science - it's a function of personal and professional bias on the part of many in the scientific community.
You mean something like this?
I cut too soon. The statute does read "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and precedent has protection for both. "Science" could be considered roughly analogous to copyright in the original definition of the word, while patent law would fall into the "useful Arts" meaning. In fact, there are protections for both, although copyright generally has weaker statutory protections than does patent law, although even that is changing with the DMCA and other attempts at strengthening copyright law.
My bad...
(As a diclaimer, IANAL, but I have read Eldred and I am familiar with public policy issues on copyright.)
Straw man is the correct term for this letter, as the entire case McBride makes is on a complete misunderstanding of both the GPL and Eldred.
First of all, his use of Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution illustrates absolutely nothing. There is nothing in the GPL that precludes or infringes upon this statute in the least. Congress has the power to grant exclusive rights to a creation but has no power to legally mandate what the terms of those rights are. (See Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City 383 US 1.) Congress has the right to grant me a patent, and if I want to take that patented product and license it to whomever, there is nothing that Constitutionally prevents me from doing so. In other words, if IBM patents a new storage device and they want to make those specifications publicly available through GPLed drivers they have every right to do so. If they want to license such technology to only one company, they may do so. If they want to take every existing model and shove it up their ass, they have every legal right to do so.
Furthermore, precedent sets that the patent power is limited only for the purpose of the "progress of science" - as Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc 489 US 141 states:
What McBride argues is that the public domain itself is somehow contradictory to the very notion of copyright, and argument which simply does not hold to much scrutiny. Even the majority opinion in Eldred acknowledges that the Constitution does not allow for a perpetual system of copyright, and that at some point material must fall into the public domain.
The argument that profit motive is the best way of ensuring the public good is fine, but it is essentially a non-sequitor in this case. If the Linux kernel contains SCO code then that code has to be legally removed. However, SCO has no right to dictate that only proprietary licenses are legally valid, and that argument does nothing to advance their particular case. Moreover, any judge who has to rule on such a prima facie idiotic argument will quickly rule that SCO has no legal ground. The GPL is, as many have already mentioned, based on an acknowledgement of copyright law and relies on copyright law as a basis for its licensing terms. SCO has no right to say that a copyright holder must use a proprietary license any more than Red Hat says that SCO must drop all claims to their proprietary source code. There is no legal foundation for such a position and McBride clearly has no understanding of the revelant law.
Hey! I create XPMs and SVG files in Emacs you insensitive clod!
OK, so I don't... but you could if you wanted to and were insane enough to try.
PICO? Please say you meant GNU nano (which is the default editor for Debian and has the same functionality as PICO without the onerous license.)