Yay for irresponsible reporting and encouraging schizos to clog their lungs with tar and soot. How the F does smoking improve any function, it's a dampener.
It is possible to produce defect-free non-trivial software. Generally, though, it is better and more cost-effective to produce defect-tolerant software.
That's not practical at all. Today's black-box/white-box testing takes almost as much code and time as the original code itself. For defect-free software, you would have to employ formal verification which very few developers are capable of doing. And even if they did, it to would take 100 to 100,000 more man-hours to prove a non-trivial software completely correct. If you think $300 is too expensive for Win XP, get ready to pay $30,000 for a defect-free XP edition. On the plus side, the $30,000 software would never crash.
True, but LAN is superfast and more fun. For a company that cares so much about quality and game experience, they are basically willing to shaft their own game to ensure more revenue.
You can call parent troll, but the phone companies recently admitted that they were spying on its customers as instructed by the CIA. What if Google provides the same service -- used as a tool to spy on all citizens? When it comes to something very, very important (to the patients), such as health records, security is paramount, and these cheap, fucking doctors should pony up the money to have a private network to maintain privacy of patient records rather than hand it over to an information hoarder, like Google.
I agree that the government has no business to enter my private domain. No quartering of troops in my home; no crossing the threshold without a warrant. That's the supreme law of the land.
So privacy is only possible (for now) within the tiny confines of ones home -- several hundred to couple of thousand sq. feet. What about the miles of land outside the home?. In this age of high speed computers, fast computer networks, Wi-Fi, facial recognition software (tools for a big-brother society) etc., can citizens expect any privacy outside their homes or does nobody care anymore? Frankly, all your comments are frightening how willingly you surrender your freedom to any govt.
All it would take is one more 911 style attack before there is a hue and cry to centralize all video feeds from these businesses, streets, buses into some google datacenter.
How is this different from the US? There's security cameras in every business, bus, train, plane, street, traffic cameras etc.
We urgently need laws preventing these so-called security cameras from stealing what little freedom we have.
But what good is open source if you have to pay $99 to compile and install it on an iphone? In this app's case, it appears nobody cares about the source code or modifying it. They just want to compile the game unmodified and install it for free ($2.99 will break their banks). The true attraction of open source is free beer (compiled software) and not access to source code.
The slashdot title for this story is highly misleading: it's trying to insinuate all people complaining of Wi-Fi allergy are phonies just because some greedy joker pulled a stunt.
Let's look at the facts:
Sticking your head or any body part in a microwave oven will severely injure or kill you -- microwave energy is highly dangerous.
Overuse of cellphones is likely to cause brain cancer after several years of use. Cellphones emit the same microwave radiation as the microwave oven, only with much diluted power, so it takes more time than an oven to damage human tissue.
Wi-fi also uses microwave radiation, except it's not stuck close to your head. But it's always on, depending on where you
live or work. Even though the power of the radiation reaching the human body is weaker than a cellphone stuck to the head, wi-fi is always on while the cellphone is not -- the cumulative effects of this exposure is yet unknown.
Looking at these facts, it's very likely that Wi-fi (microwave radiation) may cause cancer or some sort of damage if human beings are continuously exposed to it for several decades.
And copyright shall if anything belong to the creator and not be transferable. That would solve a lot of problems.
Hear, hear! Or at least make it impossible for any person or entity to purchase 100% of the copyright from its creator. The creator should be given a minimum of 10% rights (gross/net) on his/her work.
Exactly! Just look at the intense competition between Internet Explorer 8 and Opera! You'd never, ever see that from open source.
Wow, thanks for proving my point! While IE is not open-source, it is certainly free (just like open source). This makes it hard as hell for any commercial browser, like Opera, to even enter the market. Once Microsoft made IE free, the market for web browsers died, Netscape died. All innovation in the browser world died because MS did not want the web platform to overtake Windows. And the funny thing is after 10 years in the browser world, Firefox has made no major improvements to the browser platform. This just proves the stereotype that OSS is about copycatting rather than innovation.
Variety in OSS comes from the same software forked N ways. There really is no incentive to create more versions of a successful OSS program -- there's no profit involved.
Ah, but if the fact that no profit is involved is such a problem, then how is it that the original project cam into fruition? Every developer contributes by choice, and without profit, yet it still gets done. There clearly must be other motives involved.
Back in the day, just as the Internet was becoming popular, M$ was destroying almost every successful software product with their unethical business tactics. Enraged software programmers joined OSS in droves to battle against the evil force. But it soon became apparent that OSS was simply replacing Microsoft as the next overlord of the software world -- destroying not large but also small competitors with their ultimate weapon: $0 price tag. While Microsoft only had a few thousand developers, OSS had millions. The effect was devastating: instead of only big products being destroyed, now all commercial software is under threat. Businesses and governments love it, because a vast fortune of $ spent on the salary of software programmers or to purchase software products could instead stay right in their pockets.
In no other artistic/intellectual field are creators destroying their own market like software devs are doing right now.
No kidding. When faced with explaining the unpleasant truth how OSS reduces choice (by wiping out small software companies) and therefore freedom, OSS fanbois have to redefine freedom. Let's face it, consumers don't give a rat's ass about source code -- it looks like noise to them (heck, even most geeks can't add their own feature to the OSS code). If doing something important they are going to do for months or years, few consumers will haggle over $0 vs. $50. They want something that works and does what they want it to do. All OSS fans really care about is destroying the evil, closed-source software world.
Closed-source software promotes competition and a wide variety of programs because your competitor's code is not available to you and there's the profit motive. Variety in OSS comes from the same software forked N ways. There really is no incentive to create more versions of a successful OSS program -- there's no profit involved. By comparison, a successful closed-source product results in dozens of competitors vying for some marketshare. More products, more freedom, more convenience.
Rubbish, trite ideas are common. If valuable ideas were commonplace, we would all be supermen, insanely wealthy and be able to travel anywhere in the universe. In fact, the entire human civilization has progressed so far only because of the rare geniuses who discovered/invented new forms of math, science and technology.
It's good execution that makes for success.
Good execution is only one component of success. You still need good ideas, marketing, managing etc.
How many Linux kernel developers are filthy rich from the millions of people they have helped? None. RHAT just uses their code for free to make $$$$. That's the evilness and stupidity of communism -- the smartest and most deserving people get used and earn nothing while the greedy people who use their work laugh all the way to the bank.
I've studied patent and copyright law professionally, and still haven't seen a clear and compelling argument for how it ought to work.
Let's say you own a house. That ownership protects you from some hoodlum or unpleasant stranger barging into your house and staying there without your consent. In other words, the law recognizes that you have paid a hefty price to own an asset, and prevents other shady, unlawful characters from taking advantage of this asset.
Similarly, a book written by its author, belongs to the author unless he sells it to a publisher. Copyright law was there to prevent leeches, pirates and greedy publishers from simply using that work without compensating the author. Just take a look at all the anti-copyright comments here. A lot of human beings are greedy and want stuff for free.
Contrary to popular slashdot opinion, human beings are free individuals. They don't exist to serve the common good -- they are not slaves to the common good. Their minds, bodies and by extension, their work belongs to them and not to society. They may interact with society in a mutually beneficial manner, but are not subservient to it.
right now there's probably a sudden rush of books about Michael Jackson, but in ten years those new books will probably be forgotten.
Really? The crappy books will be forgotten soon. But the good and excellent books will be read for hundreds of years. People still read books by Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dickens, hundreds of years later.
Why bother protecting them for 60+ years beyond that?
Book revenues don't drop to zero after 10 years, they still decent money for decades unless they are highly mediocre to begin with.
That is downright Un-American. Here we make money the proper way, by suing someone.
So what do you recommend they do? Sit back while their competitors steal sales by leeching of their brand name? They should not sue, play the nice guy to get the blessing of slashdotters, and then go broke.
This is a blatant violation of trademark laws and Rosetta Stone should be compensated.
Trademark is intended solely to stop one company from representing its products as being another company's products.
That's a shortsighted comment. Let's say I create a craptastic product named iPwn, and when someone searches Google for iPhone, he sees an adwords ad for iPwn. In this case, I've leeched off iPhone's brand value to sell my own wares. Apple spent millions/billions to create/promote the iPhone brand and now I get to rake in the profits at Apple's expense.
If the entire program is math, then you agree that everything it contains is math. So if the program contains a recipe to bake pizza or make pankcakes, then you have just postulated that the procedure to make pizza or pancakes is math, which is ridiculous.
It is a mathematical process.
Correction, it uses mathematical processes... big difference. All techonology uses math, it is not math by itself. Just as when you type 2 + 2 in your calculator, you are using math, you don't transform from human into math.
If you'll look up in this thread, you'll see where mathematicians have proven that software is math. But hey, what would they know about the definition of math? I'm sure your made-up definition is the right one.
So, according to you and your esteemed mathematicians, word processors, operating systems, web browsers, are not technology using math, rather these applications are math themselves. Then why don't they teach the algorithms in these applications in math text books, or any text book for that matter?
But is a program that stores and displays recipes, math? No. That's more analogous to a notebook containing recipes than math. Is printf("Hello, world\n") math or simply a command to a machine?
Software is technology, and technology uses math but is not math by itself. Software uses math and electronics to accomplish its tasks. Electronics uses math and physics to accomplish its tasks. Neither software nor electronics nor physics are math -- they all use math.
What makes you think mathematics is a "fact" or "discoverable"?
2 + 2 is always 4 regardless of culture, era, language, or whether you use sticks or stones to count. That's a fact. Now I'm not a judge or a lawyer, but according to legal doctrine, Math is not patentable because it is discovered, not invented, and I don't fully understand the nuances involved. Algorithms, on the other hand are artificial, man-made, and vary tremendously depending on its creator. For example, there are at least a dozen sort algorithms. Another real world example is if you were to describe a non-trivial problem to 10 different teams of programmers, you would get 10 very different programs. Because software is as much art as it is math and science. On the other hand, if 10 mathematicians in 10 different countries independently came up with Boolean logic, they would all "create" or "discover" the same laws.
... "Discovered" Boolean logic? All mathematical systems are man-made symbolic constructs.
So make math patentable. I don't see why those brilliant mathematicians who invent/discover new mathematical systems, or create useful, interesting proofs should be paid the same or less than some PHP/javascript/J2EE code monkey. The latter will be thrown away as technology progresses, while the work of the former will live forever. But if you allow this, physicists will probably start demanding the same.
Screw the criminals, who's going to compensate the law-abiding public for their loss of privacy? The loss of privacy of several hundred thousand citizens vs capturing 10 pickpockets and 5 thugs does not seem fair. Loss of privacy --> loss of freedom --> modern slavery.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay for irresponsible reporting and encouraging schizos to clog their lungs with tar and soot. How the F does smoking improve any function, it's a dampener.
That's not practical at all. Today's black-box/white-box testing takes almost as much code and time as the original code itself. For defect-free software, you would have to employ formal verification which very few developers are capable of doing. And even if they did, it to would take 100 to 100,000 more man-hours to prove a non-trivial software completely correct. If you think $300 is too expensive for Win XP, get ready to pay $30,000 for a defect-free XP edition. On the plus side, the $30,000 software would never crash.
no commitment = iPod Touch, but it's not a phone and it costs $229.
True, but LAN is superfast and more fun. For a company that cares so much about quality and game experience, they are basically willing to shaft their own game to ensure more revenue.
You can call parent troll, but the phone companies recently admitted that they were spying on its customers as instructed by the CIA. What if Google provides the same service -- used as a tool to spy on all citizens? When it comes to something very, very important (to the patients), such as health records, security is paramount, and these cheap, fucking doctors should pony up the money to have a private network to maintain privacy of patient records rather than hand it over to an information hoarder, like Google.
So privacy is only possible (for now) within the tiny confines of ones home -- several hundred to couple of thousand sq. feet. What about the miles of land outside the home?. In this age of high speed computers, fast computer networks, Wi-Fi, facial recognition software (tools for a big-brother society) etc., can citizens expect any privacy outside their homes or does nobody care anymore? Frankly, all your comments are frightening how willingly you surrender your freedom to any govt.
All it would take is one more 911 style attack before there is a hue and cry to centralize all video feeds from these businesses, streets, buses into some google datacenter.
How is this different from the US? There's security cameras in every business, bus, train, plane, street, traffic cameras etc. We urgently need laws preventing these so-called security cameras from stealing what little freedom we have.
But what good is open source if you have to pay $99 to compile and install it on an iphone? In this app's case, it appears nobody cares about the source code or modifying it. They just want to compile the game unmodified and install it for free ($2.99 will break their banks). The true attraction of open source is free beer (compiled software) and not access to source code.
Let's look at the facts:
Looking at these facts, it's very likely that Wi-fi (microwave radiation) may cause cancer or some sort of damage if human beings are continuously exposed to it for several decades.
Hear, hear! Or at least make it impossible for any person or entity to purchase 100% of the copyright from its creator. The creator should be given a minimum of 10% rights (gross/net) on his/her work.
Wow, thanks for proving my point! While IE is not open-source, it is certainly free (just like open source). This makes it hard as hell for any commercial browser, like Opera, to even enter the market. Once Microsoft made IE free, the market for web browsers died, Netscape died. All innovation in the browser world died because MS did not want the web platform to overtake Windows. And the funny thing is after 10 years in the browser world, Firefox has made no major improvements to the browser platform. This just proves the stereotype that OSS is about copycatting rather than innovation.
Back in the day, just as the Internet was becoming popular, M$ was destroying almost every successful software product with their unethical business tactics. Enraged software programmers joined OSS in droves to battle against the evil force. But it soon became apparent that OSS was simply replacing Microsoft as the next overlord of the software world -- destroying not large but also small competitors with their ultimate weapon: $0 price tag. While Microsoft only had a few thousand developers, OSS had millions. The effect was devastating: instead of only big products being destroyed, now all commercial software is under threat. Businesses and governments love it, because a vast fortune of $ spent on the salary of software programmers or to purchase software products could instead stay right in their pockets.
In no other artistic/intellectual field are creators destroying their own market like software devs are doing right now.
No kidding. When faced with explaining the unpleasant truth how OSS reduces choice (by wiping out small software companies) and therefore freedom, OSS fanbois have to redefine freedom. Let's face it, consumers don't give a rat's ass about source code -- it looks like noise to them (heck, even most geeks can't add their own feature to the OSS code). If doing something important they are going to do for months or years, few consumers will haggle over $0 vs. $50. They want something that works and does what they want it to do. All OSS fans really care about is destroying the evil, closed-source software world.
Closed-source software promotes competition and a wide variety of programs because your competitor's code is not available to you and there's the profit motive. Variety in OSS comes from the same software forked N ways. There really is no incentive to create more versions of a successful OSS program -- there's no profit involved. By comparison, a successful closed-source product results in dozens of competitors vying for some marketshare. More products, more freedom, more convenience.
Rubbish, trite ideas are common. If valuable ideas were commonplace, we would all be supermen, insanely wealthy and be able to travel anywhere in the universe. In fact, the entire human civilization has progressed so far only because of the rare geniuses who discovered/invented new forms of math, science and technology.
Good execution is only one component of success. You still need good ideas, marketing, managing etc.
How many Linux kernel developers are filthy rich from the millions of people they have helped? None. RHAT just uses their code for free to make $$$$. That's the evilness and stupidity of communism -- the smartest and most deserving people get used and earn nothing while the greedy people who use their work laugh all the way to the bank.
Let's say you own a house. That ownership protects you from some hoodlum or unpleasant stranger barging into your house and staying there without your consent. In other words, the law recognizes that you have paid a hefty price to own an asset, and prevents other shady, unlawful characters from taking advantage of this asset.
Similarly, a book written by its author, belongs to the author unless he sells it to a publisher. Copyright law was there to prevent leeches, pirates and greedy publishers from simply using that work without compensating the author. Just take a look at all the anti-copyright comments here. A lot of human beings are greedy and want stuff for free.
Contrary to popular slashdot opinion, human beings are free individuals. They don't exist to serve the common good -- they are not slaves to the common good. Their minds, bodies and by extension, their work belongs to them and not to society. They may interact with society in a mutually beneficial manner, but are not subservient to it.
Really? The crappy books will be forgotten soon. But the good and excellent books will be read for hundreds of years. People still read books by Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dickens, hundreds of years later.
Book revenues don't drop to zero after 10 years, they still decent money for decades unless they are highly mediocre to begin with.
So what do you recommend they do? Sit back while their competitors steal sales by leeching of their brand name? They should not sue, play the nice guy to get the blessing of slashdotters, and then go broke.
This is a blatant violation of trademark laws and Rosetta Stone should be compensated.
That's a shortsighted comment. Let's say I create a craptastic product named iPwn, and when someone searches Google for iPhone, he sees an adwords ad for iPwn. In this case, I've leeched off iPhone's brand value to sell my own wares. Apple spent millions/billions to create/promote the iPhone brand and now I get to rake in the profits at Apple's expense.
If the entire program is math, then you agree that everything it contains is math. So if the program contains a recipe to bake pizza or make pankcakes, then you have just postulated that the procedure to make pizza or pancakes is math, which is ridiculous.
Correction, it uses mathematical processes... big difference. All techonology uses math, it is not math by itself. Just as when you type 2 + 2 in your calculator, you are using math, you don't transform from human into math.
So, according to you and your esteemed mathematicians, word processors, operating systems, web browsers, are not technology using math, rather these applications are math themselves. Then why don't they teach the algorithms in these applications in math text books, or any text book for that matter?
But is a program that stores and displays recipes, math? No. That's more analogous to a notebook containing recipes than math. Is printf("Hello, world\n") math or simply a command to a machine?
Software is technology, and technology uses math but is not math by itself. Software uses math and electronics to accomplish its tasks. Electronics uses math and physics to accomplish its tasks. Neither software nor electronics nor physics are math -- they all use math.
2 + 2 is always 4 regardless of culture, era, language, or whether you use sticks or stones to count. That's a fact. Now I'm not a judge or a lawyer, but according to legal doctrine, Math is not patentable because it is discovered, not invented, and I don't fully understand the nuances involved. Algorithms, on the other hand are artificial, man-made, and vary tremendously depending on its creator. For example, there are at least a dozen sort algorithms. Another real world example is if you were to describe a non-trivial problem to 10 different teams of programmers, you would get 10 very different programs. Because software is as much art as it is math and science. On the other hand, if 10 mathematicians in 10 different countries independently came up with Boolean logic, they would all "create" or "discover" the same laws.
So make math patentable. I don't see why those brilliant mathematicians who invent/discover new mathematical systems, or create useful, interesting proofs should be paid the same or less than some PHP/javascript/J2EE code monkey. The latter will be thrown away as technology progresses, while the work of the former will live forever. But if you allow this, physicists will probably start demanding the same.
Happy because you can now use their invention for free?
Screw the criminals, who's going to compensate the law-abiding public for their loss of privacy? The loss of privacy of several hundred thousand citizens vs capturing 10 pickpockets and 5 thugs does not seem fair. Loss of privacy --> loss of freedom --> modern slavery.