The grandparent poster (for simplicity) used the old analogy with the 2D surface of a 3D sphere embedded in 3D space. The problem with this is that the Universe is itself three-dimensional (*), so it is impossible to liken it with the surface of a sphere.
What you have to imagine -- and it's not a matter of visualization but rather one of abstract thought -- is the 4-dimensional analog of a 3D sphere, the so-called hypersphere. If our Universe were the (3-dimensional) "surface" of this sphere, it would appear to us as if it's "curled in on itself", but still we wouldn't be able to "walk outside" (either into the interior or the exterior of the sphere) because our ability to move is limited to the first three dimensions only -- just like an ant in the 2D surface of a 3D inflated balloon.
It helps to think in lower dimensions, too. If the Universe were 1-dimensional it could be the circumference of a 2D circle. What is beyond the circumference? Nothing. You can't extend your movement past the 1-dimensional curve you're confined to.
(*) note that I'm accounting for spatial dimensions only. Also, modern theories account for the existence of extra spatial dimensions. However, these are too "thin" to be detected macroscopically, and can be safely ignored in this discussion.
Given a choice between dressing up nicely and achieving something, and standing on your principles and achieving nothing, please feel free to go ahead and achieve nothing. But don't expect anyone to be surprised. Or interested.
I was criticising the very need for this choice -- that was my whole point. In a perfect world, Stallman's ideas would be the sole cause of (un)interest or surprisal. I do realise that in the real world tradeoffs have to take place (and Stallman should indeed make an effort if he wants to succeed), but that's no excuse to bury one's head in the sand and avoid pointing out what's wrong with our culture.
In other words, if given the choice I would choose the world in which people aren't despised by their not-so-nice looks. Most people I've discussed this with wouldn't because they think of looks+value as the whole package, and that they're getting less when the looks stay aside. To me that's wrong.
I think it's about time our civilization grew enough intelligence to judge people by their ideas and not by their looks. It's not like the man has a contagious disease of some sort; in what way does his beard or the clothes he wears affect your ability to have a civilized conversation with him?
We as a society learned to attribute way too much importance to aesthetics. Anyone who isn't hopelessly dumb acknowledges that wearing a suit doesn't intrinsically make someone a more competent individual, but most of us still let the way someone pleases (or disgusts) our eye affect our judgement of that person.
What really matters is not looking like crap on the inside.
That's right, there are restrictions to using the contents of their website!!! Doesn't matter how "friendly" these restrictions are, the very fact that there are restrictions is EVIL! Heck, I can't even modify their copyright block, that's right, there is content on their site that I can't modify! I suggest they send some guys in hazmat suits over to their own offices and start the cleanup pronto.
I think you miss the point. The point is not to abolish all rights to one's own work; it is to prevent the adoption of intrusive devices that restrict the ways in which customers can make use of a product they have legally purchased.
They'd be hypocrites if you had to pay them in order to view their webpage, and then your browser automatically shut down access to it after you'd read it n times (and the browser's makers would be sued under the DMCA if they didn't implement this measure). All they're requesting in the copyright note you refer is that you quote their message and its origin properly (you don't even have to ask for permission as long as you follow the rules). Likewise, I don't agree that you should rip others' music and distribute it as a creation of your own (without giving credit). But I despise DRM because it strips me off my rights to fair use.
Europe does not have a constitutuion at all. Any attempts to run down a nation that is based on one widely considered to be the finest political docement ever written when you have nothing at all of your own shows how weak your position is.
Europe does not need a constitution because it is not a nation on its own right. It is an aggregate of several countries, often contrasting deeply among them. Get a clue: diversity can be and is a good thing; unity does not necessarily mean an agreement in every and each matter by all the parties involved. Adopting a European constitution has proved to be difficult rightly so because of such differences, which were hard to respect in its entirety in such a broad document as was proposed by the European Parliament.
Right. Talk to the French about their little adventures in Africa. And it seemed that there are several Eurpean countries in Iraq along with us right now.
In reality the US is very late to that game. How long has Europe been engaged in that practice? At least a thousand years.
Does that somehow give you the warm feeling that you have the moral authority to do it -- just because we have done it before? If not, please reconsider your argument. I'm not excusing Europe for all the wrong things it has done in the past; neither should you excuse your own nation for the harm it causes (clue: being a patriot does not imply being aligned with one's government in all decisions; a lot of Americans seem to miss that point, including their President).
Sure. In reality what you have done is defined a standard language for talking about physical measurements. That has benefits when talking about these measurements. Now imagine how huge the benefits of having a standard language for EVERYTHING would be. It makes the metric system look like a minor triviality.
So, it seems like you actually think the metric system is a nice idea, thus falling in contradiction with your previous post. I'm glad to see you realised you were wrong.
As for a universal language: I'm all for the adoption of an international second language to serve purely as a communication tool -- as long as it is not English or any other national language, because that would be effectively creating a barrier between those who speak it natively and those who don't. Esperanto would be an adequate choice and was even considered for adoption by the UN in the 60s (if I'm not mistaken). Unfortunately, due to various political interests (and no, it wasn't only the USA's fault), the idea never took off.
It's hilarious - look at Europe with dozens of little legal systems, languages, political fiefdoms and no constitution and two world wars but goddammit WE ARE BETTER BECAUSE WE ARE METRIC.
I'll get OT and bite -- yes, I'd rather live in a continent whose culture extends more than 300 hundred years back in history, does not have a constitution that ensures the same bad politicians always stay in power and act against the interests of the population and looking into pleasing the big corporations, and does not use freedom as an excuse to bring war to other parts of the world. Any questions?
That said, I don't really understand what one thing has to do with the other. The advantage of the metric system is simply to ensure that everyone uses the same rigorously defined units and the potential for confusion is reduced -- much like your pseudo-argument that the USA are somehow better for having a single language, except that in this case you should look into other factors such as cultural diversity.
One facing straight ahead and two angling into your peripheral vision. Not only do you get a ton of real-estate, but you never have to worry about getting that even-tanned look on your face.:)
Only on Slashdot would this post be modded as informative!
Perhaps they don't want to concede all of a sudden that they're copying Unix, so they're trying to do it very slowly?;) (Vista is supposed to have Unix-like permission bits too, do we have a trend here?:))
On the serious side, I think compatibility would be a strong enough reason. It seems to drive a lot of Microsoft's decisions (and unfortunately, a lot of the problems with their software too).
Say you send one 1MB Word document to 100 of your colleagues. In a relational database-based, Single Instance Store-driven mail server, that document takes up exactly 1MB on the server. If somebody in the organization forwards the Word doc to the remaining 900 people in your organization, how much space does it take on the server? 1MB.
Send a 1MB document to 1000 users on a flat, mbox-style mail server, and how much space is taken up on the server? 1000MB.
Speaking of which, is there any filesystem around that "automagically" detects redundancy and avoids storing the same data twice (i.e. two files with the same content end up being stored only once)? (I don't mean hardlinks. Suppose I download some file for the second time without knowing the first instance exists). I suspect this would add a lot of overhead to the filesystem driver, but it'd certainly be a cool feature.
Why not "them"? I use it all the time (even if the subject is singular), and it doesn't feel too awkward after you get used to it. I don't know how grammatically correct it is (I'm not a native speaker, besides), but I've seen it quite often.
I don't see how that affects the analogy; think of the concept of a combustion engine, not of the many physical implementations of it.
American researchers came up with the idea of interconnected computer networks and, in good scientific practice, made it open (both the idea and the network) to the rest of the world. From that point on, it ceased to be an exclusively American project. All I'm implying is that the US are entitled to manage their portion of the Internet, but (should) have no business controlling the rest of it.
(And if you're worried about the concrete, physical aspect, remember that not every computer, router, switch or cable connected to the Internet was made by an American company, neither are all of the Internet nodes manned by Americans).
It would only be correct if we were talking about the U.S. using German engines.
Are you implying that every motherboard, processor, network card, router, antenna, wire, etc, connected to the Internet is American-made?
If the rest of the world wants to build their own Internet they have my best wishes.
Is is that difficult to grasp that the Internet is not a 100% American project? ARPANET was. The US certainly wasn't involved in building and setting up all the Internet infrastructure outside US soil. And by calling it "yours" you're claiming rights to an entity that belongs only partially to you.
It does control root. But should it? It goes against the very idea of an Internet, i.e. a world-wide interconnection of networks. It think the US is of course entitled to control its own networks (based in national soil), but it's unfair for it to have rights over the whole thing.
It's just that the status quo is so damn blurred right now (i.e. we are used to having the US trying to control or otherwise have an influence on everyone and everything around the whole world) that some of us can't even realise there are some things that have been done wrong in the past and ought to be changed.
I think he's just trying to imply that "freedom of speech", like everything else, does not have an absolute meaning, and as such (to get back OT) the rest of the world shouldn't be forced to adopt the US's subjective interpretation on the matter, namely by playing US's rules on what is (not) acceptable to do on the Internet.
If you were to apply that logic to everything else, I'm sure there's a whole lot of inventions that took place in other countries you use in your everyday life, and you don't usually think of as someone else's property.
I don't even need to go that far: American-based research did indeed lead to the creation of the Internet, but to say that the effort involved was 100% American is at the very least unfair. The Internet is a worldwide network.
You can take your part of the Internet (the one in American soil) and do whatever you want with it. But please leave the rights of the rest of Humanity to it alone.
By the same logic you used in your post, Germany should be allowed to have that same kind of "feel free to run them, but we're the big guys and deserve to be in control" attitude in respect to cars, and inclusively tax American (as well as other countries') vehicles. Does that look fair to you as well?
I'd bite on your GPS rant too, but others have taken care of it already, so I'll just leave it here.
I think it also has to do with the fact that the media in which we store information are increasingly less durable (compare stone engraved millenia ago, writings in paper of past centuries still readable today, and the relatively short life expectancy of magnetic and optical media).
Now I'm not saying we should all go back to Stone Age, but it does make you think about the irony of progress...
"Release" in the open source world has a broader sense than in commercial software. In open source not all "released" versions are meant for general public consumption; they include unstable versions targeted mostly at developers, so that severe isues can be detected and patched quickly.
Taking this into account, I believe this is meant to catch bugs mainly in nightly (unstable) builds and release candidates, not in "final" versions (those should, at least in theory, have no serious bugs left around as the latter have already been eradicated from release candidates).
where the hell did the cosmic egg/big bang come from?
Perhaps this isn't exactly what you mean, but one good answer to the question "what existed before the Big Bang" (and one that makes me feel comfortable) is that, if you regard Big Bang as the beginning of Time itself, "before the Big Bang" is inherently nonsensical, and thus this is an illogical question to ask.
I believe Stephen Hawking mentioned this in (probably more than) one of his books; immediately after giving this argument, he parallelled it to what St. Augustine said when someone asked him what God was doing before he created the Universe: "he was creating hell, for those who ask too many questions".;)
The non-traceability of the Open Source process leaves any given product open to contamination from copyrighted/patented IP.
Please explain to me why "non-traceability" is inherent to Open Source. Even in a closed-source project developers can use copyrighted/patented code if no measures are taken to check for prior art; the "tight-checking" you mention is by no means inherent to closed source, open source, or whatever development model you choose. Code is as "traceable" as people want it to be -- if a project is properly managed, you will always know which chunk of code came from whom.
Another point is that, Open Source being open, it is naturally easier to spot "stolen" code if you have the time and inclination to do so (with closed source it's harder as you have to reverse-engineer it). That would actually encourage developers not to reuse code without permission, since they can be caught more easily.
I always felt the term "Windows compatible hardware" was a big piece of bullshit. Shouldn't it be the software to conform to the hardware, and not the other way round? Hardware seems to be the lowest common denominator here.
Of course (as some posts already mentioned), this can only be achieved if the hardware in question is properly documented so that developers know how to write drivers for it, without having to resort to dirty (and sometimes illegal) tricks like reverse engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
The grandparent poster (for simplicity) used the old analogy with the 2D surface of a 3D sphere embedded in 3D space. The problem with this is that the Universe is itself three-dimensional (*), so it is impossible to liken it with the surface of a sphere.
What you have to imagine -- and it's not a matter of visualization but rather one of abstract thought -- is the 4-dimensional analog of a 3D sphere, the so-called hypersphere. If our Universe were the (3-dimensional) "surface" of this sphere, it would appear to us as if it's "curled in on itself", but still we wouldn't be able to "walk outside" (either into the interior or the exterior of the sphere) because our ability to move is limited to the first three dimensions only -- just like an ant in the 2D surface of a 3D inflated balloon.
It helps to think in lower dimensions, too. If the Universe were 1-dimensional it could be the circumference of a 2D circle. What is beyond the circumference? Nothing. You can't extend your movement past the 1-dimensional curve you're confined to.
(*) note that I'm accounting for spatial dimensions only. Also, modern theories account for the existence of extra spatial dimensions. However, these are too "thin" to be detected macroscopically, and can be safely ignored in this discussion.
Mi pensas, cxu "fikugxi" ne estas pli tawga vorto? :P
Saluton, karaj esperantistoj!I was criticising the very need for this choice -- that was my whole point. In a perfect world, Stallman's ideas would be the sole cause of (un)interest or surprisal. I do realise that in the real world tradeoffs have to take place (and Stallman should indeed make an effort if he wants to succeed), but that's no excuse to bury one's head in the sand and avoid pointing out what's wrong with our culture.
In other words, if given the choice I would choose the world in which people aren't despised by their not-so-nice looks. Most people I've discussed this with wouldn't because they think of looks+value as the whole package, and that they're getting less when the looks stay aside. To me that's wrong.
I think it's about time our civilization grew enough intelligence to judge people by their ideas and not by their looks. It's not like the man has a contagious disease of some sort; in what way does his beard or the clothes he wears affect your ability to have a civilized conversation with him?
We as a society learned to attribute way too much importance to aesthetics. Anyone who isn't hopelessly dumb acknowledges that wearing a suit doesn't intrinsically make someone a more competent individual, but most of us still let the way someone pleases (or disgusts) our eye affect our judgement of that person.
What really matters is not looking like crap on the inside.
I think you miss the point. The point is not to abolish all rights to one's own work; it is to prevent the adoption of intrusive devices that restrict the ways in which customers can make use of a product they have legally purchased.
They'd be hypocrites if you had to pay them in order to view their webpage, and then your browser automatically shut down access to it after you'd read it n times (and the browser's makers would be sued under the DMCA if they didn't implement this measure). All they're requesting in the copyright note you refer is that you quote their message and its origin properly (you don't even have to ask for permission as long as you follow the rules). Likewise, I don't agree that you should rip others' music and distribute it as a creation of your own (without giving credit). But I despise DRM because it strips me off my rights to fair use.
Europe does not have a constitutuion at all. Any attempts to run down a nation that is based on one widely considered to be the finest political docement ever written when you have nothing at all of your own shows how weak your position is.
Europe does not need a constitution because it is not a nation on its own right. It is an aggregate of several countries, often contrasting deeply among them. Get a clue: diversity can be and is a good thing; unity does not necessarily mean an agreement in every and each matter by all the parties involved. Adopting a European constitution has proved to be difficult rightly so because of such differences, which were hard to respect in its entirety in such a broad document as was proposed by the European Parliament.
Right. Talk to the French about their little adventures in Africa. And it seemed that there are several Eurpean countries in Iraq along with us right now.
In reality the US is very late to that game. How long has Europe been engaged in that practice? At least a thousand years.Does that somehow give you the warm feeling that you have the moral authority to do it -- just because we have done it before? If not, please reconsider your argument. I'm not excusing Europe for all the wrong things it has done in the past; neither should you excuse your own nation for the harm it causes (clue: being a patriot does not imply being aligned with one's government in all decisions; a lot of Americans seem to miss that point, including their President).
Sure. In reality what you have done is defined a standard language for talking about physical measurements. That has benefits when talking about these measurements. Now imagine how huge the benefits of having a standard language for EVERYTHING would be. It makes the metric system look like a minor triviality.
So, it seems like you actually think the metric system is a nice idea, thus falling in contradiction with your previous post. I'm glad to see you realised you were wrong.
As for a universal language: I'm all for the adoption of an international second language to serve purely as a communication tool -- as long as it is not English or any other national language, because that would be effectively creating a barrier between those who speak it natively and those who don't. Esperanto would be an adequate choice and was even considered for adoption by the UN in the 60s (if I'm not mistaken). Unfortunately, due to various political interests (and no, it wasn't only the USA's fault), the idea never took off.
It's hilarious - look at Europe with dozens of little legal systems, languages, political fiefdoms and no constitution and two world wars but goddammit WE ARE BETTER BECAUSE WE ARE METRIC.
I'll get OT and bite -- yes, I'd rather live in a continent whose culture extends more than 300 hundred years back in history, does not have a constitution that ensures the same bad politicians always stay in power and act against the interests of the population and looking into pleasing the big corporations, and does not use freedom as an excuse to bring war to other parts of the world. Any questions?
That said, I don't really understand what one thing has to do with the other. The advantage of the metric system is simply to ensure that everyone uses the same rigorously defined units and the potential for confusion is reduced -- much like your pseudo-argument that the USA are somehow better for having a single language, except that in this case you should look into other factors such as cultural diversity.
Ergo, you must be a troll.
One facing straight ahead and two angling into your peripheral vision. Not only do you get a ton of real-estate, but you never have to worry about getting that even-tanned look on your face. :)
Only on Slashdot would this post be modded as informative!
Perhaps they don't want to concede all of a sudden that they're copying Unix, so they're trying to do it very slowly? ;) (Vista is supposed to have Unix-like permission bits too, do we have a trend here? :))
On the serious side, I think compatibility would be a strong enough reason. It seems to drive a lot of Microsoft's decisions (and unfortunately, a lot of the problems with their software too).
Say you send one 1MB Word document to 100 of your colleagues. In a relational database-based, Single Instance Store-driven mail server, that document takes up exactly 1MB on the server. If somebody in the organization forwards the Word doc to the remaining 900 people in your organization, how much space does it take on the server? 1MB. Send a 1MB document to 1000 users on a flat, mbox-style mail server, and how much space is taken up on the server? 1000MB.
Speaking of which, is there any filesystem around that "automagically" detects redundancy and avoids storing the same data twice (i.e. two files with the same content end up being stored only once)? (I don't mean hardlinks. Suppose I download some file for the second time without knowing the first instance exists). I suspect this would add a lot of overhead to the filesystem driver, but it'd certainly be a cool feature.
Under relativity it is still true that F = dp/dt, but the definition of p itself changes (consequence of E=mc^2):
p = gamma * m * v (where gamma = 1/(1 - (v/c)^2))
And particles without mass (e.g. photons) do have momentum, given by
p = E/c
Why not "them"? I use it all the time (even if the subject is singular), and it doesn't feel too awkward after you get used to it. I don't know how grammatically correct it is (I'm not a native speaker, besides), but I've seen it quite often.
I don't see how that affects the analogy; think of the concept of a combustion engine, not of the many physical implementations of it.
American researchers came up with the idea of interconnected computer networks and, in good scientific practice, made it open (both the idea and the network) to the rest of the world. From that point on, it ceased to be an exclusively American project. All I'm implying is that the US are entitled to manage their portion of the Internet, but (should) have no business controlling the rest of it.
(And if you're worried about the concrete, physical aspect, remember that not every computer, router, switch or cable connected to the Internet was made by an American company, neither are all of the Internet nodes manned by Americans).
It would only be correct if we were talking about the U.S. using German engines.
Are you implying that every motherboard, processor, network card, router, antenna, wire, etc, connected to the Internet is American-made?
If the rest of the world wants to build their own Internet they have my best wishes.
Is is that difficult to grasp that the Internet is not a 100% American project? ARPANET was. The US certainly wasn't involved in building and setting up all the Internet infrastructure outside US soil. And by calling it "yours" you're claiming rights to an entity that belongs only partially to you.
It does control root. But should it? It goes against the very idea of an Internet, i.e. a world-wide interconnection of networks. It think the US is of course entitled to control its own networks (based in national soil), but it's unfair for it to have rights over the whole thing.
It's just that the status quo is so damn blurred right now (i.e. we are used to having the US trying to control or otherwise have an influence on everyone and everything around the whole world) that some of us can't even realise there are some things that have been done wrong in the past and ought to be changed.
I think he's just trying to imply that "freedom of speech", like everything else, does not have an absolute meaning, and as such (to get back OT) the rest of the world shouldn't be forced to adopt the US's subjective interpretation on the matter, namely by playing US's rules on what is (not) acceptable to do on the Internet.
If you were to apply that logic to everything else, I'm sure there's a whole lot of inventions that took place in other countries you use in your everyday life, and you don't usually think of as someone else's property.
I don't even need to go that far: American-based research did indeed lead to the creation of the Internet, but to say that the effort involved was 100% American is at the very least unfair. The Internet is a worldwide network.
You can take your part of the Internet (the one in American soil) and do whatever you want with it. But please leave the rights of the rest of Humanity to it alone.
Paraphrasing someone's comment to a recent Slashdot article (I can't remember who or where, sorry):
The internal combustion engine, which, among other things, made way for the invention of the automobile, was invented in Germany.
By the same logic you used in your post, Germany should be allowed to have that same kind of "feel free to run them, but we're the big guys and deserve to be in control" attitude in respect to cars, and inclusively tax American (as well as other countries') vehicles. Does that look fair to you as well?
I'd bite on your GPS rant too, but others have taken care of it already, so I'll just leave it here.
I think it also has to do with the fact that the media in which we store information are increasingly less durable (compare stone engraved millenia ago, writings in paper of past centuries still readable today, and the relatively short life expectancy of magnetic and optical media).
Now I'm not saying we should all go back to Stone Age, but it does make you think about the irony of progress...
You forgot the philosopher, who added "we don't even know if the sheep has another side..."
"Release" in the open source world has a broader sense than in commercial software. In open source not all "released" versions are meant for general public consumption; they include unstable versions targeted mostly at developers, so that severe isues can be detected and patched quickly.
Taking this into account, I believe this is meant to catch bugs mainly in nightly (unstable) builds and release candidates, not in "final" versions (those should, at least in theory, have no serious bugs left around as the latter have already been eradicated from release candidates).
where the hell did the cosmic egg/big bang come from?
;)
Perhaps this isn't exactly what you mean, but one good answer to the question "what existed before the Big Bang" (and one that makes me feel comfortable) is that, if you regard Big Bang as the beginning of Time itself, "before the Big Bang" is inherently nonsensical, and thus this is an illogical question to ask.
I believe Stephen Hawking mentioned this in (probably more than) one of his books; immediately after giving this argument, he parallelled it to what St. Augustine said when someone asked him what God was doing before he created the Universe: "he was creating hell, for those who ask too many questions".
The non-traceability of the Open Source process leaves any given product open to contamination from copyrighted/patented IP.
Please explain to me why "non-traceability" is inherent to Open Source. Even in a closed-source project developers can use copyrighted/patented code if no measures are taken to check for prior art; the "tight-checking" you mention is by no means inherent to closed source, open source, or whatever development model you choose. Code is as "traceable" as people want it to be -- if a project is properly managed, you will always know which chunk of code came from whom.
Another point is that, Open Source being open, it is naturally easier to spot "stolen" code if you have the time and inclination to do so (with closed source it's harder as you have to reverse-engineer it). That would actually encourage developers not to reuse code without permission, since they can be caught more easily.
I always felt the term "Windows compatible hardware" was a big piece of bullshit. Shouldn't it be the software to conform to the hardware, and not the other way round? Hardware seems to be the lowest common denominator here.
Of course (as some posts already mentioned), this can only be achieved if the hardware in question is properly documented so that developers know how to write drivers for it, without having to resort to dirty (and sometimes illegal) tricks like reverse engineering.
I'm skeptical that it wouldn't be very practical
So, in other words, you're not certain that you would not find it not practical?