Nonsense. My mom gave me a coffeepot. Are you saying my mom isn't somebody?
In fact, my bank gave me a 30-inch Toshiba hi-def television, considerably more expensive than a coffeepot (obviously, I put some significant funds into the bank, but then again, I didn't do it for the television and in fact was unaware of the gift until the silly bastards delivered it (I already had a couple of them anyway.)) I found a way to use the new HDTV, I had it mounted in the wall over the foot-end of the master bedroom's bathtub and we watch movies in the bath now. Which puts some real wrinkles into watching, let me tell you. I hadn't put a TV in there previously because I was thinking that the humidity might destroy it. Well, the thing was free... so... we're having a lovely HD humidity test. So far, so good.:-)
The fact is that people are given things all the time. Coffeepots might be given in the same spirit as the proverbial razor was; the razor is no use without a blade, and likewise, a coffeepot is no use without coffee. But wait, there's more. Aside from the Ginsu carving knives, I mean.
When you give away a coffeepot that can track drinking habits, you're building individual and regional marketing information (valuable), habituation information (valuable), and perhaps, just perhaps, the thing could even be rigged to report brand preference. Which would be insanely valuable. All of a sudden the value of you having a "free" coffeepot obeys the laws of business just fine. In fact, it seems like a darned effective money-producing mechanism.
You're just not looking at this correctly. If the coffeepot collects information and shares it, they're getting return in exchange for investment, and the "laws of business" you are hand-waving about are working just fine. Without you spending money for the coffeepot.
In reality we will more likely have identity brokers that we trust with our information, and we will tell them who gets to see what.
Yes. And they'll smile and nod, and the government will then tell them who actually gets to see what, and that's exactly who will see it (or not) and we'll have zero control over it -- which is exactly how it works now.
Anything that needs to be typeset has reason to be in PDF.
Fine. But then I simply ask, what has a legitimate reason to be typeset that begins as a web document? Why is it that you would remove the flexibility of an HTML document and replace it with a rigid format? Doing so doesn't make it any more printable. Doing so doesn't help the reader. Doing so doesn't increase the availability or quality of the information presented. In fact, the reality is quite the opposite. The more flexible the document, the more useful it is to the ultimate document consumer(s).
More broadly and more poignantly, what has good reason to be typeset at all outside of cultural habituation? Images are (at least they can be) far better on displays than they are on paper; text is far more flexible in a browser; dynamic equations and resizable vectors and animations are impossible in print. If (more likely when) electronic paper comes into common use, the benefits we see in web browsers will accrue to lighter formats, but at this point, print simply represents stone age inconvenience to me 99.9% of the time, and the remaining fraction of the time the inconvenience could be solved by e-paper, but cannot be solved by print itself.
You see manuals, brochures, and various reports in the format because that's what gets sent to their volume printer.
Well, we are talking about the web, not straight-to-print, but even so...
Why does a manual, report or brochure ever need to waste paper in a modern industrialized country?
HTML is far more dynamic
HTML is free and does not require duplication
HTML is environmentally friendly
HTML documents can interact via scripting and more
HTML documents can self-format according to circumstance
HTML is portable via PDAs and laptops and palmtops and tablets (and very soon indeed, as intermediate product held on e-paper.)
HTML can be instantly updated without waste or "version-itis"
HTML can be -- wait for it -- printed.
Also, any form which needs to be printed exactly the same is a good cantidate for PDF. IRS tax forms are a good example of this.
No. IRS forms are a terrible example of this, and for multiple reasons. An image is perfectly capable of providing a rigid, 100% reproducible form to be printed which can be machine read if need be. At any DPI you like, without having to have PDF anywhere in in the tool chain. But IRS forms are the poster child for having content on them that has absolutely no applicability to this user or that user, and a form that built itself in HTML would be a heck of a lot more appropriate, easier to deal with, and less expensive to process than the inflexible junk our legislature's tame money-grubbers have saddled us with.
The only people who normally benefit from rigid, dot-for-dot fill-in-forms are those who design them (and they're just happy in their own minds because they're locked into the stone age of design methodologies), not those who have to fill them out and certainly not those who have to parse the filled-in data on them, including machines -- why make a machine parse a field that is going to be empty 99% of the time? Why have the field there at all unless it is going to be used? It is a huge waste of resources, paper, thought and a source of growing error. It is old-school-think. As is almost anything associated with the IRS and the politicking and legislation that enables those idiots. Ahem. Different discussion, sorry.:-)
HTML is piss poor when it comes to oddball characters, complex equations, vector graphics, and sanely breaking content across page boundaries.
You cannot substantiate those claims. The fact is, HTML can support any character and/or any graphics -- in cases where perfect rigidity is required, an image can be used, likewise any imaginable construct can be placed in an image with the supporting raw information in the document in a comment, alt text or etc, ready to use by the next person in the chain.
You can do tables of contents, indexes, footnotes, control widths, and fonts. This includes unicode, which pretty much leaves your "oddball character" argument in the dust. I have to write documents in Chinese and Korean, and between the two, I have to use thousands of characters, some of them quite obscure because they are old, technically specific and definitely not in common use. I have no trouble doing so with an HTML target. Here is an example of a 100% HTML-friendly, foreign character document element (removed from context for your convenience, because HTML allows that) where I have combined charting, a few vectors, non-English characters and explicatory graphics. The presentation is locked, yet reusable and editable. Here, on the other hand, is a document that uses thousands of characters and is not locked.
You can do vector graphics in images (as well as any other graphic you might want to embed) with the benefits that bitmaps may be directly editable and reusable and vector information may be embedded underneath a bitmap presentation. You can do resizable vector (and other non-bitmap) graphics using plugins, scripting, etc, and what is more important, you can make the underlying data available to the end-user in an immediately re-usable format from CSV to live, usable code. Heck, you could embed a ray tracer or neural network or artificial life simulator -- with data -- without any trouble at all, should you want to go that far.
If you need to make the data hidden, you can do that too, and if you need to make the rendering a specific size you certainly can. Though one should ask why would you actually need to do this other than presuming you know more about what the end-user needs to see than they do, which is rarely, if ever, the case. At first, I thought I'd actually come up with one. I was thinking of a page that offers a castle you can build from card-stock. You're supposed to print it, cut it, and build it. But then I realized that you could re-size it and you then have a castle any size if you're not stuck in PDF.
Page boundaries. Well, first of all, they do not exist on the web and furthermore they should not exist, they are a stone-age hold-over from print. Here's why: Information boundaries and conceptual boundaries can and should replace page boundaries with useful distinctions over old-school, physical, disjoint, arbitrary distinctions. Should you want to go to print, you can, if you felt you had to, control an HTML document so it will fit on various pages. But is there in fact a need for this? Would the HTML document fail to print if it ran over (or under) an exact page? No. Of course not. It'd print just fine. Though again, as print is inherently far more limited in functionality than HTML, I personally find very little need to do so.
The only paper in my office is paper other people give to me, and every sheet of it is resented. Messy. Wasteful. Unjustified. Environmentally unfriendly. Difficult to reuse. Impossible to reformat. Heavy. Every time I buy a book I think how much better it would be in electronic format, and how little the print version can claim as a benefit. It is truly astonishing how little that is when you look at it honestly.
PDF files are very useful to distribute printable materials, such as books, spec sheets, PR and corporate bullshit (ugh), brochures, etc
HTML can be used in the same roles, and without loss of functionality (unless you call encrypting a document so it can't be edited, exerpted, and/or incorporated without manual re-creation "functionality"... I certainly don't.) HTML is more than flexible enough to create documents in -- it can be made to look like just about anything and have just about any feature you can imagine. HTML also (by default) gives the reader the ability to flex the presentation, where PDF is old-school "you'll see it like I wrote it" formatting, which can range from less convenient to outright impossible to deal with, depending on the capabilities of the reader.
So far -- and it's been some years now since PDF arrived -- I've never seen a single PDF document that I thought needed to be a PDF document.
Bottom line: There's nothing about an HTML document that makes it inherently unusable for print, or for carrying bullshit corporate messages, for that matter.:-)
It also happens a lot less often if you don't expect people to do unnecessary, difficult to trace work with useless repetitive tasks
Computers. Programmable calculators. It's a revolution. Really. Put your abacus down and join the new age. You'll like it.
Note: it's actually 0.65 centimeters, not millimeters. You see the problem?
I certainly do. You shouldn't be allowed to do engineering work. The concept of validation has escaped you, not to mention your unit conversion problem. Thanks for coming in, though. Next applicant, please.
So - what you're trying to say is that if there were one system of units, this could have been avoided. Perhaps so. I rather think it's a lesson in not letting idiots onto a project, myself, but if it makes you go all Luddite, well, more power to you. How is that cave you live in, anyway - does the damp ever get to you?
People make mistakes. That won't stop if you take their tools away from them, or leave them only with a hammer you happen to like. They'll simply find new ways to screw up, and if your "solution" is to take the remaining tool away at that time, then you've going to have company in your cave.
In your world, there will only be one system of measurement, one spoken language, one programming language, one type of family unit, one way to have sex. But there will be fewer errors, because you've taken all the options away. Whoo-hoo.
On second thought, just buy a bloody decent calculator and get over yourself. I'll stick with being comfortable with whatever measurement system is on the table and ignore your silly self.
I dunno, frogbert, if units of measure intimidate you, maybe you should try this new thing we put together a few years back.
It's called a calculator and it not only doesn't care what unit you prefer, it can change between them seamlessly and cleanly.
Preference for units of measure have been irrelevant since the first portable calculator dropped (and even before that, if you passed math class.)
Even reasonably modern calculators (like the wondrous and fabulous HP48 series) have stone-awesome unit conversion tools. It's not about the units. It's about the results.
What do we all need to know to get along in each other's worlds?
...the first thing you should know is that all three types of programmers basically want to bind the managers up in duct tape and drop them off the deep end of a pier.
...this is just unworkable. Records tend to be written by a VERY small number of people (one, maybe two), and produced by a few more, just because that's how the creative process works. I don't understand at all how you could apply an OS development model to a creative process like this.
Well, for one thing, if someone put up a rock or metal recording that was missing the bass or the guitar, I could (quite easily) put either of those (or both of them, come to that) on top as my particular vision and skills allow, and return the recording with the new layers.
In fact, that would be a lot of fun. I've been playing for forty years and I'm a rock and roll / metal-head who will not tolerate country, gospel and rap. I worship at the altar of Satriani and Vai. Like most musicians, I love to play.
It could be awesome... Imagine fifty people laying tracks like that on your creation, and you get to choose whose part(s) you like? Sheesh, I think that'd be terrific. And what a way to find people you want to collaborate with!
All you'd need is an open music format and an open multitrack application to make it easy, and I'd be surprised if something like that didn't exist already. A website to enable the community and I'd think you'd be off and running.
Cause proprietary software makers who use BSD software do not contribute back their changes.
Instead, they contribute usable products sooner and having jumped through far fewer legal hoops, which, if the consumer decides to, they can add to their library of tools, thus enabling them in some manner.
An important benefit here is that the costs of the product drop because lawyers are cut out to a considerably greater degree by BSD as opposed to GPL. BSD is a "no-worry" license, insomuch as such a thing is possible these days. That decrease in costs can be passed back to the consumer, or turned internally to fund more development or sooner development. Or not. But there are benefits to be had that can accrue to the "community", whatever that might mean to you and yours.
Certainly not all "giving back" has to be in the form of code to OS developers. The market is more than happy OS developers, you know. It may be that in some cases, the OS developers end up using the closed-source tool that has their work in it.
I've written a lot of code and given it out; I always did it as PD, because I'm not in the least interested in "getting a return" on that code. Of any kind. Write it, kick it out the door, and forget about it. I don't even sign it. Zero ongoing cost and annoyance are nice perks. Not everyone uses a "gimme-gimme-gimme" model for everything they do, and for that reason alone, the GPL gets kicked to the curb by many people who contribute to the community.
it seems that one of the facets of human nature is a desire to tell other people what to do, and what they may not do, often under the pretext of 'for their own good... If I find a law tolerable, I tolerate it. If I find it untolerable, I ignore it.
...and this from a person with the handle "PakProtector"... the Pak were depicted as the penultimate "we'll make the rules" race. Specifically, you were protected no matter if you wanted to be or not.
I'm afraid that I have to view your declaration as a "rational anarchist" as highly suspect. As a wanna-be Pak, I think you're a lot closer to a republican or a democrat.
Sucks when people have read the books you draw your incompatible inspirations from, eh?:-)
The dispute about water seems to be rapidly evaporating.
Yes, they're all running off. Wave as they go by. Bunch of drips, anyway. Every idea they had was all wet, precipitating a natural response to want to rain on their parade. It just makes me boil, you know?
Good to see there are still some EE Doc Smith fans around.
...there are more than you think. We helped get Skylark and company back into print. Go to Amazon and enter "skylark of space" into the search box. Publisher is the University of Nebraska Press, these are oversized paperbacks with fabulous cover art.
SCOTUS cannot just nullify laws willy-nilly because they don't like them.
You're quite wrong. The SCOTUS can indeed nullify laws because it doesn't like them. Similarly, it can confirm laws because it does like them. Or any other set of reasons the justices may put together. They may, or may not, elect to expose the public to those reasons. They can also elect to not rule on any question based on any reason they like, publicly exposed or hidden (AKA "without comment") even if that reason is simple cowardice, ignorance and stupidity (as in the case of SCOTUS chief justice quote below), or actual malignant intent. There is no check on the SCOTUS that prevents any of this behavior. You can't get a judge out of there easily, either, once they've slithered in.
Such a decision may be (though is not usually) overruled by a later session of the supreme court itself, but that's the only way such a decision faces any chance of changing at all.
The fact is, there is no one but SCOTUS that can change what SCOTUS decrees as long as a law remains on the books (and when was the last time you saw the bible-thumpers in congress sit down and scrub off a bunch of obsolete and/or bad law? Oh. Never mind.
The entire structure, including the supreme court, not to mention congress and the senate, has gone utterly nuts -- and we deserve what we're getting because we put up with it.
Just remember what the tree of liberty was said (by Thomas Jefferson) to use for sustenance. It's not the blood of politicians or judges. It's our blood.
And now something to entertain you from a chief justice of SCOTUS:
William Rehnquist: "The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."
...if that doesn't make your "moron" detector go off, you need a tune-up.
I'm the author of a 6809 / Flex emulator. Runs on Windows95 and up, and there was an earlier version that ran under AmigaDOS as well.
The thing that I did was write some utilities for the emulator that allowed it to talk directly to a "real" Flex box via a simple serial port (ACIA) and grab files from it -- so there's a connection to the hardware for anyone who still has hardware, and that lets them retrieve the old data.
Once your data is in a modern machine, there's no particular reason it should ever be lost -- of course, that means you have to be proactive enough to go after your data while you still have the old hardware.
We've sat several summer interns down at the emulator with the goal of learning assembly language; every one of them left with a rock-solid understanding of everything from stacks to interrupts to exactly how a c compiler works. There is a lot to be said for a system of low enough complexity that you can wrap your head entirely around it in a summer.
...this sounds like plenty-o-fun for everyone. We've been experimenting with a paypal button for one product, and have seen more response than we anticipated. We tied a discount to it, which may help, but still, it's been a positive experience all around.
I'm not sure Google will see the same degree of success that paypal does because they don't have EBay pumping "wallets" full of "cash" that may be easily perceived as discretionary by the account holder. What I mean by this is that when someone has made a few EBay sales, they'll have some funds in paypal; then, encountering a paypal button for a product, service, charity or just a tip, that's a pretty easy mental step to take... you didn't have the cash in your hot little hand yet, so perhaps it isn't so difficult to let go of.
Google could -- perhaps -- accumulate Adsense dollars in the "wallet" but it is a lot more involved becoming an Adsense vendor than it is selling the dusty stuff out of your basement on EBay. Still, they're a huge market presence and maybe I'm just selling them short here. Gawd knows Adsense and Adwords are working out for a lot of people.
Along moderately related e-commerce lines, anyone know of a US-centric investment->loan mechanism similar to Zopa (Zone of possible agreement)? My company is looking for something like this to put some funds into within US borders (for both tax and accountability reasons.) I came up dry with Google; perhaps this isn't legal in the US?
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, my bank gave me a 30-inch Toshiba hi-def television, considerably more expensive than a coffeepot (obviously, I put some significant funds into the bank, but then again, I didn't do it for the television and in fact was unaware of the gift until the silly bastards delivered it (I already had a couple of them anyway.)) I found a way to use the new HDTV, I had it mounted in the wall over the foot-end of the master bedroom's bathtub and we watch movies in the bath now. Which puts some real wrinkles into watching, let me tell you. I hadn't put a TV in there previously because I was thinking that the humidity might destroy it. Well, the thing was free... so... we're having a lovely HD humidity test. So far, so good. :-)
The fact is that people are given things all the time. Coffeepots might be given in the same spirit as the proverbial razor was; the razor is no use without a blade, and likewise, a coffeepot is no use without coffee. But wait, there's more. Aside from the Ginsu carving knives, I mean.
When you give away a coffeepot that can track drinking habits, you're building individual and regional marketing information (valuable), habituation information (valuable), and perhaps, just perhaps, the thing could even be rigged to report brand preference. Which would be insanely valuable. All of a sudden the value of you having a "free" coffeepot obeys the laws of business just fine. In fact, it seems like a darned effective money-producing mechanism.
You're just not looking at this correctly. If the coffeepot collects information and shares it, they're getting return in exchange for investment, and the "laws of business" you are hand-waving about are working just fine. Without you spending money for the coffeepot.
Yes. And they'll smile and nod, and the government will then tell them who actually gets to see what, and that's exactly who will see it (or not) and we'll have zero control over it -- which is exactly how it works now.
No.
Wait, that's wrong.
What was your point again?
Fine. But then I simply ask, what has a legitimate reason to be typeset that begins as a web document? Why is it that you would remove the flexibility of an HTML document and replace it with a rigid format? Doing so doesn't make it any more printable. Doing so doesn't help the reader. Doing so doesn't increase the availability or quality of the information presented. In fact, the reality is quite the opposite. The more flexible the document, the more useful it is to the ultimate document consumer(s).
More broadly and more poignantly, what has good reason to be typeset at all outside of cultural habituation? Images are (at least they can be) far better on displays than they are on paper; text is far more flexible in a browser; dynamic equations and resizable vectors and animations are impossible in print. If (more likely when) electronic paper comes into common use, the benefits we see in web browsers will accrue to lighter formats, but at this point, print simply represents stone age inconvenience to me 99.9% of the time, and the remaining fraction of the time the inconvenience could be solved by e-paper, but cannot be solved by print itself.
Well, we are talking about the web, not straight-to-print, but even so...
No. IRS forms are a terrible example of this, and for multiple reasons. An image is perfectly capable of providing a rigid, 100% reproducible form to be printed which can be machine read if need be. At any DPI you like, without having to have PDF anywhere in in the tool chain. But IRS forms are the poster child for having content on them that has absolutely no applicability to this user or that user, and a form that built itself in HTML would be a heck of a lot more appropriate, easier to deal with, and less expensive to process than the inflexible junk our legislature's tame money-grubbers have saddled us with.
The only people who normally benefit from rigid, dot-for-dot fill-in-forms are those who design them (and they're just happy in their own minds because they're locked into the stone age of design methodologies), not those who have to fill them out and certainly not those who have to parse the filled-in data on them, including machines -- why make a machine parse a field that is going to be empty 99% of the time? Why have the field there at all unless it is going to be used? It is a huge waste of resources, paper, thought and a source of growing error. It is old-school-think. As is almost anything associated with the IRS and the politicking and legislation that enables those idiots. Ahem. Different discussion, sorry. :-)
You cannot substantiate those claims. The fact is, HTML can support any character and/or any graphics -- in cases where perfect rigidity is required, an image can be used, likewise any imaginable construct can be placed in an image with the supporting raw information in the document in a comment, alt text or etc, ready to use by the next person in the chain.
You can do tables of contents, indexes, footnotes, control widths, and fonts. This includes unicode, which pretty much leaves your "oddball character" argument in the dust. I have to write documents in Chinese and Korean, and between the two, I have to use thousands of characters, some of them quite obscure because they are old, technically specific and definitely not in common use. I have no trouble doing so with an HTML target. Here is an example of a 100% HTML-friendly, foreign character document element (removed from context for your convenience, because HTML allows that) where I have combined charting, a few vectors, non-English characters and explicatory graphics. The presentation is locked, yet reusable and editable. Here, on the other hand, is a document that uses thousands of characters and is not locked.
You can do vector graphics in images (as well as any other graphic you might want to embed) with the benefits that bitmaps may be directly editable and reusable and vector information may be embedded underneath a bitmap presentation. You can do resizable vector (and other non-bitmap) graphics using plugins, scripting, etc, and what is more important, you can make the underlying data available to the end-user in an immediately re-usable format from CSV to live, usable code. Heck, you could embed a ray tracer or neural network or artificial life simulator -- with data -- without any trouble at all, should you want to go that far.
If you need to make the data hidden, you can do that too, and if you need to make the rendering a specific size you certainly can. Though one should ask why would you actually need to do this other than presuming you know more about what the end-user needs to see than they do, which is rarely, if ever, the case. At first, I thought I'd actually come up with one. I was thinking of a page that offers a castle you can build from card-stock. You're supposed to print it, cut it, and build it. But then I realized that you could re-size it and you then have a castle any size if you're not stuck in PDF.
Page boundaries. Well, first of all, they do not exist on the web and furthermore they should not exist, they are a stone-age hold-over from print. Here's why: Information boundaries and conceptual boundaries can and should replace page boundaries with useful distinctions over old-school, physical, disjoint, arbitrary distinctions. Should you want to go to print, you can, if you felt you had to, control an HTML document so it will fit on various pages. But is there in fact a need for this? Would the HTML document fail to print if it ran over (or under) an exact page? No. Of course not. It'd print just fine. Though again, as print is inherently far more limited in functionality than HTML, I personally find very little need to do so.
The only paper in my office is paper other people give to me, and every sheet of it is resented. Messy. Wasteful. Unjustified. Environmentally unfriendly. Difficult to reuse. Impossible to reformat. Heavy. Every time I buy a book I think how much better it would be in electronic format, and how little the print version can claim as a benefit. It is truly astonishing how little that is when you look at it honestly.
HTML can be used in the same roles, and without loss of functionality (unless you call encrypting a document so it can't be edited, exerpted, and/or incorporated without manual re-creation "functionality"... I certainly don't.) HTML is more than flexible enough to create documents in -- it can be made to look like just about anything and have just about any feature you can imagine. HTML also (by default) gives the reader the ability to flex the presentation, where PDF is old-school "you'll see it like I wrote it" formatting, which can range from less convenient to outright impossible to deal with, depending on the capabilities of the reader.
So far -- and it's been some years now since PDF arrived -- I've never seen a single PDF document that I thought needed to be a PDF document.
Bottom line: There's nothing about an HTML document that makes it inherently unusable for print, or for carrying bullshit corporate messages, for that matter. :-)
All IMHO.
...if only I had mod points, the parent would be the first anonymous post I ever modded up. :(
Computers. Programmable calculators. It's a revolution. Really. Put your abacus down and join the new age. You'll like it.
I certainly do. You shouldn't be allowed to do engineering work. The concept of validation has escaped you, not to mention your unit conversion problem. Thanks for coming in, though. Next applicant, please.
People make mistakes. That won't stop if you take their tools away from them, or leave them only with a hammer you happen to like. They'll simply find new ways to screw up, and if your "solution" is to take the remaining tool away at that time, then you've going to have company in your cave.
In your world, there will only be one system of measurement, one spoken language, one programming language, one type of family unit, one way to have sex. But there will be fewer errors, because you've taken all the options away. Whoo-hoo.
On second thought, just buy a bloody decent calculator and get over yourself. I'll stick with being comfortable with whatever measurement system is on the table and ignore your silly self.
It's called a calculator and it not only doesn't care what unit you prefer, it can change between them seamlessly and cleanly.
Preference for units of measure have been irrelevant since the first portable calculator dropped (and even before that, if you passed math class.)
Even reasonably modern calculators (like the wondrous and fabulous HP48 series) have stone-awesome unit conversion tools. It's not about the units. It's about the results.
Hey, you asked.
Well, for one thing, if someone put up a rock or metal recording that was missing the bass or the guitar, I could (quite easily) put either of those (or both of them, come to that) on top as my particular vision and skills allow, and return the recording with the new layers.
In fact, that would be a lot of fun. I've been playing for forty years and I'm a rock and roll / metal-head who will not tolerate country, gospel and rap. I worship at the altar of Satriani and Vai. Like most musicians, I love to play.
It could be awesome... Imagine fifty people laying tracks like that on your creation, and you get to choose whose part(s) you like? Sheesh, I think that'd be terrific. And what a way to find people you want to collaborate with!
All you'd need is an open music format and an open multitrack application to make it easy, and I'd be surprised if something like that didn't exist already. A website to enable the community and I'd think you'd be off and running.
No, no. Overboard length of an exposition on any particular subject isn't justification to kill the subject. It's justification to kill the author.
Instead, they contribute usable products sooner and having jumped through far fewer legal hoops, which, if the consumer decides to, they can add to their library of tools, thus enabling them in some manner.
An important benefit here is that the costs of the product drop because lawyers are cut out to a considerably greater degree by BSD as opposed to GPL. BSD is a "no-worry" license, insomuch as such a thing is possible these days. That decrease in costs can be passed back to the consumer, or turned internally to fund more development or sooner development. Or not. But there are benefits to be had that can accrue to the "community", whatever that might mean to you and yours.
Certainly not all "giving back" has to be in the form of code to OS developers. The market is more than happy OS developers, you know. It may be that in some cases, the OS developers end up using the closed-source tool that has their work in it.
I've written a lot of code and given it out; I always did it as PD, because I'm not in the least interested in "getting a return" on that code. Of any kind. Write it, kick it out the door, and forget about it. I don't even sign it. Zero ongoing cost and annoyance are nice perks. Not everyone uses a "gimme-gimme-gimme" model for everything they do, and for that reason alone, the GPL gets kicked to the curb by many people who contribute to the community.
...when they ask me to pay taxes, I can just give them the finger.
I loved "Protector", great book.
I'm afraid that I have to view your declaration as a "rational anarchist" as highly suspect. As a wanna-be Pak, I think you're a lot closer to a republican or a democrat.
Sucks when people have read the books you draw your incompatible inspirations from, eh? :-)
Yes, they're all running off. Wave as they go by. Bunch of drips, anyway. Every idea they had was all wet, precipitating a natural response to want to rain on their parade. It just makes me boil, you know?
At that point, non-linear fruit might be just as low, or lower, than the linear fruit was.
Perhaps we'll see the benefits of picking chaotic fruit, or unified theory fruit, or string theory fruit, or fusion fruit... you get the idea.
Progress isn't smooth, and frankly, why would one expect it to be?
You're quite wrong. The SCOTUS can indeed nullify laws because it doesn't like them. Similarly, it can confirm laws because it does like them. Or any other set of reasons the justices may put together. They may, or may not, elect to expose the public to those reasons. They can also elect to not rule on any question based on any reason they like, publicly exposed or hidden (AKA "without comment") even if that reason is simple cowardice, ignorance and stupidity (as in the case of SCOTUS chief justice quote below), or actual malignant intent. There is no check on the SCOTUS that prevents any of this behavior. You can't get a judge out of there easily, either, once they've slithered in.
Such a decision may be (though is not usually) overruled by a later session of the supreme court itself, but that's the only way such a decision faces any chance of changing at all.
The fact is, there is no one but SCOTUS that can change what SCOTUS decrees as long as a law remains on the books (and when was the last time you saw the bible-thumpers in congress sit down and scrub off a bunch of obsolete and/or bad law? Oh. Never mind.
The entire structure, including the supreme court, not to mention congress and the senate, has gone utterly nuts -- and we deserve what we're getting because we put up with it.
Just remember what the tree of liberty was said (by Thomas Jefferson) to use for sustenance. It's not the blood of politicians or judges. It's our blood.
And now something to entertain you from a chief justice of SCOTUS:
...to verify where this story came from. I'm sorry, it'll have to be rejected.
The thing that I did was write some utilities for the emulator that allowed it to talk directly to a "real" Flex box via a simple serial port (ACIA) and grab files from it -- so there's a connection to the hardware for anyone who still has hardware, and that lets them retrieve the old data.
Once your data is in a modern machine, there's no particular reason it should ever be lost -- of course, that means you have to be proactive enough to go after your data while you still have the old hardware.
We've sat several summer interns down at the emulator with the goal of learning assembly language; every one of them left with a rock-solid understanding of everything from stacks to interrupts to exactly how a c compiler works. There is a lot to be said for a system of low enough complexity that you can wrap your head entirely around it in a summer.
I'm not sure Google will see the same degree of success that paypal does because they don't have EBay pumping "wallets" full of "cash" that may be easily perceived as discretionary by the account holder. What I mean by this is that when someone has made a few EBay sales, they'll have some funds in paypal; then, encountering a paypal button for a product, service, charity or just a tip, that's a pretty easy mental step to take... you didn't have the cash in your hot little hand yet, so perhaps it isn't so difficult to let go of.
Google could -- perhaps -- accumulate Adsense dollars in the "wallet" but it is a lot more involved becoming an Adsense vendor than it is selling the dusty stuff out of your basement on EBay. Still, they're a huge market presence and maybe I'm just selling them short here. Gawd knows Adsense and Adwords are working out for a lot of people.
Along moderately related e-commerce lines, anyone know of a US-centric investment->loan mechanism similar to Zopa (Zone of possible agreement)? My company is looking for something like this to put some funds into within US borders (for both tax and accountability reasons.) I came up dry with Google; perhaps this isn't legal in the US?