It's pretty hard to get people interested in space when the only thing riding on it is a handful of integrated circuits.
Quite to the contrary: people are fascinated by the results that we get back from robotic probes. The discovery or non-discovery of life on Europa, Titan, Mars, and/or Venus would be of enormous importance to many people. And we will only be able to afford that kind of exploration if we don't waste our money on trying to send a bunch of aging test pilots into space, but instead focus on efficient robotic probes with high-resolution cameras and batteries that last for years.
Just what is it with this "we must either do manned missions, or robotic missions and never both!" bullshit?
Economics says that: right now, manned missions are so expensive that you have to scrap dozens of unmanned missions. Scientists think that that's a bad tradeoff right now. Once we have learned more about space travel with unmanned probes, then the economics may shift.
People who are interested in rocks or exobiology also don't like manned space travel. They'd much rather have 10 unmanned sample return missions than one manned mission.
In fact, the only people who seem to like spending money on manned missions are politicians and people who have watched too much sci-fi.
And, in fact, scientists don't really have anything against manned missions in general, they just think they give a poor return on investment right now. Let's do more unmanned exploration--we learn a lot more from that for now.
But, private spaceflight, that's none of his business.
It is his business to the degree that he can talk about it, like everybody else can. And, given that he has credibility, people tend to listen more.
He can end government spaceflight for all I care.
He doesn't want to end government spaceflight, he wants to end manned government spaceflight.
And I hope lots of people feel like you do because the manned space flight initiatives that the government keeps proposing present huge problems for scientists.
You can waste your personal money on whatever you like for all I care, but people do care about whether you waste taxpayer's money.
But those were activities every human could engage in: all you needed was a good brain and a good pair of hands and legs.
I'd say adventure is a good enough reason to get me my damn spaceship and lunar weekend retreat!
But you won't be getting one: manned space exploration will remain something for tiny numbers of people for the foreseeable future. So far, we have enough trouble launching unmanned probes into space on journeys that take years. Entire crews and life support systems are technologically completely out of the question for now.
The Sony's shape, features, and battery life have presumably designed specifically for use as a remote control. The Axim has been designed for a completely different purpose; it may work reasonably well as a remote control, but in order to claim that it works "better", I think you have to make a better argument.
Actually, that IS the problem: Drugs are TOO fun. They are often times more fun than other things in people's lives that turn out to be useful to society.
If that were the case, we'd all be drug addicts. But we aren't. Why? Because most people know that many things that are a lot of fun aren't good for them, so they don't do them. Furthermore, most people who try illegal drugs (the majority of Americans) manage to stop taking them on their own, so it isn't the case that you automatically become a slave to drugs if you take them.
You have a reward system in your brain that has evolved for hundreds of millions of years to promote evolutionarily useful behavior.
Yes, and a few million years ago, another system evolved that lets us evaluate the future consequences of our actions and make choices accordingly. If that newer evolutionary system isn't working for you, then you have a problem, and that problem goes far beyond the potential for drug addiction.
In fact, I think the reason many people end up having drug problems is because they believe that their lives are so miserable that they might as well take drugs--probably quite a rational decision for many of them. And you aren't going to stop that by vaccinating them.
One of the central tenets of the Open Source philosophy (as it seems to be understood by the average person, at any rate) is that all software should be free.
No, that's not the central tenet of open source. The central tenet is that you "should" get the source to binaries that you use and that you "should" be able to redistribute it.
But this "should" isn't some kind of moral imperative. The reason people say that you "should" do this is because it's the economically rational thing to do if you take a long-term and global perspective.
That doesn't mean that in the short term, it may not be cheaper to choose proprietary software--it probably is. But if everybody makes the same choice as you, then, in the long term, you end up paying many times for software what you ought to have paid, and you condemn other people to the same fate.
It's little like littering: if you do it only rarely and most people don't do it, it's not much of a problem. But if everybody does it, it's a huge problem, and it is self-reinforcing.
You may agree with that argument or you may not, but either way, it's not some kind of philosophical principle or communist conspiracy. When OSS advocates tell you that you "should" choose OSS, they are making an argument about how rational economic beings ought to behave in order to maximize their profits.
As a developer myself, this prospect is profoundly depressing - as I said earlier, I develop applications just like a carpenter makes tables or an author writes books.
Well, have you noticed that carpenters don't make a lot of tables anymore? They have largely been replaced by mass-produced, self-assembled furniture. That was probably depressing for them as well. But that's the way life is: our economy is constantly changing. We aren't willing to accept inefficient production methods just because you have some quaint attachment to an old way of making a living.
Why should software be any different [than carpentry]?
Because, unlike the product of carpentry, software can be copied and distributed at almost no cost. So, 1000 carpenters can produce 10000 tables and still charge for each table. If carpentry were like software, then once 1 carpenter would produce 1 table for free for fun which then could get copied 10000 times at no cost to anybody; nobody else would make a profit.
but to make this the dominant way of developing anything worthwhile just seems like shooting ourselves in the collective foot.
That appeal won't work: there are too many people who can and are willing to produce something for free (like myself, for example). If you want to make a living writing software, you will have to write custom software. There is still a huge market for that, but you have to change the way you work.
It's the usual quick-fix mentality. Instead of asking what problems cause people to turn to drugs (mental disease, poverty, social problems, etc.), a syringe is supposed to fix it. It's the same quick fix mentality that dominates so much of politics, and it's not going to work.
Instead of some people sedating their problems and imposing health care costs on everybody else, which is bad enough, you are going to have the same people doing something else self-destructive and probably even more destructive to others.
And for that quick fix, you risk several deaths a year from medical mistakes (wrong injection, infection, etc.) during vaccination, as well as unknown long-term consequences and the possibility that important future drugs won't work.
This type of scheming is both unprofessional and damaging.
I don't see any "scheming". RMS is warning about what seems to be the legal situation right now. Instead of pointing us to facts that contradict his view, you are just giving us a lot of verbiage, flaming, and accusations, and you are telling us that we should trust you and that everything is going to be right in the end.
This is the machinations of a faction who want to use MARID for conducting a vendetta against Microsoft and don't care what the effect on MARID is.
Your use of the term "vendetta" implies that you are saying that RMS's behavior is motivated by a personal grudge and a desire for revenge against Microsoft. But there is no indication that RMS has any such personal motivations--his position is consistent with the criteria he has previously applied to evaluating other standards. If anything is "unprofessional" here, it's your accusations against him.
Your standard has run into negative publicity because of the way the standards body communicated the legal situation, and that's your problem, not his. As soon as you provide convincing evidence that the legal situation surrounding MARID is bulletproof, then RMS will stop complaining about it.
Let me guess: you're all for energy independence, though, so we won't have to keep bothering with Middle Eastern oil. Why would dependence on foreign food be good and dependence on foreign oil be bad?
Because creating or preventing dependencies just shouldn't be our policy goal--our policy goals should be oriented towards development, progress, and fairness. And, generally speaking, fair trade and open markets help with that (they don't always and they need to be regulated, but not for a one-sided advantage).
In the case of Middle Eastern oil, we subsidize the auto industry and we subsidize undemocratic foreign regimes. If we charged for gas and oil what they actually cost and let the Middle Eastern nations do whatever they want to do politically, we'd get energy independence in a heartbeat.
In the case of food, we subsidize domestic agricultural producers, for a variety of reasons, including a misguided attempt at food self-sufficiency. That causes big economic problems in nations whose major form of export could be food but isn't. It also causes mass migration from, say, Mexico to the US.
So, the underlying problem is that we distort the market, which happens to have two different consequences for the two kinds of goods.
Note, incidentally, that we are trying to achieve energy "self"-sufficiency, basically by turning various oil producing nations into political client states.
In general, dependence on other nations is probably a good thing, simply because it creates a common interest and leads to cooperation, but dependencies among nations should arise naturally when they make economic sense--they should not be artificially created or prevented.
how many desktops will there be before one of them becomes truly useful
Windows 3.1, Windows 98, Mac OS 6, Mac OS 7, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Amiga, etc. Everybody is trying lots of different things, and all of them had and still have usability problems.
I think Gnome and KDE both get the job done about as well or poorly as GUIs on other major platforms.
Here is what people like Raskin and Hertzfeld had to say about OS X when it came out in 2001:
All of the panelists agreed that Mac OS X looks beautiful, but most have misgivings about the new user interface (UI), lack of documentation and the completeness of its implementation. [...] "The internal improvements of Mac OS X are long overdue, but the UI, well, yuk," said Raskin. "Apple has ignored for years all that has been learned about developing UIs. It's unprofessional, incompetent, and it's hurting users." Hertzfeld was less down on the UI, offering a mixed bag of what he liked and disliked about the new OS.
The sooner people realize that there is no single "best" user interface and that all UIs still have lots of problems, the better for everybody. Furthermore, anything that you change about a UI is going to make some people unhappy. The good thing with Linux, X11, and its choice of UIs is that UIs really are in competition.
I think what all these UI efforts and all this discussion in the Linux community show is that people realize that with OSS, they can actually make a difference. And it also shows that there are many different preferences and needs when it comes to UI.
The biggest problem is the language people use to talk about these sorts of projects. Talking about "GoneME fixing perceived Gnome UI errors" is a good start. But the GoneME developers themselves should be aware that they are just developing something different for a different community, and that they aren't necessarily "fixing UI errors". I mean, the Gnome 2.6 developers aren't stupid, and they didn't set out to create a system with "UI errors" (personally, I think spatial Nautilus is a slight improvement).
With Windows or Macintosh, you get whatever Microsoft or Apple tell you is best: you can buy it or you can leave it. Complaining about usability problems with those systems is useless--the companies aren't going to listen anyway.
someone's trying to sound important
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Ethernet at 10 Gbps
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Cardinality" is the number of elements in a given mathematical set. When modems ran at 300 baud, you could forget about sending large data sets, such as images, because text and voice data took up all the available bandwidth. As connection rates increased, so did the cardinality of data that users could send. [...] Video currently represents the highest cardinality data
The term "cardinality" is wrong for several reasons. First, image data isn't represented as sets, it's represented as ordered sequences, and when talking about ordered sequences, both computer scientists and mathematicians talk about their "length", not their "cardinality".
Furthermore, what matters is not the size of what you want to transmit, but the rate at which you need to transmit it. We call that the "data rate" or (somewhat sloppily) the "required bandwidth".
So, the overall point of the article, that there is no single media stream that requires 10 Gbit bandwidth, is correct. However, that's pretty much irrelevant: file servers, video servers, and aggregate usage still require that kind of bandwidth. A family of four might require that bandwidth. You might want that bandwidth to have your backup happen in 1 minute instead of 10 minutes. So, there are lots of reasons to want 10 Gbit Ethernet, provided the price is right.
As for his use of the term "cardinality", the author apparently doesn't quite know the terminology of the field.
The IOSONO people didn't invent wave field synthesis. People got serious about it in the Netherlands and France in the 1980's (here).
However, the reason why it took until the 1980's to do it isn't that people didn't think of it before, but simply that hardware and software had developed to the point that that became feasible. I suspect that if you do some digging, you can probably find the suggestion earlier. It's really a pretty straightforward idea.
Of course, that won't keep people from trying to slice their patents out of it. It's MP3 all over again.
Re:No, it's the UN that's responsible for that.
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No, what's responsible for that - in Kosovo at least - is the UN's arms embargo.
We are talking about third world nations, nations with development problems, not Kosovo. Those are nations with huge population growth and little economic development.
By disarming everybody who wasn't supported by an outside group (typically a large country), they left them at the mercy of those who WERE supported by such powers, and who wanted to eliminate them. Thus starvation, and genocide.
Well, even assuming that that theory were true (ridiculous as it is--the UN doesn't have the resources to disarm the poor of the world), who is running the UN? It's the US and Europe. If you hold UN policies responsible for world poverty and hunger, it just falls right back into our lap.
The solution to genocide is allow the potential victims - which means EVERYBODY - to arm themselves for their own defense.
Ah, yes, I see: so, you believe that the Jews got killed by the Nazis because the UN imposed selective gun control on the Jews. Uh huh...
And the obstacle to both is governmental force, implemented either by malicious people or people too ignorant or stupid to understand that the SECOND-order effects of government programs often completely swamp and reverse the expected FIRST-order effects.
You are forgetting the zeroth-order effects of government: an unprecedented level of wealth, life expectancy, and security. That's why most people are willing to put up with government and try to fix it when its unintended consequences (and there are many) rear their ugly heads.
Starvation doesn't come from "greedy corporations" "wasting money". They'd LOVE to feed the world - they'd make MORE MONEY that way!
I never talked about "greedy corporations wasting money". If you put things in quotes, you better make sure that they are quotations.
But you are completely naive if you think that the economic interests of food producing companies are aligned with your or my interests or the interests of inhabitants of the third world. Food is something you can't do without--it's the ultimate drug. Companies maximize their profit by centralizing food production and creating scarcity. Their interst is not to feed the world, their interest is in feeding only those people who have enough money to make it worth their while. And it is in their interest to use their political influence to kill any competitor that can produce food cheaper and more efficiently than they can.
U.S. Farming is way outside my realm of knowledge, but it seems obvious being sure we're able to produce our own food is quite necessary.
In fact I've been worrying a bit lately that we're migrating too much to a service economy and moving more and more production and manufacturing out of the country; we need the ability to produce our own goods, too.
And how does the US and European domestical policies affect starving North Koreans? Maybe it's because they have oversized army to feed for such a small country?
Probably. And what point are you trying to make?
Does US and European domestical policies somehow magically alter the weather patterns in famin stricken countries?
Well, yes, they do, that too (global warming), but that's not what we are talking about here.
What we are talking about here is that they do hinder economic development and they raise the cost of food production in famine stricken countries. As a result, those nations have larger populations and produce less food than they otherwise would, and that is where famine really comes from.
You could also argue that C, or even LaTeX weren't designed for usability (and you would have a point;-) But the difference is, a syntaxically incorrect file in those language won't be accepted by the parser.
C compilers have incompatible extensions, but many users don't use them because they want their programs to be portable.
LaTeX has just a single implementation, so the question of variability among implementations doesn't arise.
But reinventing the wheel would mean people would lose all the know-how they've aquired over time, there would be painful transitions, and so on. It would just be rejected
It depends on how, when, and why. Replacing XML, HTML, or XHTML would be hard, but sooner or later it's going to happen, probably with some form of backwards compatibility.
Are you sure ?
How can one be "sure" about anything in the future? But it looks unlikely to me that Microsoft is going to make IE more restrictive because anything else is just too much of a pain.
What, you mean how the US insists that others not put up one way trade barriers or they will? Oooh, pretty villinous that. The US trades for their own profit and if other countries don't want to trade with the US they don't have to. The point of trade is profit.
But not at any cost. Many of the nations we are talking about aren't even democratic, so the US isn't trading with the people of those nations, it is trading with a bunch of thugs that hold those nations hostage. Sure, one can make a lot of money trading with thugs, but that doesn't make it ethical or legal.
Furthermore, other countries have given the trading system the US effectively initiated a chance; if, after a few decades, it doesn't work, they may well not want to continue with it. The loss will be primarily to the US, because the others don't have that much to lose.
It's not an economic issue, it's a strategic one. We are paying for a strategic advantage with an economic cost.
Accumulating too many strategic advantages is something other nations are likely wary of, and eventually, they may act on that.
The unskilled imagrants the US recieves are common to all richer nations without draconian imagration controls. The only way they'll stop is when the US is no longer better off than most other nations.
My point exactly. And that should preferably happen by making other nations better off. But if the US doesn't work towards making other nations better off, it will happen when the US sinks to their level.
The terrorism the US is experiencing is not a result of ecconomic policy. It's because they helped Israel.
Israel is just an excuse. If those nations were democratic and their citizens well-off, they wouldn't give a damn about Israel or the US.
Like who, most of western europe? Their subsidies put ours to shame.
I included the EU in my criticism. But the EU at least isn't naive enough anymore to think they can become self-sufficient. The last major European nation to think that was Nazi Germany.
What specific trade practices are you comparing to breaking boats and handcuffing?
Killing the domestic agricultural base of developing nations with subsidized food products, making those nations dependent on expensive US chemical and seed products, and keeping dictatorships in power because they suit our economic interests, just to name a few.
Countries like Japan that import raw materials and export finished products more would be far worse off if there was a trade disturbance. The US doesn't need trade to survive. America would suffer, japan might starve.
Japan isn't foolish enough to try isolationism, so it isn't an issue for them.
I think you also underestimate how dependent the US is on the rest of the world. US industry would collapse without cheap oil from the middle east. Worse, however, the US economy and government function only because of huge influxes of money from overseas. US wealth is a complete illusion, financed by borrowing from the rest of the world.
Mostly, because it doesn't really benefit the people who are in power in those nations. And look at what happened when, say, the Iranian people democratically decided their economic "arrangement" with Britain wasn't working anymore and they wanted to nationalize their oil company.
Poor nations are also weak nations. They don't have much of a choice when the US or EU asks them to do something. That's why it's our obligation to be careful what we ask them to do.
In the long run, that's also in our own interest: a world full of a couple of billion poor people with no self-determination and no hope is a recipe for disaster for us.
Yeah, we realy should have checked with those other nations before deciding our domestic policies.
Yes, indeed, we should have. That's not only because it is the just and equitable thing to do (we demand the same of other nations, and it is, in fact, a cornerstone of our trade policy), it is also because it is in our own interest. Even just from a domestic perspective, US agricultural subsidies are economically inefficient.
In the long term, the way our subsidies hold back economic development in other nations comes back to haunts us in the form of unskilled and illegal immigration and terrorism. And eventually, they may make the global free trade system collapse, which would hurt us the most, because we have the most to lose.
Shame on us for wanting food if we ever go to war again.
If you look at the list of nations that have historically attempted food self-sufficiency, I think you, too, will come to the conclusion that that is not a club we want to be part of.
We should try to help other nations feed themselves, not complain that the "scraps" of our economy aren't being distributed evenly enough to feed them. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day etc. etc.
Yes, and that is exactly what we are doing: we are giving "a man a fish", year after year, and we are not teaching him how to fish. In fact, we are blowing up his fishing boat and handcuffing him, which pretty much ensures that he will not be able to fish for himself.
It is the lack of a free market to transport that food to market efficiently.
Yes, and do you know who is responsible for that? The US and Europe, with their lavish farm subsidies. If Western nations ever allowed the free market to operate in developing nations, problems with food and poverty in the world would be greatly reduced.
In America, we have all kinds of systems to get the food to your dinner plate.
We also have enormous government subsidies, paid for by tax payers, to keep farmers happy and in business. It may be good for ensuring a reliable food supply domestically (and give the number of wars we fight, not exactly a bad idea either), but it is causing huge economic problems elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty hard to get people interested in space when the only thing riding on it is a handful of integrated circuits.
Quite to the contrary: people are fascinated by the results that we get back from robotic probes. The discovery or non-discovery of life on Europa, Titan, Mars, and/or Venus would be of enormous importance to many people. And we will only be able to afford that kind of exploration if we don't waste our money on trying to send a bunch of aging test pilots into space, but instead focus on efficient robotic probes with high-resolution cameras and batteries that last for years.
Just what is it with this "we must either do manned missions, or robotic missions and never both!" bullshit?
Economics says that: right now, manned missions are so expensive that you have to scrap dozens of unmanned missions. Scientists think that that's a bad tradeoff right now. Once we have learned more about space travel with unmanned probes, then the economics may shift.
People who are interested in rocks or exobiology also don't like manned space travel. They'd much rather have 10 unmanned sample return missions than one manned mission.
In fact, the only people who seem to like spending money on manned missions are politicians and people who have watched too much sci-fi.
And, in fact, scientists don't really have anything against manned missions in general, they just think they give a poor return on investment right now. Let's do more unmanned exploration--we learn a lot more from that for now.
But, private spaceflight, that's none of his business.
It is his business to the degree that he can talk about it, like everybody else can. And, given that he has credibility, people tend to listen more.
He can end government spaceflight for all I care.
He doesn't want to end government spaceflight, he wants to end manned government spaceflight.
And I hope lots of people feel like you do because the manned space flight initiatives that the government keeps proposing present huge problems for scientists.
You can waste your personal money on whatever you like for all I care, but people do care about whether you waste taxpayer's money.
But those were activities every human could engage in: all you needed was a good brain and a good pair of hands and legs.
I'd say adventure is a good enough reason to get me my damn spaceship and lunar weekend retreat!
But you won't be getting one: manned space exploration will remain something for tiny numbers of people for the foreseeable future. So far, we have enough trouble launching unmanned probes into space on journeys that take years. Entire crews and life support systems are technologically completely out of the question for now.
There are enough people who spend $20k on speakers or $100k or an entire AV system. Those are the people who buy $700 (or $2000) remote control.
The Sony's shape, features, and battery life have presumably designed specifically for use as a remote control. The Axim has been designed for a completely different purpose; it may work reasonably well as a remote control, but in order to claim that it works "better", I think you have to make a better argument.
Actually, that IS the problem: Drugs are TOO fun. They are often times more fun than other things in people's lives that turn out to be useful to society.
If that were the case, we'd all be drug addicts. But we aren't. Why? Because most people know that many things that are a lot of fun aren't good for them, so they don't do them. Furthermore, most people who try illegal drugs (the majority of Americans) manage to stop taking them on their own, so it isn't the case that you automatically become a slave to drugs if you take them.
You have a reward system in your brain that has evolved for hundreds of millions of years to promote evolutionarily useful behavior.
Yes, and a few million years ago, another system evolved that lets us evaluate the future consequences of our actions and make choices accordingly. If that newer evolutionary system isn't working for you, then you have a problem, and that problem goes far beyond the potential for drug addiction.
In fact, I think the reason many people end up having drug problems is because they believe that their lives are so miserable that they might as well take drugs--probably quite a rational decision for many of them. And you aren't going to stop that by vaccinating them.
One of the central tenets of the Open Source philosophy (as it seems to be understood by the average person, at any rate) is that all software should be free.
No, that's not the central tenet of open source. The central tenet is that you "should" get the source to binaries that you use and that you "should" be able to redistribute it.
But this "should" isn't some kind of moral imperative. The reason people say that you "should" do this is because it's the economically rational thing to do if you take a long-term and global perspective.
That doesn't mean that in the short term, it may not be cheaper to choose proprietary software--it probably is. But if everybody makes the same choice as you, then, in the long term, you end up paying many times for software what you ought to have paid, and you condemn other people to the same fate.
It's little like littering: if you do it only rarely and most people don't do it, it's not much of a problem. But if everybody does it, it's a huge problem, and it is self-reinforcing.
You may agree with that argument or you may not, but either way, it's not some kind of philosophical principle or communist conspiracy. When OSS advocates tell you that you "should" choose OSS, they are making an argument about how rational economic beings ought to behave in order to maximize their profits.
As a developer myself, this prospect is profoundly depressing - as I said earlier, I develop applications just like a carpenter makes tables or an author writes books.
Well, have you noticed that carpenters don't make a lot of tables anymore? They have largely been replaced by mass-produced, self-assembled furniture. That was probably depressing for them as well. But that's the way life is: our economy is constantly changing. We aren't willing to accept inefficient production methods just because you have some quaint attachment to an old way of making a living.
Why should software be any different [than carpentry]?
Because, unlike the product of carpentry, software can be copied and distributed at almost no cost. So, 1000 carpenters can produce 10000 tables and still charge for each table. If carpentry were like software, then once 1 carpenter would produce 1 table for free for fun which then could get copied 10000 times at no cost to anybody; nobody else would make a profit.
but to make this the dominant way of developing anything worthwhile just seems like shooting ourselves in the collective foot.
That appeal won't work: there are too many people who can and are willing to produce something for free (like myself, for example). If you want to make a living writing software, you will have to write custom software. There is still a huge market for that, but you have to change the way you work.
It's the usual quick-fix mentality. Instead of asking what problems cause people to turn to drugs (mental disease, poverty, social problems, etc.), a syringe is supposed to fix it. It's the same quick fix mentality that dominates so much of politics, and it's not going to work.
Instead of some people sedating their problems and imposing health care costs on everybody else, which is bad enough, you are going to have the same people doing something else self-destructive and probably even more destructive to others.
And for that quick fix, you risk several deaths a year from medical mistakes (wrong injection, infection, etc.) during vaccination, as well as unknown long-term consequences and the possibility that important future drugs won't work.
This type of scheming is both unprofessional and damaging.
I don't see any "scheming". RMS is warning about what seems to be the legal situation right now. Instead of pointing us to facts that contradict his view, you are just giving us a lot of verbiage, flaming, and accusations, and you are telling us that we should trust you and that everything is going to be right in the end.
This is the machinations of a faction who want to use MARID for conducting a vendetta against Microsoft and don't care what the effect on MARID is.
Your use of the term "vendetta" implies that you are saying that RMS's behavior is motivated by a personal grudge and a desire for revenge against Microsoft. But there is no indication that RMS has any such personal motivations--his position is consistent with the criteria he has previously applied to evaluating other standards. If anything is "unprofessional" here, it's your accusations against him.
Your standard has run into negative publicity because of the way the standards body communicated the legal situation, and that's your problem, not his. As soon as you provide convincing evidence that the legal situation surrounding MARID is bulletproof, then RMS will stop complaining about it.
Let me guess: you're all for energy independence, though, so we won't have to keep bothering with Middle Eastern oil. Why would dependence on foreign food be good and dependence on foreign oil be bad?
Because creating or preventing dependencies just shouldn't be our policy goal--our policy goals should be oriented towards development, progress, and fairness. And, generally speaking, fair trade and open markets help with that (they don't always and they need to be regulated, but not for a one-sided advantage).
In the case of Middle Eastern oil, we subsidize the auto industry and we subsidize undemocratic foreign regimes. If we charged for gas and oil what they actually cost and let the Middle Eastern nations do whatever they want to do politically, we'd get energy independence in a heartbeat.
In the case of food, we subsidize domestic agricultural producers, for a variety of reasons, including a misguided attempt at food self-sufficiency. That causes big economic problems in nations whose major form of export could be food but isn't. It also causes mass migration from, say, Mexico to the US.
So, the underlying problem is that we distort the market, which happens to have two different consequences for the two kinds of goods.
Note, incidentally, that we are trying to achieve energy "self"-sufficiency, basically by turning various oil producing nations into political client states.
In general, dependence on other nations is probably a good thing, simply because it creates a common interest and leads to cooperation, but dependencies among nations should arise naturally when they make economic sense--they should not be artificially created or prevented.
how many desktops will there be before one of them becomes truly useful
Windows 3.1, Windows 98, Mac OS 6, Mac OS 7, Mac OS X, Windows XP, Amiga, etc. Everybody is trying lots of different things, and all of them had and still have usability problems.
I think Gnome and KDE both get the job done about as well or poorly as GUIs on other major platforms.
The sooner people realize that there is no single "best" user interface and that all UIs still have lots of problems, the better for everybody. Furthermore, anything that you change about a UI is going to make some people unhappy. The good thing with Linux, X11, and its choice of UIs is that UIs really are in competition.
I think what all these UI efforts and all this discussion in the Linux community show is that people realize that with OSS, they can actually make a difference. And it also shows that there are many different preferences and needs when it comes to UI.
The biggest problem is the language people use to talk about these sorts of projects. Talking about "GoneME fixing perceived Gnome UI errors" is a good start. But the GoneME developers themselves should be aware that they are just developing something different for a different community, and that they aren't necessarily "fixing UI errors". I mean, the Gnome 2.6 developers aren't stupid, and they didn't set out to create a system with "UI errors" (personally, I think spatial Nautilus is a slight improvement).
With Windows or Macintosh, you get whatever Microsoft or Apple tell you is best: you can buy it or you can leave it. Complaining about usability problems with those systems is useless--the companies aren't going to listen anyway.
"Cardinality" is the number of elements in a given mathematical set. When modems ran at 300 baud, you could forget about sending large data sets, such as images, because text and voice data took up all the available bandwidth. As connection rates increased, so did the cardinality of data that users could send. [...] Video currently represents the highest cardinality data
The term "cardinality" is wrong for several reasons. First, image data isn't represented as sets, it's represented as ordered sequences, and when talking about ordered sequences, both computer scientists and mathematicians talk about their "length", not their "cardinality".
Furthermore, what matters is not the size of what you want to transmit, but the rate at which you need to transmit it. We call that the "data rate" or (somewhat sloppily) the "required bandwidth".
So, the overall point of the article, that there is no single media stream that requires 10 Gbit bandwidth, is correct. However, that's pretty much irrelevant: file servers, video servers, and aggregate usage still require that kind of bandwidth. A family of four might require that bandwidth. You might want that bandwidth to have your backup happen in 1 minute instead of 10 minutes. So, there are lots of reasons to want 10 Gbit Ethernet, provided the price is right.
As for his use of the term "cardinality", the author apparently doesn't quite know the terminology of the field.
The IOSONO people didn't invent wave field synthesis. People got serious about it in the Netherlands and France in the 1980's (here).
However, the reason why it took until the 1980's to do it isn't that people didn't think of it before, but simply that hardware and software had developed to the point that that became feasible. I suspect that if you do some digging, you can probably find the suggestion earlier. It's really a pretty straightforward idea.
Of course, that won't keep people from trying to slice their patents out of it. It's MP3 all over again.
No, what's responsible for that - in Kosovo at least - is the UN's arms embargo.
We are talking about third world nations, nations with development problems, not Kosovo. Those are nations with huge population growth and little economic development.
By disarming everybody who wasn't supported by an outside group (typically a large country), they left them at the mercy of those who WERE supported by such powers, and who wanted to eliminate them. Thus starvation, and genocide.
Well, even assuming that that theory were true (ridiculous as it is--the UN doesn't have the resources to disarm the poor of the world), who is running the UN? It's the US and Europe. If you hold UN policies responsible for world poverty and hunger, it just falls right back into our lap.
The solution to genocide is allow the potential victims - which means EVERYBODY - to arm themselves for their own defense.
Ah, yes, I see: so, you believe that the Jews got killed by the Nazis because the UN imposed selective gun control on the Jews. Uh huh...
And the obstacle to both is governmental force, implemented either by malicious people or people too ignorant or stupid to understand that the SECOND-order effects of government programs often completely swamp and reverse the expected FIRST-order effects.
You are forgetting the zeroth-order effects of government: an unprecedented level of wealth, life expectancy, and security. That's why most people are willing to put up with government and try to fix it when its unintended consequences (and there are many) rear their ugly heads.
Starvation doesn't come from "greedy corporations" "wasting money". They'd LOVE to feed the world - they'd make MORE MONEY that way!
I never talked about "greedy corporations wasting money". If you put things in quotes, you better make sure that they are quotations.
But you are completely naive if you think that the economic interests of food producing companies are aligned with your or my interests or the interests of inhabitants of the third world. Food is something you can't do without--it's the ultimate drug. Companies maximize their profit by centralizing food production and creating scarcity. Their interst is not to feed the world, their interest is in feeding only those people who have enough money to make it worth their while. And it is in their interest to use their political influence to kill any competitor that can produce food cheaper and more efficiently than they can.
Huh? How are our farm subsidies causing problems abroad?
Here are a few links: 1, 2, 3.
U.S. Farming is way outside my realm of knowledge, but it seems obvious being sure we're able to produce our own food is quite necessary.
In fact I've been worrying a bit lately that we're migrating too much to a service economy and moving more and more production and manufacturing out of the country; we need the ability to produce our own goods, too.
You mean like another military power before the US?
And how does the US and European domestical policies affect starving North Koreans? Maybe it's because they have oversized army to feed for such a small country?
Probably. And what point are you trying to make?
Does US and European domestical policies somehow magically alter the weather patterns in famin stricken countries?
Well, yes, they do, that too (global warming), but that's not what we are talking about here.
What we are talking about here is that they do hinder economic development and they raise the cost of food production in famine stricken countries. As a result, those nations have larger populations and produce less food than they otherwise would, and that is where famine really comes from.
You could also argue that C, or even LaTeX weren't designed for usability (and you would have a point ;-) But the difference is, a syntaxically incorrect file in those language won't be accepted by the parser.
C compilers have incompatible extensions, but many users don't use them because they want their programs to be portable.
LaTeX has just a single implementation, so the question of variability among implementations doesn't arise.
But reinventing the wheel would mean people would lose all the know-how they've aquired over time, there would be painful transitions, and so on. It would just be rejected
It depends on how, when, and why. Replacing XML, HTML, or XHTML would be hard, but sooner or later it's going to happen, probably with some form of backwards compatibility.
Are you sure ?
How can one be "sure" about anything in the future? But it looks unlikely to me that Microsoft is going to make IE more restrictive because anything else is just too much of a pain.
What, you mean how the US insists that others not put up one way trade barriers or they will? Oooh, pretty villinous that. The US trades for their own profit and if other countries don't want to trade with the US they don't have to. The point of trade is profit.
But not at any cost. Many of the nations we are talking about aren't even democratic, so the US isn't trading with the people of those nations, it is trading with a bunch of thugs that hold those nations hostage. Sure, one can make a lot of money trading with thugs, but that doesn't make it ethical or legal.
Furthermore, other countries have given the trading system the US effectively initiated a chance; if, after a few decades, it doesn't work, they may well not want to continue with it. The loss will be primarily to the US, because the others don't have that much to lose.
It's not an economic issue, it's a strategic one. We are paying for a strategic advantage with an economic cost.
Accumulating too many strategic advantages is something other nations are likely wary of, and eventually, they may act on that.
The unskilled imagrants the US recieves are common to all richer nations without draconian imagration controls. The only way they'll stop is when the US is no longer better off than most other nations.
My point exactly. And that should preferably happen by making other nations better off. But if the US doesn't work towards making other nations better off, it will happen when the US sinks to their level.
The terrorism the US is experiencing is not a result of ecconomic policy. It's because they helped Israel.
Israel is just an excuse. If those nations were democratic and their citizens well-off, they wouldn't give a damn about Israel or the US.
Like who, most of western europe? Their subsidies put ours to shame.
I included the EU in my criticism. But the EU at least isn't naive enough anymore to think they can become self-sufficient. The last major European nation to think that was Nazi Germany.
What specific trade practices are you comparing to breaking boats and handcuffing?
Killing the domestic agricultural base of developing nations with subsidized food products, making those nations dependent on expensive US chemical and seed products, and keeping dictatorships in power because they suit our economic interests, just to name a few.
Countries like Japan that import raw materials and export finished products more would be far worse off if there was a trade disturbance. The US doesn't need trade to survive. America would suffer, japan might starve.
Japan isn't foolish enough to try isolationism, so it isn't an issue for them.
I think you also underestimate how dependent the US is on the rest of the world. US industry would collapse without cheap oil from the middle east. Worse, however, the US economy and government function only because of huge influxes of money from overseas. US wealth is a complete illusion, financed by borrowing from the rest of the world.
Mostly, because it doesn't really benefit the people who are in power in those nations. And look at what happened when, say, the Iranian people democratically decided their economic "arrangement" with Britain wasn't working anymore and they wanted to nationalize their oil company.
Poor nations are also weak nations. They don't have much of a choice when the US or EU asks them to do something. That's why it's our obligation to be careful what we ask them to do.
In the long run, that's also in our own interest: a world full of a couple of billion poor people with no self-determination and no hope is a recipe for disaster for us.
Yeah, we realy should have checked with those other nations before deciding our domestic policies.
Yes, indeed, we should have. That's not only because it is the just and equitable thing to do (we demand the same of other nations, and it is, in fact, a cornerstone of our trade policy), it is also because it is in our own interest. Even just from a domestic perspective, US agricultural subsidies are economically inefficient.
In the long term, the way our subsidies hold back economic development in other nations comes back to haunts us in the form of unskilled and illegal immigration and terrorism. And eventually, they may make the global free trade system collapse, which would hurt us the most, because we have the most to lose.
Shame on us for wanting food if we ever go to war again.
If you look at the list of nations that have historically attempted food self-sufficiency, I think you, too, will come to the conclusion that that is not a club we want to be part of.
We should try to help other nations feed themselves, not complain that the "scraps" of our economy aren't being distributed evenly enough to feed them. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day etc. etc.
Yes, and that is exactly what we are doing: we are giving "a man a fish", year after year, and we are not teaching him how to fish. In fact, we are blowing up his fishing boat and handcuffing him, which pretty much ensures that he will not be able to fish for himself.
It is the lack of a free market to transport that food to market efficiently.
Yes, and do you know who is responsible for that? The US and Europe, with their lavish farm subsidies. If Western nations ever allowed the free market to operate in developing nations, problems with food and poverty in the world would be greatly reduced.
In America, we have all kinds of systems to get the food to your dinner plate.
We also have enormous government subsidies, paid for by tax payers, to keep farmers happy and in business. It may be good for ensuring a reliable food supply domestically (and give the number of wars we fight, not exactly a bad idea either), but it is causing huge economic problems elsewhere.