Many corporations have information on me that
I have neither tacitly nor explicitly consented
for them to have. You sound like the spams
I regularly get, insisting that they are only
sending me mail because I have somehow consented,
often lying and saying I signed up for the list.
But then, corporations are themselves government
creations. To be a consistent libertarian,
you should demand that corporations be abolished,
so that individuals will be fully responsible
for their actions.
Progeny should have set things up so that you
can buy the boxed set a month ahead of it being
available online, rather than vice versa
(with any last-minute security bugs made available
online immediately, as with security.debian.org).
This is completely in keeping with the GPL,
and would make it more likely that they will
collect enough money to pay staff. The free-beer
crowd would whine, but without some means of
motivating people to pay up, Progeny has even
fewer prospects for business success than the
fifth dot-com to try to sell you pet food over
the net.
You can ask, please, pretty please, Apple, will
you please Open Source HyperCard? They will say
no.
Or you can start a project that clones it and
produces software that anyone can run.
Reverse-engineer the format. Do the reverse
engineering part in an EU country where such
things are clearly legal. Do the thing in
layers, so that you have a GUI-independent
layer at the bottom that people can build on
top of. Innovate. Could you come up with a
scheme for mapping HyperCard links to URLs?
Maybe you could come up with a way to navigate
HyperCard stacks with ordinary web browsers.
But don't beg. Don't do petition drives.
Just Do It.
There is nothing specifically undemocratic about
non-secret votes when there is still a free choice. Recent non-secret votes for union
representation in Mexican factories, in an
environment when known labor activists are
instantly fired and thugs are hired to beat
people up, cannot be said to be democratic.
But there are other cases where secrecy would
make things less democratic, like if
representatives in a legislature can secretly
vote for programs that favor their friends but
outrage the people they are supposed to represent.
Anonymous Coward seems to think that it is worth
commenting apon that the 14th amendment has effectively altered the 1st amendment. That was its
intention: to extend the Bill of Rights to
apply to the states. This is very clear in the
legislative history, it was not a stretch by
the Supreme Court at all. Any amendment supersedes everything that has come before.
(Ignorant people sometimes claim that the income
tax is illegal because they don't understand this principle: an amendment overrules any preceding
contradictory text).
Wherever in the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments) you see "Congress shall make no law",
you should read, thanks to the 14th "and neither shall the states, cities, counties, etc".
The US invaded Panama, seized Manuel Noriega,
and dragged him to the US for a trial, whereapon
they jailed him for his crimes -- even though
it appears that US officials were co-conspirators
in some of those crimes (using drug sales to
raise money for the Contras after Congress cut
off the supply of taxpayer money).
You are making your living in an unethical manner.
The sooner that you "get out of dodge", the better.
You are aware that "I'm just following orders"
is known as the Nuremburg defense? It is not
an excuse for actions that are deeply harmful
to society. As for
"mak[ing] enough to feed myself", being on
welfare is more honorable than being a spammer,
and the unemployment rate is still so low that
most warm-blooded life forms should be able to
find a better job than that.
In my view you do not have "something
decent on your resume". You have a black mark.
Your resume identifies you as a professional
spammer.
They are talking about achieving a 25 micron
feature size. The current generation of processors is being done with an 0.13 micron
feature size, meaning that the number of gates
you can fit on your plastic chip is about 40000
(200 times 200) times lower.
Still, if they can get one transistor in 25
microns square, and handle all the wiring in
other layers:
The original 68000 (with 68,000 transistors)
fits in a 6.5 by 6.5 mm square.
The original 80386 (with 275,000 transistors)
fits in a 13.1 by 13.1 mm square.
The original 80486 (1.2M transistors) needs
27.4 by 27.4 mm (just over a square inch).
Once we get to this stage a lot of the
transistors are L1 cache.
Trying to get much bigger than this (do the
P5 in two inches square) is likely to be a
loser because getting the signals across these
large chips is going to be slow unless you
use enough power to melt the plastic.
Memory: if you can do one bit in 25 by 25 microns,
a square inch (2.54 cm on a side) gives just over one megabit
(bits, not bytes). You're probably not going
to be running Gnome or KDE on this.
There was a Canadian comedian (I forget who)
I heard on the "This American Life" radio
program saying that Canadians cannot let
a comment about space flight pass by without saying
"Canadian-made robotic arm! Canadian-made
robotic arm! We made that arm!"
Hydrogen can be obtained from non-polluting
sources of power such as solar. But it would
seem that a hydrogen-burning engine is going
to produce some oxides of nitrogen, as long as
you suck an oxygen-nitrogen mixture (air, of
course) into the engine.
sql*kitten, you turn morality on its head.
Commercial enterprises in biotech are also
heavily based on academic funding (most biotech
startups are formed by professors taking their
NSF- or NIH-funded academic research private).
And in this case, if the commercial company wins
the race, it gets a government-granted monopoly,
where anything the academics generate is open
to all: commercial companies can use any of the
knowledge gained without paying any patent
royalties.
The "informative" tag should be immediately
removed from gregbaker; he is asserting an outright
falsehood. Patent claims are not ANDed. If
they were, why would anyone issue a patent with
dozens of claims? Because patent claims are
ORed, not ANDed, patent lawyers try to claim
as many distinct things as possible.
Drop him down to a -1, with extra negative
karma points for assertively claiming something
when he has no clue.
If you post false information to a stocks
discussion board for the purpose of trying to
move the price of that stock, and then you
trade that stock or have your friends do it,
you can go to jail.
If you post true information to a stocks
discussion board and you are an insider,
it also could be a crime (if the intent is
to do it to make money on a stock deal), and it's perfectly
appropriate for a CEO to check this out
before the feds start pounding down the doors,
if shady dealings to make a buck on the stock
market are suspected.
No, I won't hold my horses, because I've just
read Claim 1 of
patent 6,052,531. That claim
is very general, and there is tons of prior
art. Claim 1 tries to conver any system in
which there is more than one patch to be applied,
at least one "update source", with no qualifications on what that update source is,
containing the patches, and finally, a client
"disposed to receive transmitted patches from
each update source". Guess what: CVS infringes,
except that it is prior art. Even the Linux
script for seeking out and applying patches
infringes.
You may have patentable technology here, but
only if the claims are rewritten so as not to
cover anything that already exists.
Of course you won't get paid. You would then
be a performer, not a record company. Napster's
settlement means that they will pay record
companies, but performers will not get a dime
of the money.
RMS is a doer. You are a talker. Writing
code is only one form of doing.
The subject that RMS is going to speak about
is the very thing that could kill free software
dead: ubiquitous patents could make most
free software illegal. So could laws like
the DMCA. If activists don't fight them,
free software is over -- unless programmers
want to risk jail.
We need activists more than ever. And an
activist who doesn't ever piss people off
is probably not an effective activist.
I should know. I'm one of the conspirators that
started egcs.
The egcs and FSF gcc projects merged in April
1999, and put out the first combined release
(2.95) at the end of July 1999.
The GCC (not EGCS) snapshots represent ongoing development and
occasionally something breaks. Please report
such things, but don't stress about it; you
should expect to find bugs in the snapshots.
No intelligent people ever believed that the
trademark holder was going to sue 7,000,000
email users. Only people with a mental
deficiency (the inability to recognize even
the most blatantly obvious heavy-handed satire
as such unless they literally read the words
"this is satire") are fooled by such things.
Unfortunately several of the Slashdot editors
suffer from said mental deficiency, as do way
too many Slashdot readers.
In most developed countries, no one opens a bunch
of paper bills, writes paper checks, puts them
in envelopes, and mails them. Almost all payments are handled electronically. The US is far behind
Europe in this regard.
If someone (or many someones) spend the effort
to create an XYZ/BSD release, it will come to
be. If not, it won't. So the real answer to
"why isn't there..." questions is "Because you
haven't done it". ESR often gets on my nerves,
but his "shut up and show me the code" comment
has a lot of validity here.
I can't imagine that such a project would be
in the financial interest of Red Hat or of
Suse, but I could see how it might appeal to
volunteers, so my guess is that a Debian GNU/BSD
would be the most likely of the three.
But because far fewer folks will be interested,
I can't see how it would ever become more
than a niche project.
There seems to be an unspoken assumption in this
thread that open source programs are intended to
run only on 386-compatible Linux boxes, so that
one set of binaries will suffice for all users.
Releasing binaries only for that standard vanilla
platform is a nice way of reminding users of other
systems that they are second class, and also this
kind of development is a nice way to make sure
that your software is less portable than it
otherwise should be.
For this reason I think it's better in the early
days of a project to release source only. Binaries can wait until the software's in shape
for use by non-programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
So just use ssh for everything, it can forward every service you want to run, so everything over the air is protected with strong crypto.
Many corporations have information on me that I have neither tacitly nor explicitly consented for them to have. You sound like the spams I regularly get, insisting that they are only sending me mail because I have somehow consented, often lying and saying I signed up for the list.
But then, corporations are themselves government creations. To be a consistent libertarian, you should demand that corporations be abolished, so that individuals will be fully responsible for their actions.
Progeny should have set things up so that you can buy the boxed set a month ahead of it being available online, rather than vice versa (with any last-minute security bugs made available online immediately, as with security.debian.org).
This is completely in keeping with the GPL, and would make it more likely that they will collect enough money to pay staff. The free-beer crowd would whine, but without some means of motivating people to pay up, Progeny has even fewer prospects for business success than the fifth dot-com to try to sell you pet food over the net.
You can ask, please, pretty please, Apple, will you please Open Source HyperCard? They will say no.
Or you can start a project that clones it and produces software that anyone can run. Reverse-engineer the format. Do the reverse engineering part in an EU country where such things are clearly legal. Do the thing in layers, so that you have a GUI-independent layer at the bottom that people can build on top of. Innovate. Could you come up with a scheme for mapping HyperCard links to URLs? Maybe you could come up with a way to navigate HyperCard stacks with ordinary web browsers.
But don't beg. Don't do petition drives. Just Do It.
There is nothing specifically undemocratic about non-secret votes when there is still a free choice. Recent non-secret votes for union representation in Mexican factories, in an environment when known labor activists are instantly fired and thugs are hired to beat people up, cannot be said to be democratic.
But there are other cases where secrecy would make things less democratic, like if representatives in a legislature can secretly vote for programs that favor their friends but outrage the people they are supposed to represent.
Anonymous Coward seems to think that it is worth commenting apon that the 14th amendment has effectively altered the 1st amendment. That was its intention: to extend the Bill of Rights to apply to the states. This is very clear in the legislative history, it was not a stretch by the Supreme Court at all. Any amendment supersedes everything that has come before. (Ignorant people sometimes claim that the income tax is illegal because they don't understand this principle: an amendment overrules any preceding contradictory text).
Wherever in the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments) you see "Congress shall make no law", you should read, thanks to the 14th "and neither shall the states, cities, counties, etc".
You're only immune if you have a bigger army.
The US invaded Panama, seized Manuel Noriega, and dragged him to the US for a trial, whereapon they jailed him for his crimes -- even though it appears that US officials were co-conspirators in some of those crimes (using drug sales to raise money for the Contras after Congress cut off the supply of taxpayer money).
You are making your living in an unethical manner. The sooner that you "get out of dodge", the better.
You are aware that "I'm just following orders" is known as the Nuremburg defense? It is not an excuse for actions that are deeply harmful to society. As for "mak[ing] enough to feed myself", being on welfare is more honorable than being a spammer, and the unemployment rate is still so low that most warm-blooded life forms should be able to find a better job than that.
In my view you do not have "something decent on your resume". You have a black mark. Your resume identifies you as a professional spammer.
They are talking about achieving a 25 micron feature size. The current generation of processors is being done with an 0.13 micron feature size, meaning that the number of gates you can fit on your plastic chip is about 40000 (200 times 200) times lower.
Still, if they can get one transistor in 25 microns square, and handle all the wiring in other layers:
Trying to get much bigger than this (do the P5 in two inches square) is likely to be a loser because getting the signals across these large chips is going to be slow unless you use enough power to melt the plastic.
Memory: if you can do one bit in 25 by 25 microns, a square inch (2.54 cm on a side) gives just over one megabit (bits, not bytes). You're probably not going to be running Gnome or KDE on this.
And if you don't like it, there is always apt-get remove task-kde.
That won't remove KDE from your system; it will only remove a tiny package that depends on the KDE packages, probably freeing up a few hundred bytes.
Who do you think put up the money to develop BSD in the first place? DARPA, of course.
There was a Canadian comedian (I forget who) I heard on the "This American Life" radio program saying that Canadians cannot let a comment about space flight pass by without saying "Canadian-made robotic arm! Canadian-made robotic arm! We made that arm!"
Hydrogen can be obtained from non-polluting sources of power such as solar. But it would seem that a hydrogen-burning engine is going to produce some oxides of nitrogen, as long as you suck an oxygen-nitrogen mixture (air, of course) into the engine.
sql*kitten, you turn morality on its head. Commercial enterprises in biotech are also heavily based on academic funding (most biotech startups are formed by professors taking their NSF- or NIH-funded academic research private). And in this case, if the commercial company wins the race, it gets a government-granted monopoly, where anything the academics generate is open to all: commercial companies can use any of the knowledge gained without paying any patent royalties.
The "informative" tag should be immediately removed from gregbaker; he is asserting an outright falsehood. Patent claims are not ANDed. If they were, why would anyone issue a patent with dozens of claims? Because patent claims are ORed, not ANDed, patent lawyers try to claim as many distinct things as possible.
Drop him down to a -1, with extra negative karma points for assertively claiming something when he has no clue.
If you post false information to a stocks discussion board for the purpose of trying to move the price of that stock, and then you trade that stock or have your friends do it, you can go to jail.
If you post true information to a stocks discussion board and you are an insider, it also could be a crime (if the intent is to do it to make money on a stock deal), and it's perfectly appropriate for a CEO to check this out before the feds start pounding down the doors, if shady dealings to make a buck on the stock market are suspected.
No, I won't hold my horses, because I've just read Claim 1 of patent 6,052,531. That claim is very general, and there is tons of prior art. Claim 1 tries to conver any system in which there is more than one patch to be applied, at least one "update source", with no qualifications on what that update source is, containing the patches, and finally, a client "disposed to receive transmitted patches from each update source". Guess what: CVS infringes, except that it is prior art. Even the Linux script for seeking out and applying patches infringes.
You may have patentable technology here, but only if the claims are rewritten so as not to cover anything that already exists.
Of course you won't get paid. You would then be a performer, not a record company. Napster's settlement means that they will pay record companies, but performers will not get a dime of the money.
RMS is a doer. You are a talker. Writing code is only one form of doing.
The subject that RMS is going to speak about is the very thing that could kill free software dead: ubiquitous patents could make most free software illegal. So could laws like the DMCA. If activists don't fight them, free software is over -- unless programmers want to risk jail.
We need activists more than ever. And an activist who doesn't ever piss people off is probably not an effective activist.
I should know. I'm one of the conspirators that started egcs.
The egcs and FSF gcc projects merged in April 1999, and put out the first combined release (2.95) at the end of July 1999.
The GCC (not EGCS) snapshots represent ongoing development and occasionally something breaks. Please report such things, but don't stress about it; you should expect to find bugs in the snapshots.
No intelligent people ever believed that the trademark holder was going to sue 7,000,000 email users. Only people with a mental deficiency (the inability to recognize even the most blatantly obvious heavy-handed satire as such unless they literally read the words "this is satire") are fooled by such things.
Unfortunately several of the Slashdot editors suffer from said mental deficiency, as do way too many Slashdot readers.
In most developed countries, no one opens a bunch of paper bills, writes paper checks, puts them in envelopes, and mails them. Almost all payments are handled electronically. The US is far behind Europe in this regard.
If someone (or many someones) spend the effort to create an XYZ/BSD release, it will come to be. If not, it won't. So the real answer to "why isn't there ..." questions is "Because you
haven't done it". ESR often gets on my nerves,
but his "shut up and show me the code" comment
has a lot of validity here.
I can't imagine that such a project would be in the financial interest of Red Hat or of Suse, but I could see how it might appeal to volunteers, so my guess is that a Debian GNU/BSD would be the most likely of the three. But because far fewer folks will be interested, I can't see how it would ever become more than a niche project.
You don't need year 2000 compliance any more. It's 2001 now.
There seems to be an unspoken assumption in this thread that open source programs are intended to run only on 386-compatible Linux boxes, so that one set of binaries will suffice for all users. Releasing binaries only for that standard vanilla platform is a nice way of reminding users of other systems that they are second class, and also this kind of development is a nice way to make sure that your software is less portable than it otherwise should be.
For this reason I think it's better in the early days of a project to release source only. Binaries can wait until the software's in shape for use by non-programmers.