...the USA and Russia decided to fight in a number of "proxy" wars such as Vietnam and Korea.
Russia (USSR) didn't have that much involvement in the Korean War It was mostly North Korea and then China fighting against the United States. China asked for help from Russia but they only received some limited air support. So it seems to me a proxy war between the US and China more so than between the US and Russia.
I agree with your opinion about not signing an agreement like this, but I believe the blog post is referring to something slightly different. Many open source projects require contributors to sign an agreement that basically say that the code you are contributing does not have existing copyright restrictions. This is a little different than the employer/employee contracts that says all your code/work/ideas/children created during employment belong to the company. The contributor license at apache for example, I think is more aimed at preventing them from being sued in case someone uploads all their company's proprietary code to an open source project.
I think this is what you were getting to, but I just wanted to clarify. The constitution actually doesn't grant us any rights. By default you have the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, and the only thing the government can do is decide which of your innate rights it wants to take away. The founders understood this and argued about whether a bill of rights was necessary, because all it does is state rights that we already have. The first ten amendments don't actually grant us any new rights, they only list rights that the government is not allowed to take away.
It's too bad that most people don't understand this and believe that they only have the rights that they are given by the government. It should be the other way round, meaning you have all rights except for those that the government explicitly takes away.
Why is this modded interesting? I thought the parent was trying to be funny. Somehow I doubt EMF harmonics has anything to do with the nice round values like 6 and 10 ft, that are commonly found at compusa, best buy, etc
Don't forget it's also the fault of all the voters who put those people in government. And the fault of the non-voters who didn't get out and vote against these politicians.
This is also part of the problem in outsourcing the actual industrial production of all this stuff.
Why is it a problem if China is innovating and creating new business models and new kinds of electronics? Innovation is not a zero sum game. Instead of thinking about how can we protect what we know and stop Chinese people from innovating, it would be more productive for us to learn what we can from them, and then maybe improve our business models.
I agree with you that hands on production work is important for innovation and businesses in the US and Europe should keep that in mind. But I just don't agree that everything is us vs. them. There's plenty of innovation to be done by all sides.
I think the government should support open source development, but not through some expensive stimulus package. The best way for the government to support open source is by simply releasing much of the code they already develop. There must be thousands of government employed programmers in the country, working on many kinds of projects. If these projects were open source it could help businesses who might find some of the software useful, and it would help the government IT workers by allowing the public to make contributions through helping to find bugs, submitting patches, etc.
I see the list has a screenshot for Battle for Wesnoth. I started playing it a couple months ago when it was mentioned here on Slashdot, and it's really fun.
It's a turn based strategy which is maybe not as intense as a RTS or FPS. But it's perfect for me because I have young kids and frequently get interrupted, so I need a game that I walk away from without messing up the game.
I'm sure they will base their distribution on one of the existing ones. So they will probably take ubuntu or fedora for example and fork it. Then inspect and test the code and maybe add a few things (to monitor the users?), and then release their own distribution. The problem with just choosing standard Red Hat or Ubuntu is that they would still depend on a foreign company which is part of the reason they want to get away from M$.
So if someone tells you to follow orders or your wife and family will be put into the prison camp, are you still a mercenary? Or are you caught in an impossible situation and trying to make a choice that nobody should have to make?
Why would you follow orders from someone who threatened your family? What would make you trust them enough to keep their word? If you do follow their orders, they might threaten you again later and order you to do something else just as bad or worse. When they are done with you they might through you and your family into the prison camp anyway.
I didn't say Glass-Steagall was the only cause, but it did contribute to the problems so calling it a scapegoat is misleading.
So you want to remove the greedy people from wall street? Good luck with that!
If there are ways to make money and avoid risk without breaking the law, people will find them. Everyone is greedy to a certain point, that's what makes the free market work. But it also has to be restricted to prevent some people from messing it up for everyone else.
The truth is that the economic crisis happened because the financial markets found new ways to be greedy that no one understood.
It wasn't even a new way to be greedy, we just forgot what was learned in the great depression: that it's a bad idea to allow commercial banks to underwrite securities. There were many contributors that helped cause the current economic troubles, but certainly one of the most important was the gradual erosion of
Glass-Steagal.
To me it seems really inevitable that microsoft will eventually have to open source windows. It may still be a ways off, but in the long run I just don't see how they can compete against linux and other open source operating systems. Linux gets better every year while microsoft stagnates. We've already seen some of the problems Windows has with driver support for example in Vista. If they open source windows and start moving toward a business model more like Red Hat, it would allow people to improve legacy drivers, find and fix various bugs in the os, and they would end up with a better operating system. No matter how much money they throw at the development of their OS, it just won't be able to keep up with the open source world, especially in terms of supporting legacy devices.
I watched an interesting video a while back about what can be done to increase your chances of survival during a nuclear attack. The gist of it is that after the detonation you should make sure you get out of the path of the radiation which will be flowing with the wind. The presentation approaches the issue in a more rational way than most of our politicians.
This is the problem with the current plurality voting system, and until you change the voting system there will always be this spoiler effect. Sometimes it helps your candidate and sometimes it hurts your candidate, but it's always wrong to blame the thirdparty candidate for a major candidate's win or loss. Many of those Nader voters probably wouldn't have voted for either candidate had Nader not run, but even if 100% of them would have voted for Gore or Kerry, it is still not Nader's fault that they lost.
Using approval or range voting, this wouldn't even be an issue, which is why I hate it when democrats or republicans blame a spoiler candidate for their loss, but will never talk about changing the voting system to make it more fair for everyone.
I don't see any reason why you can't get some programming experience while working on QA. You should at least be able to get read access to the code of the projects you are working on. When you find bugs during you QA work try tracking them down and/or writing unit tests for them. Depending on what languages are used there, you should probably get to know JUnit or NUnit or search for other testing frameworks that might be relevant to your project. Then create a patch with the test and attach that to the issue. It will make the developer's life easier and prevent the issue from occurring again later. Obviously, not all test can be easily automated, but you're bound to find a few along the way.
If you're able to create an automated test for the issue, the next step is to see if you can fix it yourself. If you sumbit a few unit tests with fixes, the development team will probably start thinking about hiring you if/when an opening comes up. If openings do not come up within a year or two, then at least you have gained some good experience that can be used during interviews, or to help out one of the many open source projects that desperately need better automated tests.
You are obviously correct that it is not likely any thirdparty candidate will win this election. But allowing them to enter the debates is what helps third parties get recognition as a valid alternative. It gives them publicity, spreads their ideas, and can help them grow their party base which is what could help get one of them elected to various positions in the future. The two main parties have done a great job of keeping the majority of the American public completely ignorant about the other parties. If, when watching the debates, you are only concerned about finding out who will be elected then it makes sense to keep the debates closed. If instead you are interested in spreading the best ideas and possibly getting those ideas implemented by whoever is in office, then I think it is better to have maybe the five top parties represented.
So, by that logic, every piece of software that can be updated is beta.
Which means that every piece of software is beta, since any software could conceivably be updated. And in that case the term "beta" becomes redundant so we are back where we started. I think you're right they just don't want the responsibility if something fails.
From your example, I really don't see what the problem is. You imply that B is the more liked candidate, but if his own supporters are giving him a 7, and another group is giving him zeros, maybe he shouldn't win. A is the only candidate who doesn't get any zeros, and he has the highest average score, to me it seems like the system chooses the best candidate in this example.
No voting system is perfect, including range voting. And so there will always be edge cases where the system does not elect the ideal candidate. But range voting (and approval which is a subset of range) have been shown to give the least amount of bayesian regret. It is certainly better than the current plurality system which is one of the least fair voting methods.
Totally agree with you about Malcom Gladwell. I didn't read Blink, but I read some of The Tipping Point. I also saw him give a presentation. He's a great speaker in terms of being entertaining and engaging, unfortunately if you actually listen to the content of what he's saying it's garbage.
I think option 1 is a great idea. For option 2, I don't think you need to make deletion difficult. Instead you could just make recovery easy. So if an article gets deleted by one administrator, make it easy for someone else to vote for it and add it back in.
Personally I don't think any articles should be deleted. If an article has incorrect or irrelevant information, then either correct it or make a note about what is incorrect. It doesn't matter how much garbage is in wikipedia as long as the information is well organized enough so that you can find the information you are looking for. I would think people would understand that based on how well wikipedia already works even with all the people who try to vandalize it.
It may not seem like it, but I think this statement
there's usually going to be some prior art if your work has any value at all
And this one
As long as your work builds upon what's been done in a meaningful way
conflict with each other. I'm not a patent expert, but I usually take prior art to mean that your idea has been done before and that you new idea does not have meaningful improvements to the existing ideas. The difficult part of patent examination is determining what changes are meaningful enough to warrant a patent. As an example, if I take an old process and use it in a web page instead of on the command line, I wouldn't consider that a meaningful improvement. But it may seem meaningful to some people.
more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia
While this certainly is not a good thing for the environment, I wonder how this compares to pollution coming from the United States. According to wikipedia the US produced the most CO2 of any country in 2006. China might top the list this year, but I'm sure the US isn't far behind. I guess my point is that it seems hypocritical to criticize China for sending pollution to us when we've been doing it to the rest of the world for a long time. We should be leading by example and cleaning up our own industries first instead of trying to place blame.
Slashdot Mirror
...the USA and Russia decided to fight in a number of "proxy" wars such as Vietnam and Korea.
Russia (USSR) didn't have that much involvement in the Korean War It was mostly North Korea and then China fighting against the United States. China asked for help from Russia but they only received some limited air support. So it seems to me a proxy war between the US and China more so than between the US and Russia.
I agree with your opinion about not signing an agreement like this, but I believe the blog post is referring to something slightly different. Many open source projects require contributors to sign an agreement that basically say that the code you are contributing does not have existing copyright restrictions. This is a little different than the employer/employee contracts that says all your code/work/ideas/children created during employment belong to the company. The contributor license at apache for example, I think is more aimed at preventing them from being sued in case someone uploads all their company's proprietary code to an open source project.
I think this is what you were getting to, but I just wanted to clarify. The constitution actually doesn't grant us any rights. By default you have the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, and the only thing the government can do is decide which of your innate rights it wants to take away. The founders understood this and argued about whether a bill of rights was necessary, because all it does is state rights that we already have. The first ten amendments don't actually grant us any new rights, they only list rights that the government is not allowed to take away.
It's too bad that most people don't understand this and believe that they only have the rights that they are given by the government. It should be the other way round, meaning you have all rights except for those that the government explicitly takes away.
Why is this modded interesting? I thought the parent was trying to be funny. Somehow I doubt EMF harmonics has anything to do with the nice round values like 6 and 10 ft, that are commonly found at compusa, best buy, etc
Don't forget it's also the fault of all the voters who put those people in government. And the fault of the non-voters who didn't get out and vote against these politicians.
This is also part of the problem in outsourcing the actual industrial production of all this stuff.
Why is it a problem if China is innovating and creating new business models and new kinds of electronics? Innovation is not a zero sum game. Instead of thinking about how can we protect what we know and stop Chinese people from innovating, it would be more productive for us to learn what we can from them, and then maybe improve our business models. I agree with you that hands on production work is important for innovation and businesses in the US and Europe should keep that in mind. But I just don't agree that everything is us vs. them. There's plenty of innovation to be done by all sides.
I think the government should support open source development, but not through some expensive stimulus package. The best way for the government to support open source is by simply releasing much of the code they already develop. There must be thousands of government employed programmers in the country, working on many kinds of projects. If these projects were open source it could help businesses who might find some of the software useful, and it would help the government IT workers by allowing the public to make contributions through helping to find bugs, submitting patches, etc.
I see the list has a screenshot for Battle for Wesnoth. I started playing it a couple months ago when it was mentioned here on Slashdot, and it's really fun. It's a turn based strategy which is maybe not as intense as a RTS or FPS. But it's perfect for me because I have young kids and frequently get interrupted, so I need a game that I walk away from without messing up the game.
I'm sure they will base their distribution on one of the existing ones. So they will probably take ubuntu or fedora for example and fork it. Then inspect and test the code and maybe add a few things (to monitor the users?), and then release their own distribution. The problem with just choosing standard Red Hat or Ubuntu is that they would still depend on a foreign company which is part of the reason they want to get away from M$.
So if someone tells you to follow orders or your wife and family will be put into the prison camp, are you still a mercenary? Or are you caught in an impossible situation and trying to make a choice that nobody should have to make?
Why would you follow orders from someone who threatened your family? What would make you trust them enough to keep their word? If you do follow their orders, they might threaten you again later and order you to do something else just as bad or worse. When they are done with you they might through you and your family into the prison camp anyway.
I didn't say Glass-Steagall was the only cause, but it did contribute to the problems so calling it a scapegoat is misleading. So you want to remove the greedy people from wall street? Good luck with that! If there are ways to make money and avoid risk without breaking the law, people will find them. Everyone is greedy to a certain point, that's what makes the free market work. But it also has to be restricted to prevent some people from messing it up for everyone else.
The truth is that the economic crisis happened because the financial markets found new ways to be greedy that no one understood.
It wasn't even a new way to be greedy, we just forgot what was learned in the great depression: that it's a bad idea to allow commercial banks to underwrite securities. There were many contributors that helped cause the current economic troubles, but certainly one of the most important was the gradual erosion of Glass-Steagal.
Damn, I thought it meant they would have robot wives there for us.
To me it seems really inevitable that microsoft will eventually have to open source windows. It may still be a ways off, but in the long run I just don't see how they can compete against linux and other open source operating systems. Linux gets better every year while microsoft stagnates. We've already seen some of the problems Windows has with driver support for example in Vista. If they open source windows and start moving toward a business model more like Red Hat, it would allow people to improve legacy drivers, find and fix various bugs in the os, and they would end up with a better operating system. No matter how much money they throw at the development of their OS, it just won't be able to keep up with the open source world, especially in terms of supporting legacy devices.
I watched an interesting video a while back about what can be done to increase your chances of survival during a nuclear attack. The gist of it is that after the detonation you should make sure you get out of the path of the radiation which will be flowing with the wind. The presentation approaches the issue in a more rational way than most of our politicians.
This is the problem with the current plurality voting system, and until you change the voting system there will always be this spoiler effect. Sometimes it helps your candidate and sometimes it hurts your candidate, but it's always wrong to blame the thirdparty candidate for a major candidate's win or loss. Many of those Nader voters probably wouldn't have voted for either candidate had Nader not run, but even if 100% of them would have voted for Gore or Kerry, it is still not Nader's fault that they lost.
Using approval or range voting, this wouldn't even be an issue, which is why I hate it when democrats or republicans blame a spoiler candidate for their loss, but will never talk about changing the voting system to make it more fair for everyone.
I don't see any reason why you can't get some programming experience while working on QA. You should at least be able to get read access to the code of the projects you are working on. When you find bugs during you QA work try tracking them down and/or writing unit tests for them. Depending on what languages are used there, you should probably get to know JUnit or NUnit or search for other testing frameworks that might be relevant to your project. Then create a patch with the test and attach that to the issue. It will make the developer's life easier and prevent the issue from occurring again later. Obviously, not all test can be easily automated, but you're bound to find a few along the way.
If you're able to create an automated test for the issue, the next step is to see if you can fix it yourself. If you sumbit a few unit tests with fixes, the development team will probably start thinking about hiring you if/when an opening comes up. If openings do not come up within a year or two, then at least you have gained some good experience that can be used during interviews, or to help out one of the many open source projects that desperately need better automated tests.
You are obviously correct that it is not likely any thirdparty candidate will win this election. But allowing them to enter the debates is what helps third parties get recognition as a valid alternative. It gives them publicity, spreads their ideas, and can help them grow their party base which is what could help get one of them elected to various positions in the future. The two main parties have done a great job of keeping the majority of the American public completely ignorant about the other parties. If, when watching the debates, you are only concerned about finding out who will be elected then it makes sense to keep the debates closed. If instead you are interested in spreading the best ideas and possibly getting those ideas implemented by whoever is in office, then I think it is better to have maybe the five top parties represented.
So, by that logic, every piece of software that can be updated is beta.
Which means that every piece of software is beta, since any software could conceivably be updated. And in that case the term "beta" becomes redundant so we are back where we started. I think you're right they just don't want the responsibility if something fails.
Someone should nominate the deletion criteria pages for deletion. Let's delete anything that describes rules about what should be deleted.
From your example, I really don't see what the problem is. You imply that B is the more liked candidate, but if his own supporters are giving him a 7, and another group is giving him zeros, maybe he shouldn't win. A is the only candidate who doesn't get any zeros, and he has the highest average score, to me it seems like the system chooses the best candidate in this example.
No voting system is perfect, including range voting. And so there will always be edge cases where the system does not elect the ideal candidate. But range voting (and approval which is a subset of range) have been shown to give the least amount of bayesian regret. It is certainly better than the current plurality system which is one of the least fair voting methods.
Totally agree with you about Malcom Gladwell. I didn't read Blink, but I read some of The Tipping Point. I also saw him give a presentation. He's a great speaker in terms of being entertaining and engaging, unfortunately if you actually listen to the content of what he's saying it's garbage.
I think option 1 is a great idea. For option 2, I don't think you need to make deletion difficult. Instead you could just make recovery easy. So if an article gets deleted by one administrator, make it easy for someone else to vote for it and add it back in.
Personally I don't think any articles should be deleted. If an article has incorrect or irrelevant information, then either correct it or make a note about what is incorrect. It doesn't matter how much garbage is in wikipedia as long as the information is well organized enough so that you can find the information you are looking for. I would think people would understand that based on how well wikipedia already works even with all the people who try to vandalize it.
there's usually going to be some prior art if your work has any value at all
And this one
As long as your work builds upon what's been done in a meaningful way
conflict with each other. I'm not a patent expert, but I usually take prior art to mean that your idea has been done before and that you new idea does not have meaningful improvements to the existing ideas. The difficult part of patent examination is determining what changes are meaningful enough to warrant a patent. As an example, if I take an old process and use it in a web page instead of on the command line, I wouldn't consider that a meaningful improvement. But it may seem meaningful to some people.
more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia
While this certainly is not a good thing for the environment, I wonder how this compares to pollution coming from the United States. According to wikipedia the US produced the most CO2 of any country in 2006. China might top the list this year, but I'm sure the US isn't far behind. I guess my point is that it seems hypocritical to criticize China for sending pollution to us when we've been doing it to the rest of the world for a long time. We should be leading by example and cleaning up our own industries first instead of trying to place blame.