Anyway for our vehicle systems, the design documents are to be public
domain (with author copyrights of course) and support software will be
GPL'd or BSD licensed.
*sigh*
If you create something, copyright is implicitly granted to you.
If you explicitly register it with a government, or mark it with
a copyright notice, or both, the copyright is made more enforceable
in courts, but the copyright already existed.
If you transfer or license copyright to another party, then they
can copy or distribute it within the bounds of the agreement. It
depends on the bounds of the agreement as to whether you, the
creator, can continue to copy or distribute it.
Putting something in the Public Domain negates and relinquishes all
copyrights. That's the point. The thing may then be copied and
distributed and modified and incorporated in derivative works by anyone
in the world, without attribution. The only thing that is still not
possible ethically or morally is to try to assign or limit reproduction
with a new copyright on any substantially unchanged version.
It is rare, but sometimes excessive licensed reproduction, to the point of cultural ubiquity, can negate all copyrights on a work and put it into the Public Domain. For example, NASA's photograph of Earth during Apollo 17 mission was once the most reproduced photo in the world, with hundreds of thousands or millions of licensed placements. Its ubiquity dilutes its controls.
If you consciously put your vehicle design documents into the Public Domain, then
you can choose whether or not to include attribution of the
authors. However, saying that Joe Blow wrote the plans is a far
cry from claiming, asserting or enforcing a right to control copying.
DoubleClick just quit ad Personalizating
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 2
An
article on C|Net just reported DoubleClick doesn't find personalized ad profiles to be profitable:
The New York-based company jettisoned its "intelligent" targeting service effective Dec. 31, a company representative confirmed Tuesday. Launched in 2000, the product allowed marketers to target ads based on a database of some 100 million profiles. The technology tracked people online anonymously and then served ads based on personal tastes.
The overhead of storing the data appears to outweigh the advertisers' demand for such data.
"Employers are winning key legal victories against former workers who criticize them online. Rulings in the waning days of 2001 could have a chilling effect on workers' use of cyberspace for years to come, civil libertarians say. The battle over Internet free speech also is heating up as more firms crack down on grousing by laid-off staff."
But you know, Whistler's Mother actually just cut and pasted it from USA Today's page. No thought, no additional quote marks, no attribution to the actual writer, Stephanie Armour, just a quick dump to the submission form to get their name on the Slashdot front page.
And if you think this is off-topic, we're discussing 'online publication integrity', which would include slander, libel, plagiarism and general complaining. If people would respect each others rights, and don't take the lazy or litigious way through life, then we'd actually get somewhere.
So your[sic] saying that acdemic[sic] institutions shouldn't have any way of protecting their IP. Any hard work put in by the people there, the money donated by the institution, businesses and grants should count for nothing if a "company" wants to use the idea.
Yes, and especially for state-funded schools. It's not just one company who should benefit either, but any and all companies who want to benefit from the ideas generated through university research.
Salon has an article on just this sort of thing, where schools are turning their research into Big Business instead of Big Teaching.
My favorite quote: Larry Smarr, a professor of computer science at U.C. San Diego, said, "I
don't think universities should be in the moneymaking business. They ought to be in the changing-the-world business, and open source is a great vehicle for changing the world."
The alumni donate money to the school, not to maximize their investment in profits, but to maximize the impact of learning and teaching. Pure Research is not Applied Research. Pure Research is setting out a roadmap where none existed before, and what good is a roadmap if the society which paid for it cannot use it?
In the movie, the party was standing in the ring of stone-turned trolls, but they didn't explain what they were. Bilbo told the hobbit children the story during the party.
A very understated treatment and quite nice.
Unlike the ham-fisted approach to Galadriel's inner struggle.
According to the 'order AquaPAD' page, the base prices are $660 for either Midori or WinCE included.
I sure hope the situation is that the Midori distribution team is getting money for each Midori AquaPAD sold, instead of the more likely case of Microsoft being paid per-cpu whether it includes WinCE or not.
Personally, I dont hear too many new comments on/. anymore. I think that instead of writing everything out, we should recycle electrons and just use links to what someone else already said
That sounds a lot like an old Bill Gates legend, where he was tired of how circular arguments about technological religion would get. He joked that he needed a more terse way of talking to avoid the lengthy redundancies. "If I said 13, for example, that would mean 'that's the stupidest thing I ever heard,' and you could reply with 27 for 'maybe you should find somebody else to reinvent the wheel, then.'"
If you have leads to more Audreys, other than the hiked prices on eBay, I'd be interested to find one new unit. I missed the Tiger Direct sale procrastinating. Email me?
--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]
People using their computers don't need to know much beyond "Push button A and action B results."vsTelling someone "To A, push B" is not teaching, it's more like programming the student.
Both are teaching, but very different kinds. Not everyone can extrapolate well, nor should they be forced to learn the same way someone else learns. How about the teacher asking the user (or inferring from past experience with them) what kind of teaching/training/learning experience they want to have?
"Do you want to accomplish something specifically right now, or would you like to take this opportunity to learn a general approach to this kind of problem?"
If I remember to do this, I find the lesson goes much easier. They get what they want, and they'll come back again if they need help again.
Many people cannot seem to generalize or extrapolate, and trying to make them generalize or extrapolate is a painful waste of time for both of you. Many people can generalize only after going through a couple rote examples from their real-world problems, not with applied theory. That doesn't make them stupid, it just means that a good teacher has to be ready with more than one way to help explain a topic.
"platform agnostic" and runs on IE only... those marketeers never fail to amuse me.
Well, the literal meaning of "agnostic" is "in a manner without knowledge." A- gnostic. The dictionary lists "professing ignorance."
Perhaps running on IE only really is being agnostic.:)
Re:Nitpick Redux
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
HH:MM:SS time is actually called "sexagesimal."
Yes, it is called sexagesimal, but that's a misnomer. It's three decimal components with distinct modulo periods.
For mathematicians, sexagesimal numbering would use sixty different digit symbols, for every component. The Babylonians used sexagesimal numbering for a range of things, not just counting minutes, but that's where we got the hour/minute/second convention.
Someone below also mentioned that the watch is "binary coded sexagesimal". That's closer to the mark, as the minutes and seconds digits are shown in distinct groupings of six binary digits (wasting four permutations for 60, 61, 62, 63). It does not count for the hours position, though, as that is shown with only five binary digits.
A twelve-hour system would be "binary coded duodecimal," but the watch appears to use a twenty-four hour system which would be called "binary coded tetravigesimal."
The Plano, Il., police page you listed was very informative. I love reading log sheets like this for small town police units. The infractions seem so petty compared to the big stuff you see on the mainstream news.
The township name of Sandwich Il. seems somewhat unfortunate with the title "Female Juvenile Sandwich" halfway down the page, though. I'm sure a few people had to double-take to read that properly.
nVidia supplies source code only for the 2D functionality on their cards to date, apparently because their technology draws on some patent-encumbered features from third parties (rumored SGI). nVidia flatly refuses (and indeed cannot) release the specifications to Open Source developers.
nVidia supplies a binary precompiled OpenGL-accelerated driver for Linux, or rather several varieties for different kernel configurations. However, those precompiled drivers are (1) not supported by some distributions (e.g., Red Hat) because they can't be properly debugged, fixed or improved by distribution-producing companies, and (2) are unstable for some people running Linux for unknown reasons. A badly written kernel plugin can wreak plenty havoc on the whole running system, with little protection.
Matrox and ATi are more supportive of the Open Source world, because they are in control of their own technologies and see the benefit of many developers collaborating on their drivers. DRI support can move forward to get fast and safe access to video hardware without endangering the safety or security of the rest of the machine.
One of the Windows technologies' biggest problem is the unexplained BSoD. Death from nowhere with little explanation. The major cause of BSoDs is poorly written device drivers which run in an unprotected ring zero environment. One bad instruction can ruin your whole machine's state. Is this what we want for the Linux environment? Are we going to keep adding unprotected, unknown and undebuggable closed source solutions into the Linux kernel, adding more and more sources of kernel lockups? Do we need to start talking about a PSoD (Penguin Screen of Death)?
I'm looking forward to the upcoming drivers for new ATi Radeon cards, myself. Open Source DRI/DRM drivers and solid 2D and 3D performance. How about you?
The way to deal with the DMCA is not to pretend it does not exists, but to show how ridiculous it is, and that means obeying it and showing how it limits development.
So, slightly tongue-in-cheek, is this what Gandhi or Thoreau would call civil obedience?
As discussed earlier, Thomas Macaulay used the terms 'piracy' and 'piratical' for those who ignored early copyright and reproduced books, depriving the writers their due income from their own works. This was 160 years ago. I'd say, get over the hangup about this use of language.
Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. [...] Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. --Thomas Macaulay, 1841
From that page, here is the meat of the settlement, which is far from a "win" by Wolfram and the site's creator:
We eventually concluded that there was no real business discussion possible. CRC was simply incapable of listening to or evaluating an actual business proposal. So we weighed the costs of continued litigation against the costs of giving CRC some of the cash for which it appeared so hungry. The cash approach won.
In addition to its "instant win," CRC will be paid annually for books they don't sell, according to a formula that both sides have accepted--although we continue to believe that any past or future failure to achieve projected sales is far more plausibly attributed to CRC's abysmal marketing efforts than to any abuse of the web site by people who want to have and hold snapshots of its contents. But in this life we do what we have to do--and what we are willing to do.
Another important change is that, as part of the settlement agreement, CRC Press will now be given permission to create editions of the printed book based on future snapshots of the website. As a result, CRC insisted that broad reproduction rights to all contributed material be secured. Furthermore, if we are not able to secure such rights, then Wolfram Research and I, at our own expense, must rewrite the entries in question from scratch for CRC to reproduce. This makes it extremely difficult for us to include any new contributed material on the website unless we first secure permissions using CRC's boilerplate permissions form. This form is endorsed by neither Wolfram Research nor myself, but as part of the settlement agreement, we are required to ask contributors to sign it. Since our goal is and always has been to provide your contributions on-line to the worldwide math community, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or imposition this CRC-mandated form may cause you.
I understand not having the financial resources to fight such disastrous suits, but I really wish more light was shed on this issue BEFORE the settlement. There is a whole world outside Wolfram Research, and perhaps such a fight would have been possible if more people knew it was necessary.
Great Rules for Writing
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 4, Funny
In Part Two: Have multinationals hijacked globalism? (Yes.)
Great! Glad you answered that one. Now I don't have to read the second of two parts.
JonKatz, here are some "Great Rules for Writing" from William Safire in the New York Times:
Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
It is incumbent on one to avoid archaisms.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
The problem is the duplication of effort and decreased manpower for each VM. Not only that, but any project that works closely with the VM has to test under twice as many conditions, and may require different code for each. Talk about a maintenance problem.
And this would somehow not be the problem with a fork? Considering Linux vs *BSD is already a division of the pool of possibly alignable geeks, and considering both Linux and *BSD families continue to grow, innovate and expand, I think the problem is overrated.
Organizations align on common goals and pursuits, by definition. If there were two or more unalignable goals in the VM, then either a fork or an unforked competition would be in order, and would have the same issues of reduced effort and increased maintenance chores.
Personally, as a non-kernel developer, I think the different VM issues are probably overblown in the moment, and that the best approaches will forge ahead with some significant consensus in the mid-term. Until then, it's worth the experimentation it takes to decide what are the best approaches.
Re:Best Excerpt
on
WipOut Contest
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. [...] Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. --Thomas Macaulay, 1841
What strikes me here is the use of the word piratical. It is no new thing to consider the wholesale disregard for copyright as "piracy," a theft that has very real connotations on the wages of the copyright holder.
I am no fan of DMCA or SSSCA, but I am also no fan of disregard for copyright. It has its place, and as Thomas Macaulay was saying, if treated properly, ensures income for the popular working artist. The key here is to respect the creator's intent. If you want Metallica songs, pay for the CDs. If you want Stephen King novels, pay for the pages. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Vote with your dollars.
It says 'www Inventor' in the headline... yet I don't see Al Gore's name anywhere...
Ha ha ha, yes, how funny.
However, the joke goes that Al Gore "invented" the Internet, not the World Wide Web. The WWW is only one aspect of the Internet, certainly the killer app that brought it mainstream in the 1990s.
Good ol' Al never sought credit for "inventing" it, but did claim some responsibility for "creating" it in its current form: a public and global network mostly driven by the private sector. In his years as a lawmaker, he did sponsor legislation that supported this transition from a purely academic (ARPA) and military (DARPA) tool of one country, mostly driven by the government of that country.
While it's all nice and good to say "the Audrey is great at $89," or "I'd buy a device like that at $89," that doesn't help future product development that much.
The $89 tag is the current clearance price that an online reseller is offering. It doesn't address the actual price of the unit, just the best price that the reseller can get rid of the unsold inventory. The $89 price tag is far below the total cost of development, manufacture and support.
Future products would sell well if they had all the Audrey has, at the same price. It's just not going to happen any time soon, and by that time, the feature set of the Audrey will be quaint, even for its kitchen niche. It costs money to develop products, and if the manufacturer is getting screwed, they won't be encouraged to develop more.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway for our vehicle systems, the design documents are to be public domain (with author copyrights of course) and support software will be GPL'd or BSD licensed.
*sigh*
If you create something, copyright is implicitly granted to you.
If you explicitly register it with a government, or mark it with a copyright notice, or both, the copyright is made more enforceable in courts, but the copyright already existed.
If you transfer or license copyright to another party, then they can copy or distribute it within the bounds of the agreement. It depends on the bounds of the agreement as to whether you, the creator, can continue to copy or distribute it.
Putting something in the Public Domain negates and relinquishes all copyrights. That's the point. The thing may then be copied and distributed and modified and incorporated in derivative works by anyone in the world, without attribution. The only thing that is still not possible ethically or morally is to try to assign or limit reproduction with a new copyright on any substantially unchanged version.
It is rare, but sometimes excessive licensed reproduction, to the point of cultural ubiquity, can negate all copyrights on a work and put it into the Public Domain. For example, NASA's photograph of Earth during Apollo 17 mission was once the most reproduced photo in the world, with hundreds of thousands or millions of licensed placements. Its ubiquity dilutes its controls.
If you consciously put your vehicle design documents into the Public Domain, then you can choose whether or not to include attribution of the authors. However, saying that Joe Blow wrote the plans is a far cry from claiming, asserting or enforcing a right to control copying.
An article on C|Net just reported DoubleClick doesn't find personalized ad profiles to be profitable:
- The New York-based company jettisoned its "intelligent" targeting service effective Dec. 31, a company representative confirmed Tuesday. Launched in 2000, the product allowed marketers to target ads based on a database of some 100 million profiles. The technology tracked people online anonymously and then served ads based on personal tastes.
The overhead of storing the data appears to outweigh the advertisers' demand for such data.The writeup says,
But you know, Whistler's Mother actually just cut and pasted it from USA Today's page. No thought, no additional quote marks, no attribution to the actual writer, Stephanie Armour, just a quick dump to the submission form to get their name on the Slashdot front page.
And if you think this is off-topic, we're discussing 'online publication integrity', which would include slander, libel, plagiarism and general complaining. If people would respect each others rights, and don't take the lazy or litigious way through life, then we'd actually get somewhere.
So your[sic] saying that acdemic[sic] institutions shouldn't have any way of protecting their IP. Any hard work put in by the people there, the money donated by the institution, businesses and grants should count for nothing if a "company" wants to use the idea.
Yes, and especially for state-funded schools. It's not just one company who should benefit either, but any and all companies who want to benefit from the ideas generated through university research.
Salon has an article on just this sort of thing, where schools are turning their research into Big Business instead of Big Teaching.
My favorite quote: Larry Smarr, a professor of computer science at U.C. San Diego, said, "I don't think universities should be in the moneymaking business. They ought to be in the changing-the-world business, and open source is a great vehicle for changing the world."
The alumni donate money to the school, not to maximize their investment in profits, but to maximize the impact of learning and teaching. Pure Research is not Applied Research. Pure Research is setting out a roadmap where none existed before, and what good is a roadmap if the society which paid for it cannot use it?
In the movie, the party was standing in the ring of stone-turned trolls, but they didn't explain what they were. Bilbo told the hobbit children the story during the party.
A very understated treatment and quite nice.
Unlike the ham-fisted approach to Galadriel's inner struggle.
The current pearl images are coded like this:
<img BORDER=0 SRC="//images.slashdot.org/neutral.gif" ALT="Alter Relationship">
It would be nice if they used the align tag to set properly in the line of text:
<img BORDER=0 SRC="//images.slashdot.org/neutral.gif" ALT="Alter Relationship" align="absmiddle">
According to the 'order AquaPAD' page, the base prices are $660 for either Midori or WinCE included.
I sure hope the situation is that the Midori distribution team is getting money for each Midori AquaPAD sold, instead of the more likely case of Microsoft being paid per-cpu whether it includes WinCE or not.
Anyone know for sure?
Pity I don't have that installed on the AIX machine in my office. Isn't that from "Bored of the Rings", that someone mentioned above?
Pity? Yes, pity stayed his hand. "Pity I ran out of bullets," he thought.
Personally, I dont hear too many new comments on /. anymore. I think that instead of writing everything out, we should recycle electrons and just use links to what someone else already said
That sounds a lot like an old Bill Gates legend, where he was tired of how circular arguments about technological religion would get. He joked that he needed a more terse way of talking to avoid the lengthy redundancies. "If I said 13, for example, that would mean 'that's the stupidest thing I ever heard,' and you could reply with 27 for 'maybe you should find somebody else to reinvent the wheel, then.'"
If you have leads to more Audreys, other than the hiked prices on eBay, I'd be interested to find one new unit. I missed the Tiger Direct sale procrastinating. Email me? -- [ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]
People using their computers don't need to know much beyond "Push button A and action B results." vs Telling someone "To A, push B" is not teaching, it's more like programming the student.
Both are teaching, but very different kinds. Not everyone can extrapolate well, nor should they be forced to learn the same way someone else learns. How about the teacher asking the user (or inferring from past experience with them) what kind of teaching/training/learning experience they want to have?
"Do you want to accomplish something specifically right now, or would you like to take this opportunity to learn a general approach to this kind of problem?"
If I remember to do this, I find the lesson goes much easier. They get what they want, and they'll come back again if they need help again.
Many people cannot seem to generalize or extrapolate, and trying to make them generalize or extrapolate is a painful waste of time for both of you. Many people can generalize only after going through a couple rote examples from their real-world problems, not with applied theory. That doesn't make them stupid, it just means that a good teacher has to be ready with more than one way to help explain a topic.
"platform agnostic" and runs on IE only... those marketeers never fail to amuse me.
Well, the literal meaning of "agnostic" is "in a manner without knowledge." A- gnostic. The dictionary lists "professing ignorance."
Perhaps running on IE only really is being agnostic. :)
HH:MM:SS time is actually called "sexagesimal."
Yes, it is called sexagesimal, but that's a misnomer. It's three decimal components with distinct modulo periods.
For mathematicians, sexagesimal numbering would use sixty different digit symbols, for every component. The Babylonians used sexagesimal numbering for a range of things, not just counting minutes, but that's where we got the hour/minute/second convention.
Someone below also mentioned that the watch is "binary coded sexagesimal". That's closer to the mark, as the minutes and seconds digits are shown in distinct groupings of six binary digits (wasting four permutations for 60, 61, 62, 63). It does not count for the hours position, though, as that is shown with only five binary digits.
A twelve-hour system would be "binary coded duodecimal," but the watch appears to use a twenty-four hour system which would be called "binary coded tetravigesimal."
The Plano, Il., police page you listed was very informative. I love reading log sheets like this for small town police units. The infractions seem so petty compared to the big stuff you see on the mainstream news.
The township name of Sandwich Il. seems somewhat unfortunate with the title "Female Juvenile Sandwich" halfway down the page, though. I'm sure a few people had to double-take to read that properly.
Someone who is more enterprising than myself could set up some more 3rd level delegations, like [...] vivendiuniversalsucks.theyjustsuckperiod.com...
Hey, maybe this is the way to get that old great online humor site back in the black! Offer subdomains to the highest bidding malcontent.
nVidia supplies source code only for the 2D functionality on their cards to date, apparently because their technology draws on some patent-encumbered features from third parties (rumored SGI). nVidia flatly refuses (and indeed cannot) release the specifications to Open Source developers.
nVidia supplies a binary precompiled OpenGL-accelerated driver for Linux, or rather several varieties for different kernel configurations. However, those precompiled drivers are (1) not supported by some distributions (e.g., Red Hat) because they can't be properly debugged, fixed or improved by distribution-producing companies, and (2) are unstable for some people running Linux for unknown reasons. A badly written kernel plugin can wreak plenty havoc on the whole running system, with little protection.
Matrox and ATi are more supportive of the Open Source world, because they are in control of their own technologies and see the benefit of many developers collaborating on their drivers. DRI support can move forward to get fast and safe access to video hardware without endangering the safety or security of the rest of the machine.
One of the Windows technologies' biggest problem is the unexplained BSoD. Death from nowhere with little explanation. The major cause of BSoDs is poorly written device drivers which run in an unprotected ring zero environment. One bad instruction can ruin your whole machine's state. Is this what we want for the Linux environment? Are we going to keep adding unprotected, unknown and undebuggable closed source solutions into the Linux kernel, adding more and more sources of kernel lockups? Do we need to start talking about a PSoD (Penguin Screen of Death)?
I'm looking forward to the upcoming drivers for new ATi Radeon cards, myself. Open Source DRI/DRM drivers and solid 2D and 3D performance. How about you?
The way to deal with the DMCA is not to pretend it does not exists, but to show how ridiculous it is, and that means obeying it and showing how it limits development.
So, slightly tongue-in-cheek, is this what Gandhi or Thoreau would call civil obedience?
As discussed earlier, Thomas Macaulay used the terms 'piracy' and 'piratical' for those who ignored early copyright and reproduced books, depriving the writers their due income from their own works. This was 160 years ago. I'd say, get over the hangup about this use of language.
Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. [...] Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. --Thomas Macaulay, 1841
From that page, here is the meat of the settlement, which is far from a "win" by Wolfram and the site's creator:
In addition to its "instant win," CRC will be paid annually for books they don't sell, according to a formula that both sides have accepted--although we continue to believe that any past or future failure to achieve projected sales is far more plausibly attributed to CRC's abysmal marketing efforts than to any abuse of the web site by people who want to have and hold snapshots of its contents. But in this life we do what we have to do--and what we are willing to do.
There are a few other consequences of the settlement which are of interest to MathWorld readers. The first is that a copyright statement "© 1999 CRC Press LLC" (in addition of the © 1999-2001 Wolfram Research, Inc. notice) now appears at the bottom of MathWorld entries that have a corresponding article in CRC's printed shapshot. Despite the fact the I (or volunteer contributors) wrote these entries, that CRC Press did nothing to support their creation or the creation of the web site in which they appear, and the fact that they existed in the website long before they ever appeared in the printed version, the tail has truly come to wave this dog, and this copyright statement will henceforth be a constant reminder of this fact.
Another important change is that, as part of the settlement agreement, CRC Press will now be given permission to create editions of the printed book based on future snapshots of the website. As a result, CRC insisted that broad reproduction rights to all contributed material be secured. Furthermore, if we are not able to secure such rights, then Wolfram Research and I, at our own expense, must rewrite the entries in question from scratch for CRC to reproduce. This makes it extremely difficult for us to include any new contributed material on the website unless we first secure permissions using CRC's boilerplate permissions form. This form is endorsed by neither Wolfram Research nor myself, but as part of the settlement agreement, we are required to ask contributors to sign it. Since our goal is and always has been to provide your contributions on-line to the worldwide math community, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or imposition this CRC-mandated form may cause you.
I understand not having the financial resources to fight such disastrous suits, but I really wish more light was shed on this issue BEFORE the settlement. There is a whole world outside Wolfram Research, and perhaps such a fight would have been possible if more people knew it was necessary.
In Part Two: Have multinationals hijacked globalism? (Yes.)
Great! Glad you answered that one. Now I don't have to read the second of two parts.
JonKatz, here are some "Great Rules for Writing" from William Safire in the New York Times:
Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
It is incumbent on one to avoid archaisms.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
The problem is the duplication of effort and decreased manpower for each VM. Not only that, but any project that works closely with the VM has to test under twice as many conditions, and may require different code for each. Talk about a maintenance problem.
And this would somehow not be the problem with a fork? Considering Linux vs *BSD is already a division of the pool of possibly alignable geeks, and considering both Linux and *BSD families continue to grow, innovate and expand, I think the problem is overrated.
Organizations align on common goals and pursuits, by definition. If there were two or more unalignable goals in the VM, then either a fork or an unforked competition would be in order, and would have the same issues of reduced effort and increased maintenance chores.
Personally, as a non-kernel developer, I think the different VM issues are probably overblown in the moment, and that the best approaches will forge ahead with some significant consensus in the mid-term. Until then, it's worth the experimentation it takes to decide what are the best approaches.
Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. [...] Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. --Thomas Macaulay, 1841
What strikes me here is the use of the word piratical. It is no new thing to consider the wholesale disregard for copyright as "piracy," a theft that has very real connotations on the wages of the copyright holder.
I am no fan of DMCA or SSSCA, but I am also no fan of disregard for copyright. It has its place, and as Thomas Macaulay was saying, if treated properly, ensures income for the popular working artist. The key here is to respect the creator's intent. If you want Metallica songs, pay for the CDs. If you want Stephen King novels, pay for the pages. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Vote with your dollars.
It says 'www Inventor' in the headline... yet I don't see Al Gore's name anywhere...
Ha ha ha, yes, how funny.
However, the joke goes that Al Gore "invented" the Internet, not the World Wide Web. The WWW is only one aspect of the Internet, certainly the killer app that brought it mainstream in the 1990s.
Good ol' Al never sought credit for "inventing" it, but did claim some responsibility for "creating" it in its current form: a public and global network mostly driven by the private sector. In his years as a lawmaker, he did sponsor legislation that supported this transition from a purely academic (ARPA) and military (DARPA) tool of one country, mostly driven by the government of that country.
I posted this open letter to my representatives on the topic of SSSCA, and included anecdotal review of why DMCA shouldn't have been passed.
It includes Scope, Civil, Business, Technical, and Motivational issues against anything that even smells like SSSCA.
While it's all nice and good to say "the Audrey is great at $89," or "I'd buy a device like that at $89," that doesn't help future product development that much.
The $89 tag is the current clearance price that an online reseller is offering. It doesn't address the actual price of the unit, just the best price that the reseller can get rid of the unsold inventory. The $89 price tag is far below the total cost of development, manufacture and support.
Future products would sell well if they had all the Audrey has, at the same price. It's just not going to happen any time soon, and by that time, the feature set of the Audrey will be quaint, even for its kitchen niche. It costs money to develop products, and if the manufacturer is getting screwed, they won't be encouraged to develop more.