Never throw good money after bad. Accept it as a loss, work to make sure that it doesn't happen again, and go back to conducting legitimate business.
because it's important for the greater good of the nation
A summary of the justification for Socialism. You know why socialist and communist states always fail? Greed. Greedy people always justify sucking your wallet dry in the interest of the greater good.
that is no argument for locking up publicly funded data.
The military does it all the time. If it's not military, then it's not within the government's jurisdiction to be funding it.
Either the public should not be paying for it, or the data should remain public
I agree but, even if we stop this sort of government wasteful spending, we'd still be lending legitimacy to government intervention in these arenas if we allow politicians to further appropriate funds to disseminate the wrongfully collected data.
No. The government is like a bad relationship. Cut your losses and be done with it. The federal government has no authority or jurisdiction to be meddling in these affairs and they have no authority or jurisdiction to further waste taxpayer dollars publishing the data they've already collected.
Cut the losses, turn the research material over to the rightful organizations (ACS, SOCMA, whoever) and be done with it.
Also, i believe that scientific knowledge is not even the property of humanity, let alone a corporation.
The scientific knowledge is the property of a person, until they write it down or present it to others. It's only owned by corporations due to overbearing employee agreements. Make sure you know where the real problem is.
A government is an entity which should protect a group of people's interests, namely the citizens of a nation. This includes science.
This is fast becoming the Union of American Socialist States with your line of thinking. What interest do you have in "Acylphloroglucinol Derivatives from Mahurea palustris", or "Highly Stable Phenanthridinium Frameworks as a New Class of Tunable DNA Binding Agents with Cytotoxic Properties", or "Biomimetic Synthesis of Elysiapyrones A and B"?
Come on. This is not stuff that you should be forced to spend your tax money on.
Big Brother Brainwashing has become so prevalent and accepted that it's silly. To think that brainwashed people actually have the right to vote and their majority vote will dictate how my tax money is spent.
I love America... it's just the stupidity of its citizenry which drives me up a wall.
The question of whether governments should finance research is a separate issue.
Not really. The ACS (I'm a member) is making a very good point that government is creating the problem and then trying to remedy it by spending more of your taxpayer money.
Say you cut a person's head off and then want the right to display that head publicly in a store window. The ACS is saying,"You know... you really shouldn't have done that in the first place."
The ACS does have business motives here. No one's denying that. Their point is still valid, however. There's no reason why the Federal Government should have any hand in these arenas of scientific research. If it were strictly military related, where the Federal Government does have legitimate involvement, then they wouldn't be trying to make it publicly available anyway.
Should your neighbor be allowed to plant a garden in your front lawn just because you weren't using it? Of course not. It's still your front lawn. The government is trying to plant crops and profit from an arena which rightfully belongs to the American Chemical Society and other professional chemistry organizations and the companies and individuals who are in their membership ranks.
If we follow government's route, pretty soon everything will be under the jurisdiction of the Union of American Socialist States.
So if I start my own fire brigade I should demand that publicly funded fire fighing be outlawed?
You're making a fool of yourself. This isn't about fighting fires, saving lives, or preventing destruction of property.
This is about forcing you to subscribe to a service which you probably have no personal interest in.
Libraries should be closed since booksellers are missing out on sales?
That's a local, maybe a state issue. The current issue is at the Federal level and... in that sense... you're right. The Federal Government should not have any position on or involvement with local libraries.
Private schols certainly have a distorted market with public schools being provided.
It's really a shame that private schools, offering better overall educations, have to compete for subsidy dollars on the playing field where all the qualifications have been written to include public schools by default.
Like trying to qualify for a subsidy written for blond people when you have black hair.
Who decides what is critical for the government to provide? Would you not say that health care, for instance, falls under providing safety?
Read the Constitution. Read the 9th and 10th Amendments. The official duty of the Federal Government is clearly defined and delineated.
It's worthwhile to note that the acts of the very first Congress were to agree, more or less, that the 9th and 10th Amendments don't really apply to them. 200 years later the mess that created is easy to see. The 9th and 10th Amendments were written as the closing parts of the Bill of Rights for a very good reason. An entity like the Federal Government must be kept under lock and chain at all times because, if given carte blanche to do whatever it wants, it can always justify sucking your wallet dry for your own good.
Maybe there's a good reason for wanting to reevaluate funding sources and access to data.
Why should you, as a taxpayer who doesn't give a rat's butt about advanced research in niche fields like Density Functional Theory, or 3+2 cyclizations, or Palladium catalyzed cross-coupling, be forced to pay for the infrastructure for the government to make this information available to you?
I'm a chemist, I like this stuff but this is really information that should be on a subscription basis. If you like it, you'll subscribe to it and you'll fund it. If you don't like it, then you won't subscribe to it and it won't cost you any more money.
Mandatory subscription is the basis of government bloat. It then leads to graft, corruption, and money laundering.
Access to high level chemical and biological research material is hardly a basic service like education.
But, as long as you bring it up, government funded and regulated education is a horrible scam. It's wasteful, it's ineffective, in many cases it repropagates complete falsehoods (eg. Pearl Harbor, the reason why the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the motives and causes behind the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression, and the creation of the Federal Reserve), and in today's world it does little more than preserve the social strata of those who can afford the extra money to live in posh districts.
I think that, what the GPL had in mind, the company would be intelligent enough to want to employ the coders of the original GPLd code and thus increase the quality of their employee pool. That's just wishful thinking, though, since "quality of employee pool" is typically measured only by letters after a name and really isn't all that important on the quarterly report to the IRS. I guess that makes the IRS the enforcer of a social caste system.
This is precisely where the American legal system fails. In order to bring a suit against someone who has committed a civil wrongdoing (ie. not a crime against the state) the full burden of expense falls on the victim.
Like all those trolls who love to ride people who remark about the inequities of corporate America,"If you don't like it then start your own company."
And just where does the magic startup capital come from?
The solution is not increased government assistance. That would only lead to abuse and frivolous lawsuits. The solution is a streamlined system of justice which isn't endlessly bottlenecked by paperwork, frivolous forms, and lawyers. If a GAIM developer should walk into an attorney's office with proof that IMblaze is a ripoff of their code, there should be a compensation check and a court injunction against IMblaze within 24 hours.
after all, you don't lose anything if you get caught, and you gain something if you don't.
That would be our politicians teaching this to the companies.
as it will only encourage the less-than-scrupulous companies to commit further license violations, many of which *will* go undetected... Taking code from a GPL'ed library, though, for example, and integrating that into your $10K+ enterprise application, will most likely not be noticed, even though it is just as illegal.
I've long proposed that this is PRECISELY what big companies are doing. If not directly then it doesn't take much tin foil to imagine a situation where someone has a copy of an old group project, no way (or no real desire) to contact the other contributing members of the group, goes on to rework some of the code and sell the group's project at an enormous profit (QDOS?).
At this level it's no longer even about the GPL. It's just the way things work. Software industry: college code. Legal industry: high school and college debate arguments. Chemical industry: college research projects and PhD dissertations.
This entire world is based on people stealing from each other without giving proper credit... and the major world governments are protecting the thieves typically because the thieves are related, by blood, marriage, or business, to the politicians.
Not to worry, though, maybe an industry will spring up around the security software industry... providing us with meta-security software...! (even heavier sigh.)
Sounds like the insurance industry. Next thing you know, you'll be receiving $500 fines for not subscribing to at least one security software scam.
To me, Monad is an exciting effort to try to reinvent the command line.
The biggest hurdle for the Monad shell is that Microsoft has painted themselves into a corner. The vast majority of software running on a Windows platform was not written with command line operability or scripting in mind.
The Monad shell may be nice. Heck, it may turn out to be superior to any *nix *sh shell. When it comes right down to it, though, the Windows developers are not going to begin rewriting all of their software just to make it command line compliant.
Ever think that these particularly obnoxious chatrooms were started by a politician or an attorney for the sole purpose of bolstering their case in court or the congressional floor? Maybe they were started by members of the "accounts payable" department with the sole purpose of having an excuse not to give Yahoo! owed money.
I highly doubt there more than 2 people in any of those chat rooms at any time, and one of them was probably a channel service bot.
Okay, let's just face it. Theo's right. He always is. That's just the way the world is.
Now let's think about it from the viewpoint of reality. The reality is that ranting and raving and openly attacking the competition, while self-fulfilling, isn't the right kind of PR to advocate your own platform. Theo will learn, eventually, that the world runs on relationships. Superior relationships (often embodied by advertising) will beat superior technology each and every time.
Any technical specifics about how oBSD is better than Linux?
Look, I'm not a zealot. I don't use Linux because I hate Windows. I use Linux because Windows doesn't give me what I need. When I want to inspect packets at a low level, it was like entering a new country in Windows. When I want to inspect packets on a low level in Linux, it's like knocking on the neighbor's door. Windows has distanced itself from real computer use to application use. That's its business model and frankly, as a computer hobbyist, I have no use for the goals which Windows fulfills.
So, that said, how about this rant about oBSD being so superior to Linux? So what? It's all POSIX based with an sh compatible (more or less) shell. The only thing making Linux more like Windows is Gnome and KDE. Thank God Enlightenment knows where to draw the line. I get a pretty GUI that doesn't try to teach parlor tricks to my toaster oven.
it doesn't surprise me in the least that companies - which exist in a capitalist system for the sole purpose of taking money from people - are stomping all over people's rights for the purpose of fattening their wallets
Quit with the amateur wannabe jargon political posting. Face reality.
We, in the US, do not live in a capitalist system. A capitalist system with thousands and thousands of government rules and regulations is communism. To put it another way, if you could remove the government control and oversight from communism, you would have capitalism.
Quit blaming capitalism. Your brand of misinformation is going to result in an enormous amount of people running in the wrong direction and further making a mess of things.
The money launderer here is government. The people writing the rules, with the appropriate loopholes, allowing companies to stomp all over the rights of the people are the politicians. The people who are focusing on the letter of the law as opposed to the right or wrong of a given situation are the government appointed judges.
I'd love to see that happen. You know why? Because then we can go at it from the angle of,"Microsoft is giving away the equivalent of a lit black cat firecracker for a nickel!".
Which is really what they should be doing, in an inverse-converse way, to the media industry. "They're giving the stuff away to anyone with $15... how important can their property be?
How about we filter telephone frequencies so that you can't use your modem unless you tell us first? How about that one? How did that one go over in the courts? They tried it. Eventually we beat it, or else everyone would've been paying $100/mo. for dialup service and anyone using a computer online would've immediately been marked for extra "consideration".
My ISP me with an IP, DNS services, routing services, and a bare wire with a signal. How about we leave it that way?
I nominate the politicians who were paid by lobbyists to write the laws to help the lawyers to convince the judges to uphold EULAs that divest companies like MIcrosoft from accepting any responsibility for selling software which allows these sorts of things to happen.
It's because they put distribution above the product. They were in it for the money more than the product quality. As a consequence they paid the lawyers to shield them from users with stolen identity, trashed credit, stalkers, or whose machines have been hijacked to participate in illicit activity.
Siphoning off computing power just like the politicians siphon off tax money--when you're not looking and in a way that you can't do anything about it or hold anyone accountable. I guess we know who taught these botnet owners how to do business.
Let's hope the control systems for those things are not connected via some backdoor to to a network in turn connected via some other back door to a network connected to the internet, eh?
I don't know anything about using snmp exploits in printers to get to machines which are supposedly not connected to the internet.
*whistles innocently and walks off while checking the rear view mirror for details*
A fellow victim in college removed all the keys from his keyboard to clean them. He became impatient, or plain didn't care, when he put the keys back on. Only the keys which were limited by their physical shape were replaced in their correct places.
We didn't meausre his typing speed before and after. There was, however, a large increase in tiny outbursts of displeasure directed at the keyboard.
"I disagree. One can define theft as taking an item that one is not legally entitled to.
You must be new in society. The prevailing mantra is that anything which isn't nailed down is free. If it's on the open network then, in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, it must've been put there by someone who had the legal authority to put it there.
All this advertising by the MPAA only applies to the other guy. He's the one downloading the pirated stuff. All of the stuff which I download has been put here legally for free. Just because they're selling it at the store is because they're selling the whole CD and the cover art. The music they is given away for free by someone with the legal authority to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
A summary of the justification for Socialism. You know why socialist and communist states always fail? Greed. Greedy people always justify sucking your wallet dry in the interest of the greater good.
I agree but, even if we stop this sort of government wasteful spending, we'd still be lending legitimacy to government intervention in these arenas if we allow politicians to further appropriate funds to disseminate the wrongfully collected data.
No. The government is like a bad relationship. Cut your losses and be done with it. The federal government has no authority or jurisdiction to be meddling in these affairs and they have no authority or jurisdiction to further waste taxpayer dollars publishing the data they've already collected.
Cut the losses, turn the research material over to the rightful organizations (ACS, SOCMA, whoever) and be done with it.
This is about startup capital, not after-the-fact awards. There is no try or award if you can't afford the case in the first place.
As usual... troll troll troll your boat.
This is fast becoming the Union of American Socialist States with your line of thinking. What interest do you have in "Acylphloroglucinol Derivatives from Mahurea palustris", or "Highly Stable Phenanthridinium Frameworks as a New Class of Tunable DNA Binding Agents with Cytotoxic Properties", or "Biomimetic Synthesis of Elysiapyrones A and B"?
Come on. This is not stuff that you should be forced to spend your tax money on.
Big Brother Brainwashing has become so prevalent and accepted that it's silly. To think that brainwashed people actually have the right to vote and their majority vote will dictate how my tax money is spent.
I love America... it's just the stupidity of its citizenry which drives me up a wall.
Say you cut a person's head off and then want the right to display that head publicly in a store window. The ACS is saying,"You know... you really shouldn't have done that in the first place."
The ACS does have business motives here. No one's denying that. Their point is still valid, however. There's no reason why the Federal Government should have any hand in these arenas of scientific research. If it were strictly military related, where the Federal Government does have legitimate involvement, then they wouldn't be trying to make it publicly available anyway.
Should your neighbor be allowed to plant a garden in your front lawn just because you weren't using it? Of course not. It's still your front lawn. The government is trying to plant crops and profit from an arena which rightfully belongs to the American Chemical Society and other professional chemistry organizations and the companies and individuals who are in their membership ranks.
If we follow government's route, pretty soon everything will be under the jurisdiction of the Union of American Socialist States.
This is about forcing you to subscribe to a service which you probably have no personal interest in.
That's a local, maybe a state issue. The current issue is at the Federal level and... in that sense... you're right. The Federal Government should not have any position on or involvement with local libraries.
It's really a shame that private schools, offering better overall educations, have to compete for subsidy dollars on the playing field where all the qualifications have been written to include public schools by default.
Like trying to qualify for a subsidy written for blond people when you have black hair.
Read the Constitution. Read the 9th and 10th Amendments. The official duty of the Federal Government is clearly defined and delineated.
It's worthwhile to note that the acts of the very first Congress were to agree, more or less, that the 9th and 10th Amendments don't really apply to them. 200 years later the mess that created is easy to see. The 9th and 10th Amendments were written as the closing parts of the Bill of Rights for a very good reason. An entity like the Federal Government must be kept under lock and chain at all times because, if given carte blanche to do whatever it wants, it can always justify sucking your wallet dry for your own good.
Maybe there's a good reason for wanting to reevaluate funding sources and access to data.
Why should you, as a taxpayer who doesn't give a rat's butt about advanced research in niche fields like Density Functional Theory, or 3+2 cyclizations, or Palladium catalyzed cross-coupling, be forced to pay for the infrastructure for the government to make this information available to you?
I'm a chemist, I like this stuff but this is really information that should be on a subscription basis. If you like it, you'll subscribe to it and you'll fund it. If you don't like it, then you won't subscribe to it and it won't cost you any more money.
Mandatory subscription is the basis of government bloat. It then leads to graft, corruption, and money laundering.
Access to high level chemical and biological research material is hardly a basic service like education.
But, as long as you bring it up, government funded and regulated education is a horrible scam. It's wasteful, it's ineffective, in many cases it repropagates complete falsehoods (eg. Pearl Harbor, the reason why the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the motives and causes behind the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression, and the creation of the Federal Reserve), and in today's world it does little more than preserve the social strata of those who can afford the extra money to live in posh districts.
I think that, what the GPL had in mind, the company would be intelligent enough to want to employ the coders of the original GPLd code and thus increase the quality of their employee pool. That's just wishful thinking, though, since "quality of employee pool" is typically measured only by letters after a name and really isn't all that important on the quarterly report to the IRS. I guess that makes the IRS the enforcer of a social caste system.
This is precisely where the American legal system fails. In order to bring a suit against someone who has committed a civil wrongdoing (ie. not a crime against the state) the full burden of expense falls on the victim.
Like all those trolls who love to ride people who remark about the inequities of corporate America,"If you don't like it then start your own company."
And just where does the magic startup capital come from?
The solution is not increased government assistance. That would only lead to abuse and frivolous lawsuits. The solution is a streamlined system of justice which isn't endlessly bottlenecked by paperwork, frivolous forms, and lawyers. If a GAIM developer should walk into an attorney's office with proof that IMblaze is a ripoff of their code, there should be a compensation check and a court injunction against IMblaze within 24 hours.
I've long proposed that this is PRECISELY what big companies are doing. If not directly then it doesn't take much tin foil to imagine a situation where someone has a copy of an old group project, no way (or no real desire) to contact the other contributing members of the group, goes on to rework some of the code and sell the group's project at an enormous profit (QDOS?).
At this level it's no longer even about the GPL. It's just the way things work. Software industry: college code. Legal industry: high school and college debate arguments. Chemical industry: college research projects and PhD dissertations.
This entire world is based on people stealing from each other without giving proper credit... and the major world governments are protecting the thieves typically because the thieves are related, by blood, marriage, or business, to the politicians.
The Monad shell may be nice. Heck, it may turn out to be superior to any *nix *sh shell. When it comes right down to it, though, the Windows developers are not going to begin rewriting all of their software just to make it command line compliant.
Monad is doomed, not by Monad, but by Windows.
Ever think that these particularly obnoxious chatrooms were started by a politician or an attorney for the sole purpose of bolstering their case in court or the congressional floor? Maybe they were started by members of the "accounts payable" department with the sole purpose of having an excuse not to give Yahoo! owed money.
I highly doubt there more than 2 people in any of those chat rooms at any time, and one of them was probably a channel service bot.
Okay, let's just face it. Theo's right. He always is. That's just the way the world is.
Now let's think about it from the viewpoint of reality. The reality is that ranting and raving and openly attacking the competition, while self-fulfilling, isn't the right kind of PR to advocate your own platform. Theo will learn, eventually, that the world runs on relationships. Superior relationships (often embodied by advertising) will beat superior technology each and every time.
Any technical specifics about how oBSD is better than Linux?
Look, I'm not a zealot. I don't use Linux because I hate Windows. I use Linux because Windows doesn't give me what I need. When I want to inspect packets at a low level, it was like entering a new country in Windows. When I want to inspect packets on a low level in Linux, it's like knocking on the neighbor's door. Windows has distanced itself from real computer use to application use. That's its business model and frankly, as a computer hobbyist, I have no use for the goals which Windows fulfills.
So, that said, how about this rant about oBSD being so superior to Linux? So what? It's all POSIX based with an sh compatible (more or less) shell. The only thing making Linux more like Windows is Gnome and KDE. Thank God Enlightenment knows where to draw the line. I get a pretty GUI that doesn't try to teach parlor tricks to my toaster oven.
We, in the US, do not live in a capitalist system. A capitalist system with thousands and thousands of government rules and regulations is communism. To put it another way, if you could remove the government control and oversight from communism, you would have capitalism.
Quit blaming capitalism. Your brand of misinformation is going to result in an enormous amount of people running in the wrong direction and further making a mess of things.
The money launderer here is government. The people writing the rules, with the appropriate loopholes, allowing companies to stomp all over the rights of the people are the politicians. The people who are focusing on the letter of the law as opposed to the right or wrong of a given situation are the government appointed judges.
Get your facts straight.
So you're denying the existence of bugs in the compilers which can produce code which core dumps through no fault of the code's own?
I'd love to see that happen. You know why? Because then we can go at it from the angle of,"Microsoft is giving away the equivalent of a lit black cat firecracker for a nickel!".
Which is really what they should be doing, in an inverse-converse way, to the media industry. "They're giving the stuff away to anyone with $15... how important can their property be?
How about we filter telephone frequencies so that you can't use your modem unless you tell us first? How about that one? How did that one go over in the courts? They tried it. Eventually we beat it, or else everyone would've been paying $100/mo. for dialup service and anyone using a computer online would've immediately been marked for extra "consideration".
My ISP me with an IP, DNS services, routing services, and a bare wire with a signal. How about we leave it that way?
Please. Think before you speak.
It's because they put distribution above the product. They were in it for the money more than the product quality. As a consequence they paid the lawyers to shield them from users with stolen identity, trashed credit, stalkers, or whose machines have been hijacked to participate in illicit activity.
Siphoning off computing power just like the politicians siphon off tax money--when you're not looking and in a way that you can't do anything about it or hold anyone accountable. I guess we know who taught these botnet owners how to do business.
As long as they keep getting elected and increasing the amount they take in tax money.
*whistles innocently and walks off while checking the rear view mirror for details*
A fellow victim in college removed all the keys from his keyboard to clean them. He became impatient, or plain didn't care, when he put the keys back on. Only the keys which were limited by their physical shape were replaced in their correct places.
We didn't meausre his typing speed before and after. There was, however, a large increase in tiny outbursts of displeasure directed at the keyboard.
"It's Las Vegas! We're SUPPOSED to be stealing you d...
All this advertising by the MPAA only applies to the other guy. He's the one downloading the pirated stuff. All of the stuff which I download has been put here legally for free. Just because they're selling it at the store is because they're selling the whole CD and the cover art. The music they is given away for free by someone with the legal authority to do so.
Isn't it? If not... Prove it.