Well, so do I since I didn't say that. Windows "worked" in the business sense: it allowed Microsoft to maintain a near monopoly. Technically, it was a complete mess.
If you accept reality, you'd realize that a gigantic portion of the population uses windows over any other OS.
A gigantic proportion of the population also doesn't floss, is overweight, and eats at McDonald's.
And Bill was right in this case.
In what case? Bill knows nothing about education and he hasn't said anything of substance.
Isn't looking an open source code limiting if you plan to work on proprietary software?
Not legally; the open source licenses are pretty clear on that point, and open source is, by its very nature, not trade secret. The legal problems that can result from looking at non-open source code are real.
I imagine MS wouldn't hire any Linux kernel developers.
MS hired some of the people who developed the original (open source) Mach kernel. Microsoft has also hired other open source developers (e.g. the developer of Jython) to work on closely related proprietary Microsoft projects. So, it seems like this isn't a big concern for Microsoft. Microsoft may have hangups about people who have worked on GPL'ed software, but those are not justified.
[Bill Gates] By obsolete, I mean our high schools _ even when they're working as designed _ cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.
High schools are just a place where students spend many hours with teachers, have their homework and independent study supervised and reviewed, and get evaluated. That's not "obsolete", it simply is the way education works. How you fill those hours, and with what material, is what decides what people eventually know and the skills they get.
The fact that you can't teach students "what they need to know" has nothing to do with the format, it has to do with the amount of knowledge and the limited amount of time. That's why good schools emphasize preparing students for life-long learning, rather than trying to cram every bit of information into their students' heads.
Curriculums need to be redesigned, class sizes reduced, and teachers need to get paid better. But those are incremental improvements, they don't change the fact that it is a good idea to have students go to a school every day and interact with each other and teachers in a structured and planned format.
Gates's attitude towards high school is the same as towards Windows and complex systems in general: make uninformed pronouncements and rush a half-baked solution out into the real world. Twenty years later, after patching up all the problems, he ends up with something that is more or less like the thing he didn't understand in the first place.
Bill: please stop trying to design complex systems or mess with things you don't understand. It worked badly enough for Windows; let's not repeat those mistakes with things that really matter, like education.
So, you're correct in the sense that if he is at all successful, he will likely be granted the 'opportunity' to hand the whole thing over without facing legal fees.
We are talking about an IM robot here, not a major piece of software; the downside, even if it shouldcome to pas, is negligible.
Furthermore, if he makes it open source, I think the chances that he gets sued are essentially nil. If he wants to make it a commercial product, then he has to take the commercial risks, and those include patent risks, low as they are in this case. Welcome to the real world.
Depends on what you mean by "harmed". Here is what GNU Classpath has to say about it:
3.2 Can I look as Sun's sources to get inspiration? No. In fact, if you read Sun's sources we can't accept any code from you.
Many other open source projects and many companies have similar rules. If the issue arises in a company, they may try to find another internal position where your previous exposure to such source code doesn't create a legal liability for them; of course, that position may be less interesting and less suited to your skills. Small companies generally don't have that choice, so you could lose your job. Looking at source code that is not under an open source license is a career limiting move.
Note that this is true even if you work for the company that produced the source code. As far as possible, try to limit your exposure to company internal source code to what you need for your job functions and keep track of what you looked at.
I suspect that a lot of the problem with corporate acceptance of OS X is that there is no second source.
You bet it is: any software issues aside, if a company goes with Macintosh, they are stuck with their rather limited range of hardware, and there is no price competition or room for negotiation.
Let IBM bring to the market cheap, no frills, OS X boxes aimed at corporate users (similar price / spec to the Mini, but a more boring box), and pay Apple for every copy of OS X they ship, and they could make a significant impact on the corporate sector.
If IBM put their name and reputation behind OS X, it might succeed more, or it might not. IBM does not have a good track record in pushing technologies.
But that's not going to happen. IBM has chosen Linux as their Windows alternative. I suspect that from their point of view, OS X offers no technical features to them that are worth the effort--it would be easier for them simply to invest the time and money into making Linux better.
Furthermore, given the way Apple has behaved towards licensees in the past, I seriously doubt anybody is going to partner with them again.
People who use Linux on the desktop are completely aware of the problems of exchanging files. If they didn't understand it before they installed Linux, they'll find out in the first five minutes after installing it (actually, they don't have to install it, they can just run it from a live CD).
In fact, one of the main reasons people even buy OS X is because it's a UNIX-like system that happens to run an official copy of Microsoft Office. If it weren't for MS Office on OS X, OS X desktop usage would be even lower than it already is.
But you reflect the typical Apple view: "most users are morons, and therefore if they don't buy our products, it's because they are morons".
Once you look at someone else's source code, you run the risk that they claim that your own future work is "derived" from theirs. Some shared source agreements are quite explicit about that, while others are merely silent on the issue. Some shared source agreements also explicitly state that the code you are looking at is unpublished and contains trade secret information.
The only way to guard against those claims is not to look at other people's source code unless the license not only permits you to look but explicitly permits you to reuse. Open source licenses do that, shared source licenses don't.
Shared source isn't new. AT&T UNIX and DEC VMS were "shared source", for example. Companies hand out shared source licenses because they are too cheap to fix their own bugs and want to get bug reports with fixes from customers, because they want customers to be tied more closely to their product (making it harder to switch), because they want others to do their porting work for them, and/or because they actually want to lay traps for open source developers.
If you have looked at any shared source source code under a non-open source license, do not work on any related open source or proprietary project; you would be putting those projects in jeopardy. Do not be fooled by "shared source" that's downloadable with a click-through: it may look like open source at first glance, but whether it's downloadable or whether you have to go into a room with five lawyers and sign an elaborate agreement may make some difference if it came to a court case, but it doesn't change the principle. Furthermore, most of those cases won't get to court: your future employer or open source project will probably unceremoniously dump you if there is even a hint that you have looked at shared source.
In other words, before you look at some company's proprietary source code, think carefully whether you want that company to own a piece of your brain for the rest of your life, because that's what it comes down to.
What legal fees? He hasn't gotten sued and likely never will be. Just about every major piece of software you use violates some patent. Software developers don't worry about it until the patent's owner starts making a fuss about it.
Considering Linux and all, OS X is the only real desktop alternative.
Considering that Apple has had inexpensive OS X machines on the market for several years now, has been marketing the hell out of their product line, and that there hasn't been a huge rush to switch to Macintosh, I think real world users have indicated their views: most of them obviously do not consider OS X sufficiently better to be worth switching to. In fact, according to IDC, Linux is now on more desktops than OS X, and that is despite the fact that you can hardly buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.
George Washington's birthday is not determined by whatever day most people think it is,
That's only partially true. It's not a "democracy" among the population, but "facts" certainly depend on the prevailing view among experts in the field.
The date that we agree on for George Washington's birthday is determined by what most people who have access to all the physical evidence ("the experts") believe it is. But among them, it's a kind of democracy.
It's like the people in certain areas who want "intelligen design" to be taught instead of Darwin's scientifically viable theory of evolution
Intelligent design may well become the prevalent view in the US, both among experts and among the population at large, and at that point, that's what encyclopedias and textbooks would talk about. The fact that you or I think it's unscientific wouldn't change that.
Wikipedia has a danger of being (or at least becoming) extremely biased, not necessarily for ideological reasons, but through simply through public ignorance.
So does every textbook and encyclopedia. They are written by human beings, after all, and they make mistakes and aren't experts in everything. In fact, existing textbooks and encyclopedias are full of biases, half-truths, and outright errors.
It's funny to hear encyclopedia editors stand up and talk like their profession represented the pinnacle of intellectualism. Encyclopedias try to reduce complex subjects to miniscule overview articles, often written by non-specialists. Encyclopedias are great for children and teenagers to find out about the world, but for adults, if you want to know something about a subject, just "get the book".
Encyclopedias are the fast food of the book publishing business, with encyclopedia editors writers being the short order cooks among editors and writers.
As such, the fast food served up by Wikipedia is better than most: it represents more viewpoints, it represents genuine debate among many interested parties, and it isn't constrained by size or budgets. The fact that you can't be certain of the quality of articles in Wikipedia is a good thing: you can't be certain of the quality of anything you read, and with Wikipedia, people at least think about that fact.
No, they're not both deliberate actions. One is deliberate, the other is caused by negligence.
If the operator of the nuclear power plant decides to cut staff and/or safety measures in order to save money, then that is a deliberate action. That decision may be negligent or grossly negligent, or it may represent involuntary manslaughter or even murder (if the decision maker failed to take necessary safety precautions out of malice).
Furthermore since we require that the probability of serious accidents at nuclear facilities is very low, if an accident occurs, it is a priori evidence that the operator did not take the necessary care. That is different from, say, driving a car, where everybody who participates in traffic accepts a certain risk of getting killed and where we expect people to get killed even if nobody acted negligently.
One must note that punishment for accidents are inherently small.
Only if you took the customary and legally required care. If you didn't, your actions were negligent, grossly negligent, or could even amount to murder.
Since for one with no amunt of safety/preventive measures could anyone eliminate all accidents
We, as a society, define the level of risk acceptable for the operation of a nuclear power plant: how many accidents may happen and what consequences they may have. We set how large the fines are if plants are not operated properly and according to regulations. If the free market cannot operate nuclear power plants under those conditions, then nuclear power is simply not a competitive technology.
Also potential of a fine might drastically drive up price of utility in the case of nuclear plants, completely make them unprofitable to operate and therefore no company will undertake it.
You bet. And that is one function of fines and the legal system: to make sure that you don't engage in conduct that benefits you (or your company) but imposes a huge cost and/or risk on society.
In different words, a market and a society can't function if government doesn't account for externalities and public goods. That is exactly why these fines should be higher.
Violating decency rules is intentional. Accidents at nuclear plants are accidents. Accidental deaths at nursing homes are also accidents.
You can affect the frequency of accidents with safety and preventive measures. We want that frequency to be low enough so that they basically don't occur, and we want companies to make the necessary investments to achieve such a low frequency.
Why shouldn't the punishment for a deliberate action be higher than for an accidental one?
They are both deliberate actions, and the nuclear and medical ones have far more severe consequences. Therefore, the fines for the nuclear and medical violations should be higher.
So, if an accident does occur at a nuclear power plant or in a nursing home, that is clear evidence that the operator intentionally chose to skimp on investing in safety and supervision in order to save money.
The size of the fine should have to do with the severity and impact of the offense and the difficulty of preventing an accident.
If the nuclear power industry is better at following government guidelines, that shows that it is easily possible for the industry to follow government guidelines. Since violations have severe consequences and are then obviously avoidable through proper management, the fines should be more severe, not less so, because an offender not only caused lots of damage, but could have easily prevented it by following common practice.
This is due to immutable laws of human nature and behavior.
Human nature and behavior are highly malleable. In fact, religious communities in the US (darlings of the political right), demonstrate exactly the kind of altruism and sharing that you claim is contrary to human nature. The difference, of course, is that in the US, people have a choice: they can behave like selfish jerks or they can choose to be altruistic. That's a good thing.
In the long run, current US consumerism is as unsustainable as Soviet style communism was. We need to figure out how to preserve the ability of people to choose freely but make them want to choose altruistically. It can be done, just not as long as we leave control over the media to people who abuse them for their own financial interests. Because, make no mistake about it, what comes out of your television in the US is more skillfully manipulative and propagandistic than anything the USSR ever managed to produce.
Remember, China still has a repressive few who are determined to remain in power and if strangling wireless LAN in their own country helps them stay in power one more day, so much the better for them.
Russia tried fast tracking democracy and look where it got them.
China is trying to make economic development happen first, and they seem to be doing well. I suspect few in the Chinese government have any illusions about the fact that once they have a large, reasonly wealthy middle class, political reforms will have to follow. In fact, that's the way democracy came about in the West as well: first the wealth, then the political freedoms.
Trouble is that "clear" may be misleading. For example, "if(ptr==NULL)" expresses a certain intent of the programmer (compare a variable against the null pointer), but that is not actually quite what that statement means. Many C programmers avoid "if(ptr==NULL)" because it is actually kind of obscure.
That said, there is no way Linux under Windows would be practical with all the overhead involved.
It's very practical, actually.
If Microsoft actually produced an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market
From first hand experience, I can tell you that this is not a really pleasant solution because it doesn't fix the things that are so wrong with Windows: lack of security, poor package and installer management, lousy system management interfaces, and a bad UI.
The long-term implications of such a scenario, I believe, would be essentially to kill Linux. Microsoft's MS-Linux would quickly become the dominant Linux and the company would begin to profit from all the open-source development work that would go into Linux.
First of all, Dvorak's premise is wrong: Linux has enormous numbers of drivers. Hardware "just works" under Linux when it requires cumbersome and flaky driver installations under Windows.
But let's assume the premise were right. So, people have pure Linux PCs and MS-Linux PCs. Well, that means more commercial Linux usage and the ability of software vendors to standardize on the Linux APIs. The consequence? Cutting the cost of shipping Windows out of a PC becomes a more and more attractive proposition and hardware vendors would ship more and more Linux-only PCs.
Microsoft only needs that one driver element to be proprietary for the plan to succeed.
The flaw in that argument is that it is not Microsoft that is creating the drivers, it is the hardware vendors. Anything Microsoft does to make Linux more popular or credible will mean more Linux drivers from hardware vendors.
The reason someone might use the former code snippet is because they believe it would result in smaller machine code
Anybody who uses "if(!ptr)" because he thinks it generates better code these days should be banned from programming in C (but then, we probably should just ban C programming altogether).
IMHO the latter code snippet is clearer than the former
I think there is a good chance that you don't actually understand what "if(ptr==NULL)" means. For example, if "ptr" is of type "int", can you answer the question of whether the compiler will give you a type error?
Ultimately, no amount of macro magic (like NULL) is going to fix C's pointer system, so one might as well go with the most portable expressions. It's an unfortunately fact that NULL has often been defined inconsistently (in fact, there are half a dozen different definitions scattered through dozens of Linux header files), so I avoid it in my code. Any C programmer worth his salt should have no problem with "if(!ptr)" or "ptr = 0", and those will work consistently on just about any C compiler in existence, no matter how old. It's unfortunate that it looks obscure to the uninitiated, but, hey, that's C for you, and in this case, I think the cure is worse than the disease.
Passing the Turing test does not qualify as proof of consciousness -- thats one of the points of the argument.
I wasn't making a point about Turing tests, I was saying that Searle's naive "oh no it can't be" arguments can be used to "show" that his wife, or he himself, for that matter, don't have consciousness.
he thinks the 'stuff' might be important. Is that so outrageous?
So far, there isn't even a hint that the stuff an intelligent system is made of may be important. None.
Since we know humans are conscious,
Yes: they walk around, talk about themselves, and have a sense of self. And there is no reason why a robot can't do the same thing.
I'm sorry, but Searle just does not know what he is talking about. His "syntax/semantics" distinction is bogus, as is pretty much everything else he has to say on the subject. I think the only reason he is so well known is because he tells people what they want to hear, that they are special. Searle's b.s. isn't as good as priests promising them an immortal soul, but it's better than nothing as these things go.
So that means for FOSS groupware servers to be widely successful they are going to have to support the Exchange protocol,
They can't--it's just not possible.
but they sure like Outlook and the functionality that "it" provides
Probably they do: as long as they don't know any better, people like what they are used to, even if it stinks. Like Outlook and Exchange, for example.
FOSS can only attempt to get users away from Outlook by creating a better product. Given the low quality of Outlook, that isn't technically hard, but convincing users to try it still is.
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Windows didn't work? I beg to differ.
Well, so do I since I didn't say that. Windows "worked" in the business sense: it allowed Microsoft to maintain a near monopoly. Technically, it was a complete mess.
If you accept reality, you'd realize that a gigantic portion of the population uses windows over any other OS.
A gigantic proportion of the population also doesn't floss, is overweight, and eats at McDonald's.
And Bill was right in this case.
In what case? Bill knows nothing about education and he hasn't said anything of substance.
Isn't looking an open source code limiting if you plan to work on proprietary software?
Not legally; the open source licenses are pretty clear on that point, and open source is, by its very nature, not trade secret. The legal problems that can result from looking at non-open source code are real.
I imagine MS wouldn't hire any Linux kernel developers.
MS hired some of the people who developed the original (open source) Mach kernel. Microsoft has also hired other open source developers (e.g. the developer of Jython) to work on closely related proprietary Microsoft projects. So, it seems like this isn't a big concern for Microsoft. Microsoft may have hangups about people who have worked on GPL'ed software, but those are not justified.
[Bill Gates] By obsolete, I mean our high schools _ even when they're working as designed _ cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.
High schools are just a place where students spend many hours with teachers, have their homework and independent study supervised and reviewed, and get evaluated. That's not "obsolete", it simply is the way education works. How you fill those hours, and with what material, is what decides what people eventually know and the skills they get.
The fact that you can't teach students "what they need to know" has nothing to do with the format, it has to do with the amount of knowledge and the limited amount of time. That's why good schools emphasize preparing students for life-long learning, rather than trying to cram every bit of information into their students' heads.
Curriculums need to be redesigned, class sizes reduced, and teachers need to get paid better. But those are incremental improvements, they don't change the fact that it is a good idea to have students go to a school every day and interact with each other and teachers in a structured and planned format.
Gates's attitude towards high school is the same as towards Windows and complex systems in general: make uninformed pronouncements and rush a half-baked solution out into the real world. Twenty years later, after patching up all the problems, he ends up with something that is more or less like the thing he didn't understand in the first place.
Bill: please stop trying to design complex systems or mess with things you don't understand. It worked badly enough for Windows; let's not repeat those mistakes with things that really matter, like education.
So, you're correct in the sense that if he is at all successful, he will likely be granted the 'opportunity' to hand the whole thing over without facing legal fees.
We are talking about an IM robot here, not a major piece of software; the downside, even if it shouldcome to pas, is negligible.
Furthermore, if he makes it open source, I think the chances that he gets sued are essentially nil. If he wants to make it a commercial product, then he has to take the commercial risks, and those include patent risks, low as they are in this case. Welcome to the real world.
Many other open source projects and many companies have similar rules. If the issue arises in a company, they may try to find another internal position where your previous exposure to such source code doesn't create a legal liability for them; of course, that position may be less interesting and less suited to your skills. Small companies generally don't have that choice, so you could lose your job. Looking at source code that is not under an open source license is a career limiting move.
Note that this is true even if you work for the company that produced the source code. As far as possible, try to limit your exposure to company internal source code to what you need for your job functions and keep track of what you looked at.
I suspect that a lot of the problem with corporate acceptance of OS X is that there is no second source.
You bet it is: any software issues aside, if a company goes with Macintosh, they are stuck with their rather limited range of hardware, and there is no price competition or room for negotiation.
Let IBM bring to the market cheap, no frills, OS X boxes aimed at corporate users (similar price / spec to the Mini, but a more boring box), and pay Apple for every copy of OS X they ship, and they could make a significant impact on the corporate sector.
If IBM put their name and reputation behind OS X, it might succeed more, or it might not. IBM does not have a good track record in pushing technologies.
But that's not going to happen. IBM has chosen Linux as their Windows alternative. I suspect that from their point of view, OS X offers no technical features to them that are worth the effort--it would be easier for them simply to invest the time and money into making Linux better.
Furthermore, given the way Apple has behaved towards licensees in the past, I seriously doubt anybody is going to partner with them again.
People who use Linux on the desktop are completely aware of the problems of exchanging files. If they didn't understand it before they installed Linux, they'll find out in the first five minutes after installing it (actually, they don't have to install it, they can just run it from a live CD).
In fact, one of the main reasons people even buy OS X is because it's a UNIX-like system that happens to run an official copy of Microsoft Office. If it weren't for MS Office on OS X, OS X desktop usage would be even lower than it already is.
But you reflect the typical Apple view: "most users are morons, and therefore if they don't buy our products, it's because they are morons".
Once you look at someone else's source code, you run the risk that they claim that your own future work is "derived" from theirs. Some shared source agreements are quite explicit about that, while others are merely silent on the issue. Some shared source agreements also explicitly state that the code you are looking at is unpublished and contains trade secret information.
The only way to guard against those claims is not to look at other people's source code unless the license not only permits you to look but explicitly permits you to reuse. Open source licenses do that, shared source licenses don't.
Shared source isn't new. AT&T UNIX and DEC VMS were "shared source", for example. Companies hand out shared source licenses because they are too cheap to fix their own bugs and want to get bug reports with fixes from customers, because they want customers to be tied more closely to their product (making it harder to switch), because they want others to do their porting work for them, and/or because they actually want to lay traps for open source developers.
If you have looked at any shared source source code under a non-open source license, do not work on any related open source or proprietary project; you would be putting those projects in jeopardy. Do not be fooled by "shared source" that's downloadable with a click-through: it may look like open source at first glance, but whether it's downloadable or whether you have to go into a room with five lawyers and sign an elaborate agreement may make some difference if it came to a court case, but it doesn't change the principle. Furthermore, most of those cases won't get to court: your future employer or open source project will probably unceremoniously dump you if there is even a hint that you have looked at shared source.
In other words, before you look at some company's proprietary source code, think carefully whether you want that company to own a piece of your brain for the rest of your life, because that's what it comes down to.
What legal fees? He hasn't gotten sued and likely never will be. Just about every major piece of software you use violates some patent. Software developers don't worry about it until the patent's owner starts making a fuss about it.
Considering Linux and all, OS X is the only real desktop alternative.
Considering that Apple has had inexpensive OS X machines on the market for several years now, has been marketing the hell out of their product line, and that there hasn't been a huge rush to switch to Macintosh, I think real world users have indicated their views: most of them obviously do not consider OS X sufficiently better to be worth switching to. In fact, according to IDC, Linux is now on more desktops than OS X, and that is despite the fact that you can hardly buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.
With good reason, since the concept of eminent domain is not actually part of the constitution. Not that it will stop political bodies from trying it.
The concept of breathing is part of the Constitution either, and that will not stop anybody from doing it.
In any case, patents are only property to th degree that Congress makes them that way. We, the people, can limit them any time we like.
It is doubtful that the patent is valid; IM bots go back to the dark ages of the IRC networks. There is plenty of prior art.
George Washington's birthday is not determined by whatever day most people think it is,
That's only partially true. It's not a "democracy" among the population, but "facts" certainly depend on the prevailing view among experts in the field.
The date that we agree on for George Washington's birthday is determined by what most people who have access to all the physical evidence ("the experts") believe it is. But among them, it's a kind of democracy.
It's like the people in certain areas who want "intelligen design" to be taught instead of Darwin's scientifically viable theory of evolution
Intelligent design may well become the prevalent view in the US, both among experts and among the population at large, and at that point, that's what encyclopedias and textbooks would talk about. The fact that you or I think it's unscientific wouldn't change that.
Wikipedia has a danger of being (or at least becoming) extremely biased, not necessarily for ideological reasons, but through simply through public ignorance.
So does every textbook and encyclopedia. They are written by human beings, after all, and they make mistakes and aren't experts in everything. In fact, existing textbooks and encyclopedias are full of biases, half-truths, and outright errors.
It's funny to hear encyclopedia editors stand up and talk like their profession represented the pinnacle of intellectualism. Encyclopedias try to reduce complex subjects to miniscule overview articles, often written by non-specialists. Encyclopedias are great for children and teenagers to find out about the world, but for adults, if you want to know something about a subject, just "get the book".
Encyclopedias are the fast food of the book publishing business, with encyclopedia editors writers being the short order cooks among editors and writers.
As such, the fast food served up by Wikipedia is better than most: it represents more viewpoints, it represents genuine debate among many interested parties, and it isn't constrained by size or budgets. The fact that you can't be certain of the quality of articles in Wikipedia is a good thing: you can't be certain of the quality of anything you read, and with Wikipedia, people at least think about that fact.
No, they're not both deliberate actions. One is deliberate, the other is caused by negligence.
If the operator of the nuclear power plant decides to cut staff and/or safety measures in order to save money, then that is a deliberate action. That decision may be negligent or grossly negligent, or it may represent involuntary manslaughter or even murder (if the decision maker failed to take necessary safety precautions out of malice).
Furthermore since we require that the probability of serious accidents at nuclear facilities is very low, if an accident occurs, it is a priori evidence that the operator did not take the necessary care. That is different from, say, driving a car, where everybody who participates in traffic accepts a certain risk of getting killed and where we expect people to get killed even if nobody acted negligently.
One must note that punishment for accidents are inherently small.
Only if you took the customary and legally required care. If you didn't, your actions were negligent, grossly negligent, or could even amount to murder.
Since for one with no amunt of safety/preventive measures could anyone eliminate all accidents
We, as a society, define the level of risk acceptable for the operation of a nuclear power plant: how many accidents may happen and what consequences they may have. We set how large the fines are if plants are not operated properly and according to regulations. If the free market cannot operate nuclear power plants under those conditions, then nuclear power is simply not a competitive technology.
Also potential of a fine might drastically drive up price of utility in the case of nuclear plants, completely make them unprofitable to operate and therefore no company will undertake it.
You bet. And that is one function of fines and the legal system: to make sure that you don't engage in conduct that benefits you (or your company) but imposes a huge cost and/or risk on society.
In different words, a market and a society can't function if government doesn't account for externalities and public goods. That is exactly why these fines should be higher.
Violating decency rules is intentional. Accidents at nuclear plants are accidents. Accidental deaths at nursing homes are also accidents.
You can affect the frequency of accidents with safety and preventive measures. We want that frequency to be low enough so that they basically don't occur, and we want companies to make the necessary investments to achieve such a low frequency.
Why shouldn't the punishment for a deliberate action be higher than for an accidental one?
They are both deliberate actions, and the nuclear and medical ones have far more severe consequences. Therefore, the fines for the nuclear and medical violations should be higher.
So, if an accident does occur at a nuclear power plant or in a nursing home, that is clear evidence that the operator intentionally chose to skimp on investing in safety and supervision in order to save money.
The size of the fine should have to do with the severity and impact of the offense and the difficulty of preventing an accident.
If the nuclear power industry is better at following government guidelines, that shows that it is easily possible for the industry to follow government guidelines. Since violations have severe consequences and are then obviously avoidable through proper management, the fines should be more severe, not less so, because an offender not only caused lots of damage, but could have easily prevented it by following common practice.
This is due to immutable laws of human nature and behavior.
Human nature and behavior are highly malleable. In fact, religious communities in the US (darlings of the political right), demonstrate exactly the kind of altruism and sharing that you claim is contrary to human nature. The difference, of course, is that in the US, people have a choice: they can behave like selfish jerks or they can choose to be altruistic. That's a good thing.
In the long run, current US consumerism is as unsustainable as Soviet style communism was. We need to figure out how to preserve the ability of people to choose freely but make them want to choose altruistically. It can be done, just not as long as we leave control over the media to people who abuse them for their own financial interests. Because, make no mistake about it, what comes out of your television in the US is more skillfully manipulative and propagandistic than anything the USSR ever managed to produce.
Remember, China still has a repressive few who are determined to remain in power and if strangling wireless LAN in their own country helps them stay in power one more day, so much the better for them.
Russia tried fast tracking democracy and look where it got them.
China is trying to make economic development happen first, and they seem to be doing well. I suspect few in the Chinese government have any illusions about the fact that once they have a large, reasonly wealthy middle class, political reforms will have to follow. In fact, that's the way democracy came about in the West as well: first the wealth, then the political freedoms.
Trouble is that "clear" may be misleading. For example, "if(ptr==NULL)" expresses a certain intent of the programmer (compare a variable against the null pointer), but that is not actually quite what that statement means. Many C programmers avoid "if(ptr==NULL)" because it is actually kind of obscure.
I heard about a secret project. It concerned the development of a version of Linux that runs smoothly as a task under Windows.
colinux.org
That said, there is no way Linux under Windows would be practical with all the overhead involved.
It's very practical, actually.
If Microsoft actually produced an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market
From first hand experience, I can tell you that this is not a really pleasant solution because it doesn't fix the things that are so wrong with Windows: lack of security, poor package and installer management, lousy system management interfaces, and a bad UI.
The long-term implications of such a scenario, I believe, would be essentially to kill Linux. Microsoft's MS-Linux would quickly become the dominant Linux and the company would begin to profit from all the open-source development work that would go into Linux.
First of all, Dvorak's premise is wrong: Linux has enormous numbers of drivers. Hardware "just works" under Linux when it requires cumbersome and flaky driver installations under Windows.
But let's assume the premise were right. So, people have pure Linux PCs and MS-Linux PCs. Well, that means more commercial Linux usage and the ability of software vendors to standardize on the Linux APIs. The consequence? Cutting the cost of shipping Windows out of a PC becomes a more and more attractive proposition and hardware vendors would ship more and more Linux-only PCs.
Microsoft only needs that one driver element to be proprietary for the plan to succeed.
The flaw in that argument is that it is not Microsoft that is creating the drivers, it is the hardware vendors. Anything Microsoft does to make Linux more popular or credible will mean more Linux drivers from hardware vendors.
The reason someone might use the former code snippet is because they believe it would result in smaller machine code
Anybody who uses "if(!ptr)" because he thinks it generates better code these days should be banned from programming in C (but then, we probably should just ban C programming altogether).
IMHO the latter code snippet is clearer than the former
I think there is a good chance that you don't actually understand what "if(ptr==NULL)" means. For example, if "ptr" is of type "int", can you answer the question of whether the compiler will give you a type error?
Ultimately, no amount of macro magic (like NULL) is going to fix C's pointer system, so one might as well go with the most portable expressions. It's an unfortunately fact that NULL has often been defined inconsistently (in fact, there are half a dozen different definitions scattered through dozens of Linux header files), so I avoid it in my code. Any C programmer worth his salt should have no problem with "if(!ptr)" or "ptr = 0", and those will work consistently on just about any C compiler in existence, no matter how old. It's unfortunate that it looks obscure to the uninitiated, but, hey, that's C for you, and in this case, I think the cure is worse than the disease.
Passing the Turing test does not qualify as proof of consciousness -- thats one of the points of the argument.
I wasn't making a point about Turing tests, I was saying that Searle's naive "oh no it can't be" arguments can be used to "show" that his wife, or he himself, for that matter, don't have consciousness.
he thinks the 'stuff' might be important. Is that so outrageous?
So far, there isn't even a hint that the stuff an intelligent system is made of may be important. None.
Since we know humans are conscious,
Yes: they walk around, talk about themselves, and have a sense of self. And there is no reason why a robot can't do the same thing.
I'm sorry, but Searle just does not know what he is talking about. His "syntax/semantics" distinction is bogus, as is pretty much everything else he has to say on the subject. I think the only reason he is so well known is because he tells people what they want to hear, that they are special. Searle's b.s. isn't as good as priests promising them an immortal soul, but it's better than nothing as these things go.
So that means for FOSS groupware servers to be widely successful they are going to have to support the Exchange protocol,
They can't--it's just not possible.
but they sure like Outlook and the functionality that "it" provides
Probably they do: as long as they don't know any better, people like what they are used to, even if it stinks. Like Outlook and Exchange, for example.
FOSS can only attempt to get users away from Outlook by creating a better product. Given the low quality of Outlook, that isn't technically hard, but convincing users to try it still is.