No, I am quite sure it is you who is 100% wrong. Patents on software is very much not fine. In every case I can think of, it's actually quite absurd. nosoftwarepatents.com outlines the issue well (read the dangers of software patents in particular).
The problem with software patents is that they are incredibly restrictive in an industry that requires freedom and rapid innovation. As pointed out on the page I linked to, something that was innovative in the early days of modern computing would still be patented. A few carefully chosen software patents could have crippled the advancement of computer software, possibly to the extent that the Internet would not exist today (or at least the way we think of it now). Your example of patenting World of Warcraft actually is dumb. First, it's already protected by copyright and trademark laws; someone cannot just copy WoW, call it World of Warcrack and sell it. Thus there is no need to patent it in the first place. The truly chilling concept would be that a patent on WoW would likely be a patent on MMORPGs in general. Imagine that: 20 years of no MMORPGs besides World of Warcraft. Some players might be happy with that, and I'm sure it's VU's wet-dream but for the rest of the world it would be fucking tragic.
Of course there is plenty of prior art in that case so it's not an issue but hopefully that illustrates the problem well. Twenty years ago, no one had even thought of the idea of a MMORPG, now it seems to be the new trend in computer gaming. All those thousands of programmers coding for these games could easily change the face of gaming many times in twenty years. For all we know, gaming might be in a completely virtual reality in five or ten years. How likely is that to happen if only one company or patent holder could create software using that patent? Software patents just do not make sense.
This was my thought too. However, I seem to recall that Konqueror is little more than a frontend for KIO slaves. Could be wrong though, so I guess we need some one knowledgeable to respond or head to the repository.:)
I believe the Constitution is limited to states. If you commit a crime in one state and flee to another, the Extradiction clause would apply. For an internal matter between two 'communities' within a state, the laws and/or constitution of the state would apply. So either the state would have to have an extradiction law or clause within it's constitution (they probably do, I just don't know) or the "obscene" act would have to be illegal within the state as a whole in which case the state would prosecute the criminal.
Besides, if we are talking about issues between states, Section 2 of the same Article (4) provides an interesting twist:
Section 2. The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
If it was important enough to each state, a situation like that would likely have to be resolved by a higher authority (possibly by the Supreme Court deciding to clear up the massive ambiguity).
According to your own link:
A (fallacious) ad hominem argument has the basic form:
A makes claim B;
there is something objectionable about A,
therefore claim B is false.
You'll notice that gowen has not made an argumentum ad hominem because he has not made an argument of that form. He has only said parts 1 and 2 of the above form. Never did he say "Mr. Zuck made this claim but he received money from ACT, therefore what he said is wrong."
If I may further direct to you to the strangely titled "Validity" section of the wiki link:
"Evidence may be doubted or rejected based on the source for reasons of credibility, but to doubt or reject a deduction based on the source is the ad hominem fallacy."
Again: "Evidence may be doubted or rejected based on the source for reasons of credibility..." That is all you can 'accuse' gowen of doing. All he did was point out who the author works for so that you can decide for yourself if the author or his employer has any credibility. Again, only to "doubt or reject a deduction based on the source is the ad hominem fallacy." gowen has not made any comment doubting the validity of Zuck's deduction. Hell, unless I've missed one of his posts, he hasn't made any comment on the deduction at all.
If you want to say that perhaps it was unnecessary to bring up the author's employer, fine. If you want to say that perhaps it is misleading or shady or some other subjective description, fine. But it is not an argumentum ad hominem.
You and GuloGulo seem to have a very hard time with reading comprehension. Two quotes from gowen, emphasis added:
It doesn't necessarily invalidate his opinion (and I never said it did -- that would be argument ad hominem) but it should cast a certain amount of doubt as to whether he reached those opinions through research, or is just parroting his employers opinions. It doesn't invalidate his opinions (again, I never said it did), but it certainly has some bearing on why he might hold those opinions.
He specifically said twice that the source of Johnathan Zuck's funding does not invalidate his opinion. What it does do it shed light on the how and why he came upon his opinion. (Just to be sure you're still with me: this does not invalidate his position). Now, if it's obvious that someone routinely takes money in exchange for spouting off someone else's opinion, I'm less likely to believe (or at least take at face value) that person's view in the future. The reason being that it indicates this person does not do their own research which will inevitably lead to an incident where their paymaster gives them a complete and utter lie to spread. That is how it is relevent. It does not necessarily invalidate the positions taken by this person but it does mean that I will not treat that person as an authoritative source.
You are 100% correct, thank you. Meh, the whole post sucks - it kind of looks like I hacked together sentences. There isn't a very good flow at all:( -1, Hurried Posting
Mildy offtopic but:
Shameless Plagirism from another slashdotter sig: "We want peace for all and prosperity for mankind. We are United States Government; we don't do that sort of thing."
That's actually a quote from the end of the movie Sneakers. James Earl Jones (playing an NSA chief or something like that) says the "We're the United States Government! We don't deal with that sort of thing." part. See IMDB.
~~
Thank you for your time, and now back to our regularly scheduled Slashdot programming...
I guess it never occurred to you that people are different? That one or two drinks does not have the same effect on everyone?
There are plenty of people who can drive more safely with a BAC of 9% than others with a BAC of 4%. And yet neo-prohibitionist groups like MADD continue to push for the BAC limits to be lowered. If I'm not mistaken, their most recent push was for 5%. For many people that would be one maybe two beers over a social dinner. They claim they do this to protect the children (who doesn't?), and perhaps that was their goal at first. They've long surpassed that though as the vast majority of drunk driving accidents occur at closer to 15% BAC. Not to metion using questionable statistics like: sober driver hits drunk pedestrian strolling down the sidewalk - drunk driving death/injury.
Of course I'm not condoning getting drunk and then driving (hell I barely drink myself, maybe one beer a week). It seems like the simple solution would be for the police to look for unsafe drivers (as they always do anyways) and if it's found that the driver is intoxicated, then punish them for DUI. But then how would they stop social drinking!? No, in addition they have to setup roadblocks where they test everyone. I hope I don't have to explain to you what a terrible precedent that sets, not just for social drinkers but liberty in general.
2. Have a smart bottle with $100 deposit that must be returned when the cycle is complete.
Interesting idea but what's to stop someone from ceasing to take the pills after they feel better, dump the rest, and then turn in the bottle on the specified date for their $100 back?
I think you are forgetting that there is a large community of open source supporters here on Slashdot. I support open source software myself and I make my living as a programmer. I code for work during the day, and I write open source software in my free time.
As for how I feel about that, I feel great. Most of the software I write in my free time is for my own personal satisfaction and usually helps me solve some problem or simply keeps my skills sharp. By releasing the source code for my applications, I can possibly do the same for others at no extra cost to myself. How great is that?
As far as work goes, the software I write is for internal use (and I suspect this is the case for a large number if not majority of programmers out there). While the company I work for does not release my software under an open source license (well, technically they don't release it at all but whatever), would they really lose anything by doing so? Either way they need my software to solve an internal issue.
In the cases of both my personal projects and work projects, no one would have robbed me of anything by making a copy of my code. As has to be repeated ad infinitum around here, the only thing that I could even possibly have lost is potential profits were I to be selling my software.
For the same price you are paying for your pathetic DSL line, you could have a line that is ~67 times faster download and ~250 times faster upload in Japan. It is much the same in other parts of the world. The state of ISP service in the US IS pitiful and you SHOULD be angry.
I can't afford to have a hastily written patch bring down any of my machines.
But you can afford to have a security hole that might allow an attacked to execute code wide open for any moron to exploit? It's unlikely that fixing a heap overflow bug will bring down any of your machines but if it's such a concern, why not use your testing machine (you do have one of these right?) to make sure that it doesn't?
Indeed. I think what happened is the Bill of Rights started to stink after they wiped their asses with it so much so they just decided to throw it out the window.
Out of all your employees only two were able to buy property but only after they combined their resources. With an impressive track record like that, it's only a matter of time before they become millionaires like you aspire to be.
Now you're being dishonest here. Nowhere did he say only two of his employees were able to buy property, he said that two young ("barely 21") employees (i.e. still in college) bought a place by combining resources. If that doesn't show the quality of worker he hires, I don't know what does. Think about that for a second; two college aged guys are homeowners. That means no rent and they can then save their apparently high earnings to buy their own places later on. In their off time, they can put some time and effort in to fixing up the place and probably make a profit by selling the place for more than they bought it for. It looks to me like those two are well on their ways to being millionaires.
Since you are obviously having difficulty understanding my position I'm going to help you out:
#1. I do not disagree with keeping ID out of schools, science classrooms in particular. I do not even like the idea of ID or creationism as I am not religious and general dislike religion in general.
#2. What the fuck does that or ID have to do with the Constitution of the United States of America?
No where does the Constitution say religion is unconstitutional. No where does the Constitution say that the federal government must root out religion where ever it can be found in a public place. The only thing the federal government can do is pull its education funding from that district if it's being misused.
Letting a community decide to teach its children in the manner it deems best. The federal government saying that constitutionally allow activity is unconstitutional. See the fucking difference?
If we fill that school with religious indoctrination, we act to create an establishment of religion. Just as if we mandated church attendance as a requirement to hold public office, or to vote.
If the government were to actively promote a specific religion that would indeed be a problem. That is not the case here though... oh forget it, I'm tired of playing the devil's advocate. Everyone else tramples all over the Constitution and treat it like a tool to oppress dissenting ideas, we might as well do the same.
Hoorah for teaching religion in the science classroom being "unconstitutional"!
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
While (as I've said) I completely agree with rejecting ID from the science classroom and generally have a very strong disapproval of organized religion, I still don't see how a school district allowing ID to be taught violates the first amendment. No law has been created and it neither specifically endorses a religion nor prohibits anyone from practicing their own.
This is my question too. I agree completely that Intelligent Design is not science and has no business in a science classroom. I'm missing the part where it's unconstitutional to lower the scientific reasoning abilities of our nation's youth even more that it already is though.
However, I have no incentive to open up a single line of code that I own.
True if you are short sighted enough. In many cases, businesses can and do benefit from having their tools or software open source. I recently bought a RAID card for one of my servers. Their driver is open source and (perhaps because of that) it works great, one of the easiest drive installs I've ever done (and I even had to compile the thing). If tomorrow the driver starts reporting that several drives are missing or something else bizarre, I can open up the source in a text editor, fix the problem, and have the patch to the manufacturer in a few hours (depending on the scope of the problem, of course). I was able to fix my problem quickly and the company gets a free bug fix that they can then distribute to the rest of their customers. Open source software enhances the business to customer relationship without a doubt.
On the surface, inter-business open source dynamics would seem to be a bit trickier since they are competitors. However, software is a tool, nothing more. As such it can be only one (perhaps relatively small) piece of the puzzle. Getting the source code for Walmart's supply system would not get me anywhere close to being competitive with them, for example. You still need people that can use the tool effectively (among other things) for it to gain you any competitiveness.
If companies did share their code between each other, it would only lead to a steady improvement of the code base. Better tools will lead to increased ability to produce which can allow you to overtake your competitor (assuming you are better in the other important areas like marketing as well), even if he is using the same tools.
Besides, you can't control engineers completely. I think I speak for many programmers when I say that we simply want to write and use great software; we just want it to exist. I would have no problem whatsoever fixing some problems in the software of a competing company in my free time. Maybe that would make their software better for me to use in my own personal activities. Or maybe the improved quality of their software would motivate my company to finally approve improving our own. Either way, the overall quality of software in the world has risen and I'm a happy engineer. So in that case, opening your source code to the world is not the problem you see it to be.
Very sad but true. I think one of the biggest problems is that these kind of important issues aren't covered properly on the "OMFG please tell me what to think" nightly news. "In our top story tonight, a local citizen was arrested for lewd behavior. Apparently the man would hide in the bushes naked, and wait for people to pass by at which time he would pop up and begin masturbating; leading police to dub him the 'popup wanker'. In other news, Congress threw out the first, second, and fifth amendments today, the Supreme Court rule that the government is the sole owner of all your land, and the newest body of our governemnt, the Associations of America, have decreed that all citizens shall undergo random cavity searches to look for pirated material. But back to the popup wanker, we're live with our own..." It's just absurd. Giving the news stations at least some benefit of the doubt, the likely don't focus on the more important issues enough because they don't grab people's attention quite like the fictional 'popup wanker'.
If you talk to these people and actually tell them why these things are bad, it's actually (pathetically) easy to convince them. They're apparently just not willing to devote even a modicum of mental effort to figure these things out on their own and instead want someone to tell them what to think. They may not care now, but I wonder how they'll feel when they can't pretend to be film editors with their home movies. Of course by then it will be much too late since it's a lot harder to repeal a law than to make one.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I am quite sure it is you who is 100% wrong. Patents on software is very much not fine. In every case I can think of, it's actually quite absurd. nosoftwarepatents.com outlines the issue well (read the dangers of software patents in particular).
The problem with software patents is that they are incredibly restrictive in an industry that requires freedom and rapid innovation. As pointed out on the page I linked to, something that was innovative in the early days of modern computing would still be patented. A few carefully chosen software patents could have crippled the advancement of computer software, possibly to the extent that the Internet would not exist today (or at least the way we think of it now). Your example of patenting World of Warcraft actually is dumb. First, it's already protected by copyright and trademark laws; someone cannot just copy WoW, call it World of Warcrack and sell it. Thus there is no need to patent it in the first place. The truly chilling concept would be that a patent on WoW would likely be a patent on MMORPGs in general. Imagine that: 20 years of no MMORPGs besides World of Warcraft. Some players might be happy with that, and I'm sure it's VU's wet-dream but for the rest of the world it would be fucking tragic .
Of course there is plenty of prior art in that case so it's not an issue but hopefully that illustrates the problem well. Twenty years ago, no one had even thought of the idea of a MMORPG, now it seems to be the new trend in computer gaming. All those thousands of programmers coding for these games could easily change the face of gaming many times in twenty years. For all we know, gaming might be in a completely virtual reality in five or ten years. How likely is that to happen if only one company or patent holder could create software using that patent? Software patents just do not make sense.
This was my thought too. However, I seem to recall that Konqueror is little more than a frontend for KIO slaves. Could be wrong though, so I guess we need some one knowledgeable to respond or head to the repository. :)
Besides, if we are talking about issues between states, Section 2 of the same Article (4) provides an interesting twist: If it was important enough to each state, a situation like that would likely have to be resolved by a higher authority (possibly by the Supreme Court deciding to clear up the massive ambiguity).
In fact, that's how I do all of my posting.
A (fallacious) ad hominem argument has the basic form:
You'll notice that gowen has not made an argumentum ad hominem because he has not made an argument of that form. He has only said parts 1 and 2 of the above form. Never did he say "Mr. Zuck made this claim but he received money from ACT, therefore what he said is wrong."
If I may further direct to you to the strangely titled "Validity" section of the wiki link: Again: "Evidence may be doubted or rejected based on the source for reasons of credibility..." That is all you can 'accuse' gowen of doing. All he did was point out who the author works for so that you can decide for yourself if the author or his employer has any credibility. Again, only to "doubt or reject a deduction based on the source is the ad hominem fallacy." gowen has not made any comment doubting the validity of Zuck's deduction. Hell, unless I've missed one of his posts, he hasn't made any comment on the deduction at all.
If you want to say that perhaps it was unnecessary to bring up the author's employer, fine. If you want to say that perhaps it is misleading or shady or some other subjective description, fine. But it is not an argumentum ad hominem.
You and GuloGulo seem to have a very hard time with reading comprehension. Two quotes from gowen, emphasis added:
It doesn't necessarily invalidate his opinion (and I never said it did -- that would be argument ad hominem) but it should cast a certain amount of doubt as to whether he reached those opinions through research, or is just parroting his employers opinions.
It doesn't invalidate his opinions (again, I never said it did), but it certainly has some bearing on why he might hold those opinions.
He specifically said twice that the source of Johnathan Zuck's funding does not invalidate his opinion. What it does do it shed light on the how and why he came upon his opinion. (Just to be sure you're still with me: this does not invalidate his position). Now, if it's obvious that someone routinely takes money in exchange for spouting off someone else's opinion, I'm less likely to believe (or at least take at face value) that person's view in the future. The reason being that it indicates this person does not do their own research which will inevitably lead to an incident where their paymaster gives them a complete and utter lie to spread. That is how it is relevent. It does not necessarily invalidate the positions taken by this person but it does mean that I will not treat that person as an authoritative source.
You are 100% correct, thank you. Meh, the whole post sucks - it kind of looks like I hacked together sentences. There isn't a very good flow at all :( -1, Hurried Posting
Mildy offtopic but:
Shameless Plagirism from another slashdotter sig: "We want peace for all and prosperity for mankind. We are United States Government; we don't do that sort of thing."
That's actually a quote from the end of the movie Sneakers. James Earl Jones (playing an NSA chief or something like that) says the "We're the United States Government! We don't deal with that sort of thing." part. See IMDB.
~~
Thank you for your time, and now back to our regularly scheduled Slashdot programming...
I guess it never occurred to you that people are different? That one or two drinks does not have the same effect on everyone?
There are plenty of people who can drive more safely with a BAC of 9% than others with a BAC of 4%. And yet neo-prohibitionist groups like MADD continue to push for the BAC limits to be lowered. If I'm not mistaken, their most recent push was for 5%. For many people that would be one maybe two beers over a social dinner. They claim they do this to protect the children (who doesn't?), and perhaps that was their goal at first. They've long surpassed that though as the vast majority of drunk driving accidents occur at closer to 15% BAC. Not to metion using questionable statistics like: sober driver hits drunk pedestrian strolling down the sidewalk - drunk driving death/injury.
Of course I'm not condoning getting drunk and then driving (hell I barely drink myself, maybe one beer a week). It seems like the simple solution would be for the police to look for unsafe drivers (as they always do anyways) and if it's found that the driver is intoxicated, then punish them for DUI. But then how would they stop social drinking!? No, in addition they have to setup roadblocks where they test everyone. I hope I don't have to explain to you what a terrible precedent that sets, not just for social drinkers but liberty in general.
2. Have a smart bottle with $100 deposit that must be returned when the cycle is complete.
Interesting idea but what's to stop someone from ceasing to take the pills after they feel better, dump the rest, and then turn in the bottle on the specified date for their $100 back?
I think you are forgetting that there is a large community of open source supporters here on Slashdot. I support open source software myself and I make my living as a programmer. I code for work during the day, and I write open source software in my free time.
As for how I feel about that, I feel great. Most of the software I write in my free time is for my own personal satisfaction and usually helps me solve some problem or simply keeps my skills sharp. By releasing the source code for my applications, I can possibly do the same for others at no extra cost to myself. How great is that?
As far as work goes, the software I write is for internal use (and I suspect this is the case for a large number if not majority of programmers out there). While the company I work for does not release my software under an open source license (well, technically they don't release it at all but whatever), would they really lose anything by doing so? Either way they need my software to solve an internal issue.
In the cases of both my personal projects and work projects, no one would have robbed me of anything by making a copy of my code. As has to be repeated ad infinitum around here, the only thing that I could even possibly have lost is potential profits were I to be selling my software.
Technology has not yet rendered the competition for resources unnecessary.
Don't try to rationalize our shitty connections. There is NO excuse for it. Take a look at Japan for example: Average $41.00 for a 100Mbps/85Mbps line.
For the same price you are paying for your pathetic DSL line, you could have a line that is ~67 times faster download and ~250 times faster upload in Japan. It is much the same in other parts of the world. The state of ISP service in the US IS pitiful and you SHOULD be angry.
I can't afford to have a hastily written patch bring down any of my machines.
But you can afford to have a security hole that might allow an attacked to execute code wide open for any moron to exploit? It's unlikely that fixing a heap overflow bug will bring down any of your machines but if it's such a concern, why not use your testing machine (you do have one of these right?) to make sure that it doesn't?
I think it was causing problems with the save the children bills.
Not if you're the admin and want to drive up to one and tap the "UnitXYZ.DispenseCashAnonymously()" button on your pocket PC.
Indeed. I think what happened is the Bill of Rights started to stink after they wiped their asses with it so much so they just decided to throw it out the window.
Out of all your employees only two were able to buy property but only after they combined their resources. With an impressive track record like that, it's only a matter of time before they become millionaires like you aspire to be.
Now you're being dishonest here. Nowhere did he say only two of his employees were able to buy property, he said that two young ("barely 21") employees (i.e. still in college) bought a place by combining resources. If that doesn't show the quality of worker he hires, I don't know what does. Think about that for a second; two college aged guys are homeowners. That means no rent and they can then save their apparently high earnings to buy their own places later on. In their off time, they can put some time and effort in to fixing up the place and probably make a profit by selling the place for more than they bought it for. It looks to me like those two are well on their ways to being millionaires.
Since you are obviously having difficulty understanding my position I'm going to help you out:
#1. I do not disagree with keeping ID out of schools, science classrooms in particular. I do not even like the idea of ID or creationism as I am not religious and general dislike religion in general.
#2. What the fuck does that or ID have to do with the Constitution of the United States of America?
No where does the Constitution say religion is unconstitutional. No where does the Constitution say that the federal government must root out religion where ever it can be found in a public place. The only thing the federal government can do is pull its education funding from that district if it's being misused.
Letting a community decide to teach its children in the manner it deems best. The federal government saying that constitutionally allow activity is unconstitutional. See the fucking difference?
If we fill that school with religious indoctrination, we act to create an establishment of religion. Just as if we mandated church attendance as a requirement to hold public office, or to vote.
If the government were to actively promote a specific religion that would indeed be a problem. That is not the case here though... oh forget it, I'm tired of playing the devil's advocate. Everyone else tramples all over the Constitution and treat it like a tool to oppress dissenting ideas, we might as well do the same.
Hoorah for teaching religion in the science classroom being "unconstitutional"!
This is my question too. I agree completely that Intelligent Design is not science and has no business in a science classroom. I'm missing the part where it's unconstitutional to lower the scientific reasoning abilities of our nation's youth even more that it already is though.
However, I have no incentive to open up a single line of code that I own.
True if you are short sighted enough. In many cases, businesses can and do benefit from having their tools or software open source. I recently bought a RAID card for one of my servers. Their driver is open source and (perhaps because of that) it works great, one of the easiest drive installs I've ever done (and I even had to compile the thing). If tomorrow the driver starts reporting that several drives are missing or something else bizarre, I can open up the source in a text editor, fix the problem, and have the patch to the manufacturer in a few hours (depending on the scope of the problem, of course). I was able to fix my problem quickly and the company gets a free bug fix that they can then distribute to the rest of their customers. Open source software enhances the business to customer relationship without a doubt.
On the surface, inter-business open source dynamics would seem to be a bit trickier since they are competitors. However, software is a tool, nothing more. As such it can be only one (perhaps relatively small) piece of the puzzle. Getting the source code for Walmart's supply system would not get me anywhere close to being competitive with them, for example. You still need people that can use the tool effectively (among other things) for it to gain you any competitiveness.
If companies did share their code between each other, it would only lead to a steady improvement of the code base. Better tools will lead to increased ability to produce which can allow you to overtake your competitor (assuming you are better in the other important areas like marketing as well), even if he is using the same tools.
Besides, you can't control engineers completely. I think I speak for many programmers when I say that we simply want to write and use great software; we just want it to exist. I would have no problem whatsoever fixing some problems in the software of a competing company in my free time. Maybe that would make their software better for me to use in my own personal activities. Or maybe the improved quality of their software would motivate my company to finally approve improving our own. Either way, the overall quality of software in the world has risen and I'm a happy engineer. So in that case, opening your source code to the world is not the problem you see it to be.
Very sad but true. I think one of the biggest problems is that these kind of important issues aren't covered properly on the "OMFG please tell me what to think" nightly news. "In our top story tonight, a local citizen was arrested for lewd behavior. Apparently the man would hide in the bushes naked, and wait for people to pass by at which time he would pop up and begin masturbating; leading police to dub him the 'popup wanker'. In other news, Congress threw out the first, second, and fifth amendments today, the Supreme Court rule that the government is the sole owner of all your land, and the newest body of our governemnt, the Associations of America, have decreed that all citizens shall undergo random cavity searches to look for pirated material. But back to the popup wanker, we're live with our own..." It's just absurd. Giving the news stations at least some benefit of the doubt, the likely don't focus on the more important issues enough because they don't grab people's attention quite like the fictional 'popup wanker'.
If you talk to these people and actually tell them why these things are bad, it's actually (pathetically) easy to convince them. They're apparently just not willing to devote even a modicum of mental effort to figure these things out on their own and instead want someone to tell them what to think. They may not care now, but I wonder how they'll feel when they can't pretend to be film editors with their home movies. Of course by then it will be much too late since it's a lot harder to repeal a law than to make one.