A university should really teach you a mixture, pure object-oriented (like Smalltalk), imperative (like modula-2 or C), functional (like Miranda) etc. The student will then have firm foundations for being a good programmer.
I have to agree. (Though I'd add Lisp and Forth (or PostScript) to the list just to round out the programming paradigm experience.)
For those of you old enough to remember life before OO, remember how the early OO advocates were fond of smarmily remarking that OO required an entirely different way of thinking, and was therefore a big jump from procedural/imperative code? That runs both ways. Now that the schools are producing people who never wrote a non-trivial program in a non-OO language, I'm increasingly having to work with people who have severe mental limitations when it comes to problem solving. Procedural-only programmers tend to create tight but obscure and hard-to-maintain code. OO-only programmers tend to create overcomplicated, overengineered code. The best programmers I know can handle both design methodologies, and their code tends to be efficient, modular, clear, and easy to maintain.
While computer graphics can do much to minimize the cost of special effects, it is still more expensive to do the level of special effects today's TV viewers expect than it was when Doctor Who was made in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
I may be alone in this, but the cheesiness of the special effects was a large part of the charm of the original Doctor Who. But then, I thought Babylon 5 was poorly written, unoriginal soap-opera schlock and that its CGI special effects were especially annoying, which is apparently also not a very common opinion.
My complaint with most CGI graphics is this: they're so close to being real that the failure to be indistinguishable from reality is really jarring. With old-style special effects, it's obviously fake, so you just engage in the willing suspension of disbelief and ignore the fakeness. CGI effects, by contrast, carry with them an expectation of reality that they fail to live up to.
I'll stick with my old videos of the original series. That being said, I hope the new Doctor Who lives up to the expectations of the people who do want to see it.
The modern research centre, set to open
later this year, commemorates the ancient Great Library at Alexandria, founded around 295 BC and destroyed under mysterious circumstances sometime in the first century BC.
What "mysterious circumstances" are they talking about? The main facility was destroyed during one of the Roman civil wars, and the secondary facility, located in the temple of Serapis, was ransacked and burned by a mob of fanatical Christians. Moreover, all this happened in the closing years of the third century AD, not the first century BC.
You'd think the author's hometown library had been burned to judge from this shoddy article.
I'm an Internet "oldster".. I was surfing the Web as far back as 1996 and can assure some of the
newer members here that the Internet used to be a much more productive tool.
Oh dear God, would you please STFU? Having Internet access since 1996 does not make you an "oldster". I had my first shell account with Internet access back in 1988, and I don't consider myself an oldbie. I remember when Gopher was the biggest damn thing ever, and thinking that this stupid web thing was never going to replace it. Other people I know remember life before DNS.
I'm all for universal net access. If you collected all of the master's degrees and PhD's from my friends, you'd find an astonishing array of really interesting specialties, but almost none of them are computer-oriented in any way. It frustrates the hell out of me that I can't communicate with them online because they consider net access to be too low a priority to pay much for it, and because elitist cranks like you run around thinking using Netscape 3 in 1996 makes you a freaking veteran.
We're technicians, goddamnit, and despite the tendency of technical people to grossly overestimate their own intelligence, there are plenty of smart and interesting people in other fields. Bring 'em on! And if that means we have to deal with semi-literate trailer trash, well, using spell-checker output to trigger filtering software will get rid of 99% of them.
(And those annoying people who are too lazy to use the shift key and punctuation.)
But what's really sad is the whole multi-billion dollar fraud-based industry in America.
It's all well and good to bitch about fraud, but without con artists like Alex Chiu running around, the 20% of his customer base that are actually helped by the placebo effect would be worse off. And the other 80% learn a hard lesson for only twenty-five bucks.
If he were advising people to buy his rings instead of seeing a doctor, then he'd be a menace. As it is now, he's pretty harmless as charlatans go.
It's trite, but it's true. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that money you don't have in hand doesn't exist, but I would say that about money you aren't contractually guaranteed to receive. Stock options are nice if they pay off, but they are not, now or ever, important enough to influence a decision about much of anything.
Keep this in mind: it is always in your employer's best interest to pay you as little as possible without making you stop working. Any way management can motivate you to work without actually giving you any money is great for the bottom line. Managers also know that money not yet paid is a stronger motivator than money already paid (and spent). While it's counterproductive to think of your boss as your enemy, it's just plain stupid to meander along thinking his or her best interests are the same as yours. By their very nature, they are not.
If another company was lying about my product in order to hurt my business, I'd sue them for defamation.
Microsoft is lying about Linux in particular and GPLed software in general, and the FSF ought to haul them into court over the issue. Sure, the GPL is viral, but simply writing software to run under Linux does not compromise your IP rights unless you use GPLed code to do it, which is certainly not necessary.
The other thing that strikes me, as it usually does when the GPL comes up, is how distributors of closed software are quite insistent that you must respect the terms of their licenses, but bitch like spoiled children when an open developer insists that they respect the terms of his. Closed source developers need to clue into the fact that they can't have it both ways. If you want to protect your own intellectual property, you must refrain from stealing others. It's like arguing that because some women are prostitutes, it's okay to treat all women like prostitutes, and it reflects pretty much the same personality type.
God, I kill me. But seriously, it probably ought to say, "You've got mail, and you will be allowed to read it as soon as it has been reviewed by the thought police." Which raises the question of whether American AOL employees will be collaborating with the Chinese secret police.
But I disagree with a near-eternal guarantee, that might stifle creation in the future because current creative minds can rest on their laurels.
You have that exactly right. Copyright isn't -- or wasn't -- founded on the premise that you own your ideas. (The idea of owning ideas would have struck nearly everyone as absurd up until comparatively recently. It should still strike people as pernicious.) Copyright was founded on the premise that individual creators need to be protected from giant companies -- like the RIAA members -- long enough to make a reasonable profit before their creations fall into the public domain which is their natural place.
The modern copyright's near-permanent duration turns that on its head by disincentivizing future work. The idea of a copyright that endures for the lifetime of the author is a sure sign of the perversion of copyright law's original intent.
By the time this becomes an issue, LILO and/or GRUB (which is a better bootloader anyway, if you haven't tried it yet), will support MBT. Try not to forget one of the few propaganda items about open source that's actually unambiguously true: we can and do respond quickly to changes.
Is it anti-competitive? Probably. But it's likely to be as successful as MS' attempt to crush us with the DAV protocol. Remember that one? A Linux beta came out the same week MS mentioned it. So screw 'em. What's holding us back on the desktop isn't Microsoft's standards twiddling, it's the fact we can't convince the major vendors to port their apps to X. (Which is a subset of the problem that, for several classes of desktop apps, MS is the only vendor.)
Anyway, it will take a lot more than a partition table format to sink us.
grow up, the oil companies would love cheaper fuel, there would be more room for markup.
Except that it wouldn't be oil companies feeding off their government-granted monopolies on hard-to-find and expensive-to-exploit underground reserves. An ethanol-based fuel economy would be dominated by large agricultural companies scattered all over the globe. Not that these companies are likely to be any better behaved than the oil companies, but there are more of them, and therefore more competition.
The nature/humanity dichotomy is, of course, baloney. That does not however change the fact that the activities of humans on this planet have placed us well into what is conservatively estimated to be the largest mass extinction since the end of the Cambrian era.
Natural does not necessarily equal good, and while humans are natural, so is the black plague. For the most part, humans have played to their very lowest and most 'natural' instincts in short-sightedly laying waste to much of the earth.
Nature is always changing, animals are always evolving and
becoming extinct.
That's a superficially sound observation, but it is also fundamentally utter bullshit. Humans operate in a timeframe far, far faster than natural selection, and no multicellular organism can evolve fast enough to survive the changes we are creating. Only organisms naturally well-adapted to humans -- things like rats, cockroaches, and various molds and mildews -- are benefiting from our presence. And only unicellular organisms are actually evolving fast enough to keep up with us, but these are mainly the drug-resistant pathogens that will probably wipe us out for our failure to regulate our own population.
Recognizing that man is part of nature is not the same as recognizing man's place in nature. But that requires appealing to faculties that operate in higher parts of the brain than the R-complex.
It exists, but there has been little financial incentive to promote it.
11. Use of plastics to construct houses
Ditto.
13. Houses that cost $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) and last only 25 years
Ditto.
14. Chemical removal of facial hair
Depilatories are widely available, but they're uncomfortable, smell bad, and not typically used by men. There are also chemical treatments to kill hair follicles altogether.
15. Use of plastic plates that decompes at temperatures above 250 F
Ever heat a plastic plate to 250 F? Of course, I'm not sure I'd call that decomposition...
16. Cleaning plastic waterproof furniture by turning a hose on it
Well within the reach of existing technology, but only for people who don't live in humid climates.
18. Loss of culinary skills due to all food being delivered "fresh frozen"
A near miss. People lost their culinary skills because women are no longer required to be household slaves, and most men are content enough with frozen foods not to bother learning.
19. Processes to turn wood pulp and sawdust into edible foods
They exist. The problem is that edible != yummy.
20. Discarded paper linen and rayon underwear turned into candy
Then WTF are Gummi Bears made of?
21. Videophones in every home
Obviously, the technology exists and has existed for decades. Problem is, almost no one wants to worry about how they look on the phone.
27. Cars burning denatured alchohol as their primary fuel
Possible, even practical. But the oil companies have a vested interest in preventing it.
But there's no way I can ever tolerate his distorted vision for the future of software. To the extent that he denies a software author the right to do with his code as
he pleases, the man is a maniac.
People don't become maniacs simply by having ideas about property rights that differ from yours. Nor does Stallman deny authors anything. What he does is provide a model license that gives authors the option of sharing their software in a way that ensures everyone who partakes of it must also share. This is a common virtue we push in elementary schools; it only becomes anathema, apparently, when we suggest that adults might want to voluntarily be nice to their fellow adults. Of course, people have been killed for less, but what the hell.
Stallman's use of the word 'free' can be a bit counter-intuitive, but as countless thousands of people have noted, English lacks native words for all but the crudest notions of freedom and cost-free-ness.
The GPL has its place. I don't agree with Stallman's belief that all software should be GPLed, but the abuses of "free" and "open source" software by large corporations over the past couple of years clearly demonstrate that if you give an inch to greedy, unethical suits, they'll take a mile, every time. Maybe this matters in some cases, maybe it doesn't. The GPL is available for those cases when it does.
If you want truly free software in the commonly understood sense of the word, you need to prepend these words to your source code:
I, Joe Developer, hereby release this software into the public domain.
The problem is that the vast majority of the people who decry the restrictions of the GPL as unfree are seldom willing to actually go that far and make their own software absolutely free. There is a lesson to be drawn from this which will probably not sit well with rigidly doctrinaire libertarians, so I leave it as an exercise to the reader.
Jon Katz -- among many others -- promote a dangerous idea in arguing that our primary defense against arbitrary authority lies in technology. This might be true in wars between nations, but it is most definitely not the case in struggles between citizenry and their government. We live in a democracy, however deeply flawed it might be, and the most potent weapons available to us are political activism and the right to vote. Whatever problems we now face are the result of a failure to organize and act.
The other side -- governments and corporations -- have most of the lawyers, trillions of dollars, and the world's most extensive network of law enforcement organizations. The idea that random bands of hackers and mathematicians could overcome all that just by dint of good code is ludicrous. The most we can do with code is annoy the enemy; the least they can do is imprison and impoverish us.
This isn't to say that technology can't assist the cause of liberty, but for every genius floating around in the OSS community, the NSA alone employs ten more. Write your congressmen, organize your causes, buy only from ethical companies, and vote. Therein lies our hope.
While Katz scrutinized every other detail in the movie, I do believe he failed to maybe catch that maybe the movie was meant to be a typical "mummy" movie that's
purpose was to poke fun at all the other mummy movies, recursively including itself.
Exactly. I haven't seen the sequel yet -- still trying to find a babysitter -- I loved the first movie. It's a spoof of the genre, not a serious attempt to represent anything remotely resembling ancient Egyptian culture. And as spoofs go, it's pretty damn funny.
I have a pretty high level of sensitivity where Egypt is concerned; I've been an amateur Egyptologist most of my life, learned to read the language (if not especially well, yet), etc., and I hate seeing Egypt misrepresented as much as anyone. But The Mummy isn't about Egypt, it's about bad Hollywood archaeology/horror movies in much the same way that Scream was a spoof of bad teen slasher pics. Except that The Mummy was much more fun than Scream.
Katz really needs to have that alien probe removed.
Wow, this came awfully close to being a real book review. Katz's normal approach is to briefly describe one of the book's major themes and use it as a springboard for a rant about corporate America. (Not that I always disagree with him, but a book review ought not to be an editorial.)
Aside from the occasional spurt of Usenet abuse, I've never been inclined to spend most of my time online. I find it detracts from my real obsession, which is software development. I love coding more than any other computer-related activity. And I think that coding for eight to ten hours a day at work, followed by another six to eight hours at home, punctuated by fitful sleep, helps me keep my balance and prevents needless web-surfing.:)
With a name like Tandem Thrust, you'd think this was part of a raunchy 80's metal band, not a military operation. What's the follow-on to this, Turgid Probe?
Boy, the suggestion that payphones are obsolete sure does say a lot about the income bracket of the people submitting stories to Slashdot.
Hey, now that we've all got great benefits packages, let's get rid of public health clinics. And since our kids are all living off of the largesse of our absurdly high family incomes, let's can the school lunch program. Heck, let's just bulldoze all those poor neighborhoods now that no one lives in them anymore.
Oh wait -- you mean we're not the majority, just an insular clique of tech specialists? Whoooaaaa, heavy man.
And I'm going to respond by refusing to buy any Apple products --
Oh wait, I've been boycotting Apple ever since they killed the Apple IIgs in order to promote an underpowered piece of crap without sound or even color graphics called... was it 'Granny Smith' or 'Macintosh' or something?
Um, this isn't about diplomatic posturing, saving face, culture clashes, or apologies. The entire point of this confrontation is the status of the South China Sea. The Chinese have made a territorial claim over virtually the entire South China sea, in stark violation of international law, and for the US to apologize in this case would essentially be the same as recognizing the legitimacy of Chinese territorial claims. Go look at a map to see why pretty much everyone except the Chinese would consider this a bad thing.
Not everything's a cultural gesture, Jon. In this case, it's an attempt at using a mixture of threats and actual military force to annex some of the most valuable and heavily traveled sea lanes on earth.
Forget the censorship issue. This is nothing new, and the current situation is not that bad (or good, depending on your bent). In the Portland area, fr'example, I head "fuck" and "shit" on the radio at least a couple of times a day. Big deal.
What is disturbing, however, is that these self-appointed guardians of public decency are under the impression that motherfucker is hyphenated. For at least thirty or forty years now, motherfucker has been a non-hyphenated compound word, and can, in fact, be found in most dictionaries these days. I wonder what company's spell-checker these FCC goons proofed their document with?
No, what they want is for content owners to be able to give permission to Napster to distribute specific songs with the a priori assumption that it is a violation of copyright to do so otherwise. Which is a pretty straightforward and uncomplicated application of copyright law.
In other words, for Napster to distribute one of my spoken-word pieces, I'd have to tell Napster that it was okay to distribute it, exactly the same way I give permission to distribute my software by slapping a GPL on it. The presumption is that copyright exists and that people own their creations.
Having said that, I have severe misgivings about IP laws in general, but in this particular case, there doesn't appear to be anything questionable going on from a legal standpoint.
If you are angry that you have done some hard work coding a piece of software and no one is paying your bills, then stop coding.
It's not about money. I'm already paid reasonably well for writing software during the day. The code I write on my own time and release under the GPL is another matter altogether -- it's about freedom for its users. If I wanted to help fatten the coffers of businessmen, I'd keep it closed and demand a licensing fee, not release it under the GPL.
I find it disturbing that so many software companies think the generosity of GPL software authors is an invitation to theft, especially when those same companies would not hesitate to sue anyone who blithely disregarded their licenses.
Even the god-among-men ESR thinks that Open Source does not mean that one has to forgo monetary considerations.
ESR can think whatever the hell he wants, it still has no bearing on the GPL. Instituting a mandatory charge for a GPL'ed product is a violation of the license. These people can do whatever the heck they want with the software they create, but they are not entitled to take other people's software and violate the terms of the license under which they obtained copies in the first place.
Pay these people their money and get on with your life.
When hell freezes over. If it were my code they were pirating -- and that is the correct word in this case -- I'd sue the hell out of them. GPL != public domain no matter how many get-rich-quick-for-trivial-tweaks parasites there are out there who might believe otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree. (Though I'd add Lisp and Forth (or PostScript) to the list just to round out the programming paradigm experience.)
For those of you old enough to remember life before OO, remember how the early OO advocates were fond of smarmily remarking that OO required an entirely different way of thinking, and was therefore a big jump from procedural/imperative code? That runs both ways. Now that the schools are producing people who never wrote a non-trivial program in a non-OO language, I'm increasingly having to work with people who have severe mental limitations when it comes to problem solving. Procedural-only programmers tend to create tight but obscure and hard-to-maintain code. OO-only programmers tend to create overcomplicated, overengineered code. The best programmers I know can handle both design methodologies, and their code tends to be efficient, modular, clear, and easy to maintain.
There is no knowledge that is not power.
--
I may be alone in this, but the cheesiness of the special effects was a large part of the charm of the original Doctor Who. But then, I thought Babylon 5 was poorly written, unoriginal soap-opera schlock and that its CGI special effects were especially annoying, which is apparently also not a very common opinion.
My complaint with most CGI graphics is this: they're so close to being real that the failure to be indistinguishable from reality is really jarring. With old-style special effects, it's obviously fake, so you just engage in the willing suspension of disbelief and ignore the fakeness. CGI effects, by contrast, carry with them an expectation of reality that they fail to live up to.
I'll stick with my old videos of the original series. That being said, I hope the new Doctor Who lives up to the expectations of the people who do want to see it.
--
What "mysterious circumstances" are they talking about? The main facility was destroyed during one of the Roman civil wars, and the secondary facility, located in the temple of Serapis, was ransacked and burned by a mob of fanatical Christians. Moreover, all this happened in the closing years of the third century AD, not the first century BC.
You'd think the author's hometown library had been burned to judge from this shoddy article.
--
Oh dear God, would you please STFU? Having Internet access since 1996 does not make you an "oldster". I had my first shell account with Internet access back in 1988, and I don't consider myself an oldbie. I remember when Gopher was the biggest damn thing ever, and thinking that this stupid web thing was never going to replace it. Other people I know remember life before DNS.
I'm all for universal net access. If you collected all of the master's degrees and PhD's from my friends, you'd find an astonishing array of really interesting specialties, but almost none of them are computer-oriented in any way. It frustrates the hell out of me that I can't communicate with them online because they consider net access to be too low a priority to pay much for it, and because elitist cranks like you run around thinking using Netscape 3 in 1996 makes you a freaking veteran.
We're technicians, goddamnit, and despite the tendency of technical people to grossly overestimate their own intelligence, there are plenty of smart and interesting people in other fields. Bring 'em on! And if that means we have to deal with semi-literate trailer trash, well, using spell-checker output to trigger filtering software will get rid of 99% of them.
(And those annoying people who are too lazy to use the shift key and punctuation.)
--
It's all well and good to bitch about fraud, but without con artists like Alex Chiu running around, the 20% of his customer base that are actually helped by the placebo effect would be worse off. And the other 80% learn a hard lesson for only twenty-five bucks.
If he were advising people to buy his rings instead of seeing a doctor, then he'd be a menace. As it is now, he's pretty harmless as charlatans go.
--
Keep this in mind: it is always in your employer's best interest to pay you as little as possible without making you stop working. Any way management can motivate you to work without actually giving you any money is great for the bottom line. Managers also know that money not yet paid is a stronger motivator than money already paid (and spent). While it's counterproductive to think of your boss as your enemy, it's just plain stupid to meander along thinking his or her best interests are the same as yours. By their very nature, they are not.
--
Microsoft is lying about Linux in particular and GPLed software in general, and the FSF ought to haul them into court over the issue. Sure, the GPL is viral, but simply writing software to run under Linux does not compromise your IP rights unless you use GPLed code to do it, which is certainly not necessary.
The other thing that strikes me, as it usually does when the GPL comes up, is how distributors of closed software are quite insistent that you must respect the terms of their licenses, but bitch like spoiled children when an open developer insists that they respect the terms of his. Closed source developers need to clue into the fact that they can't have it both ways. If you want to protect your own intellectual property, you must refrain from stealing others. It's like arguing that because some women are prostitutes, it's okay to treat all women like prostitutes, and it reflects pretty much the same personality type.
Nuff said.
--
"Someone set us up the mail."
God, I kill me. But seriously, it probably ought to say, "You've got mail, and you will be allowed to read it as soon as it has been reviewed by the thought police." Which raises the question of whether American AOL employees will be collaborating with the Chinese secret police.
--
You have that exactly right. Copyright isn't -- or wasn't -- founded on the premise that you own your ideas. (The idea of owning ideas would have struck nearly everyone as absurd up until comparatively recently. It should still strike people as pernicious.) Copyright was founded on the premise that individual creators need to be protected from giant companies -- like the RIAA members -- long enough to make a reasonable profit before their creations fall into the public domain which is their natural place.
The modern copyright's near-permanent duration turns that on its head by disincentivizing future work. The idea of a copyright that endures for the lifetime of the author is a sure sign of the perversion of copyright law's original intent.
--
Is it anti-competitive? Probably. But it's likely to be as successful as MS' attempt to crush us with the DAV protocol. Remember that one? A Linux beta came out the same week MS mentioned it. So screw 'em. What's holding us back on the desktop isn't Microsoft's standards twiddling, it's the fact we can't convince the major vendors to port their apps to X. (Which is a subset of the problem that, for several classes of desktop apps, MS is the only vendor.)
Anyway, it will take a lot more than a partition table format to sink us.
--
Except that it wouldn't be oil companies feeding off their government-granted monopolies on hard-to-find and expensive-to-exploit underground reserves. An ethanol-based fuel economy would be dominated by large agricultural companies scattered all over the globe. Not that these companies are likely to be any better behaved than the oil companies, but there are more of them, and therefore more competition.
--
Natural does not necessarily equal good, and while humans are natural, so is the black plague. For the most part, humans have played to their very lowest and most 'natural' instincts in short-sightedly laying waste to much of the earth.
Nature is always changing, animals are always evolving and becoming extinct.
That's a superficially sound observation, but it is also fundamentally utter bullshit. Humans operate in a timeframe far, far faster than natural selection, and no multicellular organism can evolve fast enough to survive the changes we are creating. Only organisms naturally well-adapted to humans -- things like rats, cockroaches, and various molds and mildews -- are benefiting from our presence. And only unicellular organisms are actually evolving fast enough to keep up with us, but these are mainly the drug-resistant pathogens that will probably wipe us out for our failure to regulate our own population.
Recognizing that man is part of nature is not the same as recognizing man's place in nature. But that requires appealing to faculties that operate in higher parts of the brain than the R-complex.
--
3. Cheap electrical heating
It exists, but there has been little financial incentive to promote it.
11. Use of plastics to construct houses
Ditto.
13. Houses that cost $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) and last only 25 years
Ditto.
14. Chemical removal of facial hair
Depilatories are widely available, but they're uncomfortable, smell bad, and not typically used by men. There are also chemical treatments to kill hair follicles altogether.
15. Use of plastic plates that decompes at temperatures above 250 F
Ever heat a plastic plate to 250 F? Of course, I'm not sure I'd call that decomposition...
16. Cleaning plastic waterproof furniture by turning a hose on it
Well within the reach of existing technology, but only for people who don't live in humid climates.
18. Loss of culinary skills due to all food being delivered "fresh frozen"
A near miss. People lost their culinary skills because women are no longer required to be household slaves, and most men are content enough with frozen foods not to bother learning.
19. Processes to turn wood pulp and sawdust into edible foods
They exist. The problem is that edible != yummy.
20. Discarded paper linen and rayon underwear turned into candy
Then WTF are Gummi Bears made of?
21. Videophones in every home
Obviously, the technology exists and has existed for decades. Problem is, almost no one wants to worry about how they look on the phone.
27. Cars burning denatured alchohol as their primary fuel
Possible, even practical. But the oil companies have a vested interest in preventing it.
--
People don't become maniacs simply by having ideas about property rights that differ from yours. Nor does Stallman deny authors anything. What he does is provide a model license that gives authors the option of sharing their software in a way that ensures everyone who partakes of it must also share. This is a common virtue we push in elementary schools; it only becomes anathema, apparently, when we suggest that adults might want to voluntarily be nice to their fellow adults. Of course, people have been killed for less, but what the hell.
Stallman's use of the word 'free' can be a bit counter-intuitive, but as countless thousands of people have noted, English lacks native words for all but the crudest notions of freedom and cost-free-ness.
The GPL has its place. I don't agree with Stallman's belief that all software should be GPLed, but the abuses of "free" and "open source" software by large corporations over the past couple of years clearly demonstrate that if you give an inch to greedy, unethical suits, they'll take a mile, every time. Maybe this matters in some cases, maybe it doesn't. The GPL is available for those cases when it does.
If you want truly free software in the commonly understood sense of the word, you need to prepend these words to your source code:
The problem is that the vast majority of the people who decry the restrictions of the GPL as unfree are seldom willing to actually go that far and make their own software absolutely free. There is a lesson to be drawn from this which will probably not sit well with rigidly doctrinaire libertarians, so I leave it as an exercise to the reader.
--
The other side -- governments and corporations -- have most of the lawyers, trillions of dollars, and the world's most extensive network of law enforcement organizations. The idea that random bands of hackers and mathematicians could overcome all that just by dint of good code is ludicrous. The most we can do with code is annoy the enemy; the least they can do is imprison and impoverish us.
This isn't to say that technology can't assist the cause of liberty, but for every genius floating around in the OSS community, the NSA alone employs ten more. Write your congressmen, organize your causes, buy only from ethical companies, and vote. Therein lies our hope.
--
Exactly. I haven't seen the sequel yet -- still trying to find a babysitter -- I loved the first movie. It's a spoof of the genre, not a serious attempt to represent anything remotely resembling ancient Egyptian culture. And as spoofs go, it's pretty damn funny.
I have a pretty high level of sensitivity where Egypt is concerned; I've been an amateur Egyptologist most of my life, learned to read the language (if not especially well, yet), etc., and I hate seeing Egypt misrepresented as much as anyone. But The Mummy isn't about Egypt, it's about bad Hollywood archaeology/horror movies in much the same way that Scream was a spoof of bad teen slasher pics. Except that The Mummy was much more fun than Scream.
Katz really needs to have that alien probe removed.
--
Wow, this came awfully close to being a real book review. Katz's normal approach is to briefly describe one of the book's major themes and use it as a springboard for a rant about corporate America. (Not that I always disagree with him, but a book review ought not to be an editorial.) Aside from the occasional spurt of Usenet abuse, I've never been inclined to spend most of my time online. I find it detracts from my real obsession, which is software development. I love coding more than any other computer-related activity. And I think that coding for eight to ten hours a day at work, followed by another six to eight hours at home, punctuated by fitful sleep, helps me keep my balance and prevents needless web-surfing. :)
--
With a name like Tandem Thrust, you'd think this was part of a raunchy 80's metal band, not a military operation. What's the follow-on to this, Turgid Probe?
--
Hey, now that we've all got great benefits packages, let's get rid of public health clinics. And since our kids are all living off of the largesse of our absurdly high family incomes, let's can the school lunch program. Heck, let's just bulldoze all those poor neighborhoods now that no one lives in them anymore.
Oh wait -- you mean we're not the majority, just an insular clique of tech specialists? Whoooaaaa, heavy man.
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Oh wait, I've been boycotting Apple ever since they killed the Apple IIgs in order to promote an underpowered piece of crap without sound or even color graphics called... was it 'Granny Smith' or 'Macintosh' or something?
Well, whatever. I'm really mad now.
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Not everything's a cultural gesture, Jon. In this case, it's an attempt at using a mixture of threats and actual military force to annex some of the most valuable and heavily traveled sea lanes on earth.
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What is disturbing, however, is that these self-appointed guardians of public decency are under the impression that motherfucker is hyphenated. For at least thirty or forty years now, motherfucker has been a non-hyphenated compound word, and can, in fact, be found in most dictionaries these days. I wonder what company's spell-checker these FCC goons proofed their document with?
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In other words, for Napster to distribute one of my spoken-word pieces, I'd have to tell Napster that it was okay to distribute it, exactly the same way I give permission to distribute my software by slapping a GPL on it. The presumption is that copyright exists and that people own their creations.
Having said that, I have severe misgivings about IP laws in general, but in this particular case, there doesn't appear to be anything questionable going on from a legal standpoint.
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It's not about money. I'm already paid reasonably well for writing software during the day. The code I write on my own time and release under the GPL is another matter altogether -- it's about freedom for its users. If I wanted to help fatten the coffers of businessmen, I'd keep it closed and demand a licensing fee, not release it under the GPL.
I find it disturbing that so many software companies think the generosity of GPL software authors is an invitation to theft, especially when those same companies would not hesitate to sue anyone who blithely disregarded their licenses.
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ESR can think whatever the hell he wants, it still has no bearing on the GPL. Instituting a mandatory charge for a GPL'ed product is a violation of the license. These people can do whatever the heck they want with the software they create, but they are not entitled to take other people's software and violate the terms of the license under which they obtained copies in the first place.
Pay these people their money and get on with your life.
When hell freezes over. If it were my code they were pirating -- and that is the correct word in this case -- I'd sue the hell out of them. GPL != public domain no matter how many get-rich-quick-for-trivial-tweaks parasites there are out there who might believe otherwise.
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