I agree. I would think that making it recharge utilizing electricity instead of natural gas would make more sense. That way, like the parent said, there's more options out there. All potential sources of power can be converted to create electricity. I live in an area that's supplied by hydroelectric which is very clean. As nuclear becomes an option again, that clean source can be utilized. It makes more sense to me to make electricity the common medium.
The U.S. was responsible for 26.5 percent of the all spam trapped in Sophos' networks between April and September 2005.
Still, there is some good news: this is significantly lower than the 41.5 percent chalked up during the same period last year.
South Korea ranked No. 2 on the list with a share of 19.73 percent of all spam. Meanwhile, China ranked No. 3 with 15.7 percent. But the Middle Kingdom nearly doubled its share in the spamming market.
So the US is cutting back and other countries are surging.
trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society
I think it has a whole lot less to do with these things and a whole lot more to do with political beliefs. None of these things have changed. The only thing that's changed is we have someone in the White House that isn't as in line with European political views as the last administration. How did people who are more conservative come to power? Through the democratic, meritocratic, and "free" (libre) system of government that we have in place. The system hasn't changed, just the people chosen by the people to lead, but isn't that what democracy is all about? If the current politcal beliefs don't work out among the people, it'll change again. Isn't democracy great?
And on another note, the US should not necessarily control the internet. It is used by many people around the world. Its not even like the US invented it, either...
with the internet now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical.
Everyone knew what the internet was about when they started using it and depending on it. They knew it was "controlled" by the US. In fact, that's probably a very good reason people have trusted it because they knew that the US would make it work. It's like changing the rules of a game half way through. They knew the rules of the game with the internet and they didn't care in the beginning. Now they want to say, "Hey, we rely too much on it now so give us control." It doesn't work that way.
This topic is so tired. We all know how it's going to end up:
UN: Can we control the root servers?
US: no.
UN: Please can we control the root servers?
US: no.
EU: You HAVE to give us control of the root servers or else....
US: no.
UN: ok.
EU: ok.
In the end everything will be the same as it is today and people will get over it and the internet will continue to work and work well.
It's funny. Every reason given as to why the internet should be given to the UN to control are the exact same reasons the US will never give the UN control of it. If a country is afraid the US will do something nasty to their root domain, the US would be afraid of this very same thing should someone else control the root servers. It would be completely absurd to ever think that the US will ever give up control of something that is so important to its own economy.
So every time I see a new argument as to why the US should give up control, as an American, it convinces me even more firmly that it should do everything it can to maintain control of it. It truly is a question of national security.
WP went down the toilet the moment Novell purchased them. WP for windows was a half-hearted attempt. Correl tried but they were already losing market share rapidly.
Of course, if including a "free" copy with windows was the key to market share, WP would be doing great now. Just about every computer company seems to include the latest copy of WP with a new computer. The fact is, WP stumbled and Microsoft never gave them another chance to come back. There's obviously more to it than just leveraging a monopoly. MS Office is just a good product.
Why do you think the most effective way to find employment is via "networking" (people, not computers). I've found that most companies that don't call people in for interviews because skill A and skill B aren't found on their resume is simply because of HR filters. Most large companies get hundreds of resumes for jobs. They need a way to get them down to a manageable number. HR, who hasn't a clue about computers, starts throwing away resumes without certain words (ie "Bachelors of Science" or "Red Hat").
Enter "networking". When you know someone or can get your resume placed directly to a manager, you bypass HR completely. You actually get to talk to someone who can understand that the knowledge jump from one Unix to another is trivial and that you'd be up to speed as fast as anyone else.
Cold calls and the monster.com way of finding jobs just aren't very effective.
I thought the purpose of college was as much to teach you how to learn effectively as to teach you specific skills. I see no reason why CS students coming out of college can't learn the zOS on the job from the people that are currently maintaining it. There's nothing wrong with a little on-the-job training. I don't know about most people, but most of the programming languages I've learned have been because of a specific job requirement and not from learning it at school.
People who say this don't understand economics. It isn't a zero-sum game. Tax cuts increase revenue until you hit an optimal point. It's happening as we speak. Check out this article. We still have more spending to cut and Bush's latest budget does that. We'll just have to see if congress will give up their pet programs to be able to do it.
It's much like how journalism is an objective view of events.
In support of the parent's point, I'd submit to you that your sentence would be more accurate if you'd said "It's much like how journalism is supposed to be an objective view of events.
Even a journalist with the best intentions implants his/her viewpoint into a story. Usually it's not blatant. It's in where the opposing view appears in the article. Is it near the title or only at the end or on the next page where most people don't read. It's in what information is put in as well as what information is deemed unimportant and left out. I submit that it is impossible to not interject your own values in any created work.
I find it ironic that the same people who argue that a fetus has a "right to life", regardless of anything else (especially in which state the fetus is gestating), demand that the right of a child to live without the possibility of execution be decided "by the will of the people". Of course, they're more vocal the more they believe that the current will of the people reflects their own, or can be demonstrated as such in elections.
The difference, of course, is the actions of the parties involved. In the case of the death penalty, we're talking about a handful of youths (not children) that have done acts heinous enough to cause a jury of their peers to convict them and sentence them to death. Unborn children are innocent of any crime except inconvenience (in the vast majority of cases) to their parents. The other thing that is inaccurate about your statement is that we believe the "right to life" should also be by the "will of the people", so there is no inconsistency there. We just want the legislatures (and therefore the people) of the country to be back in charge of the decision instead of the court having taken it off the table. Some people (erroneously) believe that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion will be illegal across the country. Not so. It'll return to be decided by each state legislature.
As for the ED ruling, it's not so hopeless as to require a rarely-created Constitutional Amendment. The Court decided that the ED action in Connecticut was consistent with current laws. When Congress changes those laws, a new case can be brought, and retried under the then-current laws. The Court did not find a "timeless principle" of rights in that case. They merely found that the laws, as constructed, allow some people to abuse the property of others.
A constitutional amendment is not so far fetched in this case because of the general outrage, but in many cases that are more evenly divided it is, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not for the court to make the decision. That's the job of Congress. In the ED case, the court ignored over 200 years of precedent and changed the way the constitution is read. What they should have done is read the "public use" clause and reaffirm what it has meant for the whole history of this country and establish a "timeless principle" of rights in this case in the favor of the individual's property rights.
In the end we do need to do something about the court. There really is no effective check against what the court has been doing. If we have a court that continues to usurp power, the people have to recourse. As far as I know, "interpreting" the constitution is no an impeachable offense. As long as we're creating amendments, perhaps we should create one that brings the courts back under the control of the people. We can give them term limits, make them elected, or give congress and the president an overruling power of a court decision, or something else I haven't even thought of but something needs to be done before we become an oligarchy under the control of 5 out of 9 men and women in black robes.
While judges shouldn't "legislate" they should determine if a law is constitutional, ie the courts are the third leg of the stool making it stable.
Question then: What checks and balances are in place in the constitution that protect us from a court that is running amuck? Congress legislates but the president has the veto which the congress can overturn. The president enforces the laws that congress passes but can't create laws. The courts make sure that the law is constitutional. What check do we have in place for judges that are already appointed and legislate from the bench?
The "foreign laws" against executing children was used to illustrate just how unjust would be the US remaining among those few countries which still execute children: Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The opinion itself was based on the legal history, and the principles of justice, of the United States.
Where do the "framers opinions" come into it? All that matters is the agreed documents, like the Constitution and even the Declaration of Independence. Everything else is conjecture. Just like the previous drafts of articles of the Constitution that were not accepted by the Congress, or ratified by the states. Even some articles that were ratified, but were repealed, like some Constitutional Amendments, are without merit in deciding US law. Why should some unaccountable private correspondence, or opinions inferred from them centuries later, have any weight? Unless you're deifying those men, who used their reason to create a government not beholden to religion for its legitimacy.
That's not the point. The biggest problem with that ruling was that 5 men and women that were appointed (not elected) for life created a law that did not exist before. The only body that has legal right to create law, according to the Constitution, is the Congress (and the president to a much lesser degree).
The majority of states had already outlawed the practice. When the court makes a decision like this it effectively takes the debate off the table. Legislators can no longer debate it or decide on it. The court has taken away their ability to do so. The people have no more power to decide on the laws of the land.
If the people of a state don't agree with a law, they have power to overthrow it. If their legislators don't agree, they get voted out in 2 years. Not so with the court. If the court decides something. That's it. No recourse. Nothing. The only exception is an amendment to the constitution which is very difficult to do and there's no guarantee that the court won't just invent new meanings of the clauses used in the amendment.
That is precisely why the eminent domain issue is so mortifying. The only hope is that maybe with this issue the people will finally wake up and take notice to what the courts have been doing for the past 60 years which is progressively usurping more and more power. The eminent domain issue is equally horrifying to both (political) liberals and conservatives that hopefully it'll be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Agreed, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the argument parent is making against the BSD license. If someone takes BSD software, makes a tiny change, and then sells it as closed source, the business would ultimately fail because there would be a completely free version available. Someone would have to make extensive changes and add significant value to a piece of software to warrant the sale of it.
Agreed. What's important isn't what their personal political beliefs are but how they interpret the constitution. They shouldn't invent things in there that aren't. It says what it says. Let legislators make law, not the courts.
I don't think anyone is whining about not being able to use GPL code any way they want. The point of the article was that the GPL license, when compared to the BSD license, is prohibitive to a company producing software to sell and therefore it is holding back Open Source software from becoming more widely used.
Programmers who have a problem with the GPL don't use the GPL. The discussion is simply putting out things to consider when a developer is deciding under which license to release his/her code. Nothing else.
Who in their right mind would purchase a piece of software that they can get completely free? I don't think the "pong" feature you meantioned would be enough to get people to purchase it. A company using the shared code would have to have enough value added to it that it would be worth a purchase.
I agree. It's tiring to hear the FOSS zealots go on and on about the elimination of proprietary software in favor of the much more moral OSS. Then love will flow throughout the world and we will all hold hands and sing "We are the world".
I like the OSS movement. I think it's great, and like you said, it provides for opportunities to work on projects when you're starting out or on things you wouldn't otherwise get a chance to do. I just don't get into this "We are good, you are bad" garbage.
PS, with Justice O'Connor retiring, the battle begins. All the distress this announcement is causing just goes to prove that the Supreme Court has usurped WAY too much power. I don't think the founders wanted the choosing of a justice of the court to overshadow just about anything else happening within governemtn.
I don't argue that there are indirect ways a company can make money via Open Source software and can, therefore, pay some programmers. But you have to admit that the number of people getting paid to do Open Source software is a very small percentage of the total number of people writing Open Source software. That's where my point lies. I'm not convinced that you can have OSS without proprietary software companies giving the programmers day jobs so they can work on their pet projects at night. Someone else made the point that most software developers code for companies internally. That may be the answer. Are there enough companies out there with such specific requirements that OSS wouldn't work for them and therefore they could employ all of the programmers that don't work for companies like Red Hat? I don't know. I'm just throwing it all out there for discussion.
Who said to participate in the free market you have to be a back-stabbing cheat? And who said that in order to make the world a better place you have to give it all away for free?
The basic premise that economics is based on is that we all act self-interested and by doing so we are ALL better off and the world becomes a better place.
Something else I've wondered..... If everyone dropped proprietary software and went to Open Source, what would all these developers do to pay the bills and put food on the table? If it weren't for commercial companies willing to pay developers a salary so they can pay their bills, they wouldn't be able to develop other stuff for free. Or will everyone live off of Open Source bounties and "Donate" buttons?
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I agree. I would think that making it recharge utilizing electricity instead of natural gas would make more sense. That way, like the parent said, there's more options out there. All potential sources of power can be converted to create electricity. I live in an area that's supplied by hydroelectric which is very clean. As nuclear becomes an option again, that clean source can be utilized. It makes more sense to me to make electricity the common medium.
You used to be right. From Red Herring:
The U.S. was responsible for 26.5 percent of the all spam trapped in Sophos' networks between April and September 2005.
Still, there is some good news: this is significantly lower than the 41.5 percent chalked up during the same period last year.
South Korea ranked No. 2 on the list with a share of 19.73 percent of all spam. Meanwhile, China ranked No. 3 with 15.7 percent. But the Middle Kingdom nearly doubled its share in the spamming market.
So the US is cutting back and other countries are surging.
trustworthy, democratic, meritocratic, the least corrupt and the most "free" (libre) society
I think it has a whole lot less to do with these things and a whole lot more to do with political beliefs. None of these things have changed. The only thing that's changed is we have someone in the White House that isn't as in line with European political views as the last administration. How did people who are more conservative come to power? Through the democratic, meritocratic, and "free" (libre) system of government that we have in place. The system hasn't changed, just the people chosen by the people to lead, but isn't that what democracy is all about? If the current politcal beliefs don't work out among the people, it'll change again. Isn't democracy great?
In reference to these statements:
And on another note, the US should not necessarily control the internet. It is used by many people around the world. Its not even like the US invented it, either...
with the internet now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical.
Everyone knew what the internet was about when they started using it and depending on it. They knew it was "controlled" by the US. In fact, that's probably a very good reason people have trusted it because they knew that the US would make it work. It's like changing the rules of a game half way through. They knew the rules of the game with the internet and they didn't care in the beginning. Now they want to say, "Hey, we rely too much on it now so give us control." It doesn't work that way.
This topic is so tired. We all know how it's going to end up:
UN: Can we control the root servers?
US: no.
UN: Please can we control the root servers?
US: no.
EU: You HAVE to give us control of the root servers or else....
US: no.
UN: ok.
EU: ok.
In the end everything will be the same as it is today and people will get over it and the internet will continue to work and work well.
The End.
It's funny. Every reason given as to why the internet should be given to the UN to control are the exact same reasons the US will never give the UN control of it. If a country is afraid the US will do something nasty to their root domain, the US would be afraid of this very same thing should someone else control the root servers. It would be completely absurd to ever think that the US will ever give up control of something that is so important to its own economy.
So every time I see a new argument as to why the US should give up control, as an American, it convinces me even more firmly that it should do everything it can to maintain control of it. It truly is a question of national security.
WP went down the toilet the moment Novell purchased them. WP for windows was a half-hearted attempt. Correl tried but they were already losing market share rapidly.
Of course, if including a "free" copy with windows was the key to market share, WP would be doing great now. Just about every computer company seems to include the latest copy of WP with a new computer. The fact is, WP stumbled and Microsoft never gave them another chance to come back. There's obviously more to it than just leveraging a monopoly. MS Office is just a good product.
I ran Win2k Pro on a celeron 300 with ~200MB RAM for a couple of years. Was it slower than Win98? Yes. Was it painful and unusable? In no way.
Then I installed forte 4 to learn java. Now that was painful. To this day, I still haven't learned java....
Why do you think the most effective way to find employment is via "networking" (people, not computers). I've found that most companies that don't call people in for interviews because skill A and skill B aren't found on their resume is simply because of HR filters. Most large companies get hundreds of resumes for jobs. They need a way to get them down to a manageable number. HR, who hasn't a clue about computers, starts throwing away resumes without certain words (ie "Bachelors of Science" or "Red Hat").
Enter "networking". When you know someone or can get your resume placed directly to a manager, you bypass HR completely. You actually get to talk to someone who can understand that the knowledge jump from one Unix to another is trivial and that you'd be up to speed as fast as anyone else.
Cold calls and the monster.com way of finding jobs just aren't very effective.
I thought the purpose of college was as much to teach you how to learn effectively as to teach you specific skills. I see no reason why CS students coming out of college can't learn the zOS on the job from the people that are currently maintaining it. There's nothing wrong with a little on-the-job training. I don't know about most people, but most of the programming languages I've learned have been because of a specific job requirement and not from learning it at school.
ML: Do you feel guilty for the web?
TBL: No.
Does your car have vinyl siding on it? That's kinda cool.
People who say this don't understand economics. It isn't a zero-sum game. Tax cuts increase revenue until you hit an optimal point. It's happening as we speak. Check out this article. We still have more spending to cut and Bush's latest budget does that. We'll just have to see if congress will give up their pet programs to be able to do it.
It's much like how journalism is an objective view of events.
In support of the parent's point, I'd submit to you that your sentence would be more accurate if you'd said "It's much like how journalism is supposed to be an objective view of events.
Even a journalist with the best intentions implants his/her viewpoint into a story. Usually it's not blatant. It's in where the opposing view appears in the article. Is it near the title or only at the end or on the next page where most people don't read. It's in what information is put in as well as what information is deemed unimportant and left out. I submit that it is impossible to not interject your own values in any created work.
I find it ironic that the same people who argue that a fetus has a "right to life", regardless of anything else (especially in which state the fetus is gestating), demand that the right of a child to live without the possibility of execution be decided "by the will of the people". Of course, they're more vocal the more they believe that the current will of the people reflects their own, or can be demonstrated as such in elections.
The difference, of course, is the actions of the parties involved. In the case of the death penalty, we're talking about a handful of youths (not children) that have done acts heinous enough to cause a jury of their peers to convict them and sentence them to death. Unborn children are innocent of any crime except inconvenience (in the vast majority of cases) to their parents. The other thing that is inaccurate about your statement is that we believe the "right to life" should also be by the "will of the people", so there is no inconsistency there. We just want the legislatures (and therefore the people) of the country to be back in charge of the decision instead of the court having taken it off the table. Some people (erroneously) believe that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion will be illegal across the country. Not so. It'll return to be decided by each state legislature.
As for the ED ruling, it's not so hopeless as to require a rarely-created Constitutional Amendment. The Court decided that the ED action in Connecticut was consistent with current laws. When Congress changes those laws, a new case can be brought, and retried under the then-current laws. The Court did not find a "timeless principle" of rights in that case. They merely found that the laws, as constructed, allow some people to abuse the property of others.
A constitutional amendment is not so far fetched in this case because of the general outrage, but in many cases that are more evenly divided it is, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not for the court to make the decision. That's the job of Congress. In the ED case, the court ignored over 200 years of precedent and changed the way the constitution is read. What they should have done is read the "public use" clause and reaffirm what it has meant for the whole history of this country and establish a "timeless principle" of rights in this case in the favor of the individual's property rights.
In the end we do need to do something about the court. There really is no effective check against what the court has been doing. If we have a court that continues to usurp power, the people have to recourse. As far as I know, "interpreting" the constitution is no an impeachable offense. As long as we're creating amendments, perhaps we should create one that brings the courts back under the control of the people. We can give them term limits, make them elected, or give congress and the president an overruling power of a court decision, or something else I haven't even thought of but something needs to be done before we become an oligarchy under the control of 5 out of 9 men and women in black robes.
While judges shouldn't "legislate" they should determine if a law is constitutional, ie the courts are the third leg of the stool making it stable.
Question then: What checks and balances are in place in the constitution that protect us from a court that is running amuck? Congress legislates but the president has the veto which the congress can overturn. The president enforces the laws that congress passes but can't create laws. The courts make sure that the law is constitutional. What check do we have in place for judges that are already appointed and legislate from the bench?
The "foreign laws" against executing children was used to illustrate just how unjust would be the US remaining among those few countries which still execute children: Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The opinion itself was based on the legal history, and the principles of justice, of the United States. Where do the "framers opinions" come into it? All that matters is the agreed documents, like the Constitution and even the Declaration of Independence. Everything else is conjecture. Just like the previous drafts of articles of the Constitution that were not accepted by the Congress, or ratified by the states. Even some articles that were ratified, but were repealed, like some Constitutional Amendments, are without merit in deciding US law. Why should some unaccountable private correspondence, or opinions inferred from them centuries later, have any weight? Unless you're deifying those men, who used their reason to create a government not beholden to religion for its legitimacy.
That's not the point. The biggest problem with that ruling was that 5 men and women that were appointed (not elected) for life created a law that did not exist before. The only body that has legal right to create law, according to the Constitution, is the Congress (and the president to a much lesser degree).
The majority of states had already outlawed the practice. When the court makes a decision like this it effectively takes the debate off the table. Legislators can no longer debate it or decide on it. The court has taken away their ability to do so. The people have no more power to decide on the laws of the land.
If the people of a state don't agree with a law, they have power to overthrow it. If their legislators don't agree, they get voted out in 2 years. Not so with the court. If the court decides something. That's it. No recourse. Nothing. The only exception is an amendment to the constitution which is very difficult to do and there's no guarantee that the court won't just invent new meanings of the clauses used in the amendment.
That is precisely why the eminent domain issue is so mortifying. The only hope is that maybe with this issue the people will finally wake up and take notice to what the courts have been doing for the past 60 years which is progressively usurping more and more power. The eminent domain issue is equally horrifying to both (political) liberals and conservatives that hopefully it'll be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Agreed, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the argument parent is making against the BSD license. If someone takes BSD software, makes a tiny change, and then sells it as closed source, the business would ultimately fail because there would be a completely free version available. Someone would have to make extensive changes and add significant value to a piece of software to warrant the sale of it.
Agreed. What's important isn't what their personal political beliefs are but how they interpret the constitution. They shouldn't invent things in there that aren't. It says what it says. Let legislators make law, not the courts.
I don't think anyone is whining about not being able to use GPL code any way they want. The point of the article was that the GPL license, when compared to the BSD license, is prohibitive to a company producing software to sell and therefore it is holding back Open Source software from becoming more widely used.
Programmers who have a problem with the GPL don't use the GPL. The discussion is simply putting out things to consider when a developer is deciding under which license to release his/her code. Nothing else.
Who in their right mind would purchase a piece of software that they can get completely free? I don't think the "pong" feature you meantioned would be enough to get people to purchase it. A company using the shared code would have to have enough value added to it that it would be worth a purchase.
I agree. It's tiring to hear the FOSS zealots go on and on about the elimination of proprietary software in favor of the much more moral OSS. Then love will flow throughout the world and we will all hold hands and sing "We are the world".
I like the OSS movement. I think it's great, and like you said, it provides for opportunities to work on projects when you're starting out or on things you wouldn't otherwise get a chance to do. I just don't get into this "We are good, you are bad" garbage.
PS, with Justice O'Connor retiring, the battle begins. All the distress this announcement is causing just goes to prove that the Supreme Court has usurped WAY too much power. I don't think the founders wanted the choosing of a justice of the court to overshadow just about anything else happening within governemtn.
This is the most common sense thing I've seen posted in a while. Too bad it was posted as AC. I'd like to know who did it.
I don't argue that there are indirect ways a company can make money via Open Source software and can, therefore, pay some programmers. But you have to admit that the number of people getting paid to do Open Source software is a very small percentage of the total number of people writing Open Source software. That's where my point lies. I'm not convinced that you can have OSS without proprietary software companies giving the programmers day jobs so they can work on their pet projects at night. Someone else made the point that most software developers code for companies internally. That may be the answer. Are there enough companies out there with such specific requirements that OSS wouldn't work for them and therefore they could employ all of the programmers that don't work for companies like Red Hat? I don't know. I'm just throwing it all out there for discussion.
I guess I've mostly worked for companies that sell a software product so I didn't realize that the majority code for internal companies. Good to know.
Who said to participate in the free market you have to be a back-stabbing cheat? And who said that in order to make the world a better place you have to give it all away for free?
The basic premise that economics is based on is that we all act self-interested and by doing so we are ALL better off and the world becomes a better place.
Something else I've wondered..... If everyone dropped proprietary software and went to Open Source, what would all these developers do to pay the bills and put food on the table? If it weren't for commercial companies willing to pay developers a salary so they can pay their bills, they wouldn't be able to develop other stuff for free. Or will everyone live off of Open Source bounties and "Donate" buttons?