If you successfully invalidate the GPL, all you've achieved is to prove yourself guilty of copyright infringement.
This assumes that the permissions to distribute are invalidated, not the obligations of the distributor, nor the possible judgments to which the copyright holder requests entitlement.
Nothing more perverts the issue than those that try to make the battle against pseudoscience into a "rights" issue.
Pseudoscience isn't science; but the battle is very much a "rights" issue. If science is taught as the absolute truth, then the system infringes on the 1st Amendment right to have other conflicting beliefs about the absolute truth. The question is how to offer up good science without completely denying the right to believe in some alternate ultimate truth. There's got to be a better way...
As an engineer, I would teach not science, but technology, e.g. what actually works (and can be built or wet-lab'd to possibly falsify in, say, one lifetime career), and leave theories about why it may have worked to another subject area, e.g. philosophy of science, metaphysics, and etc. Philosophy teachers are much better about quaffling appropriately.
does that mean that there should be a democratic process to decide on what "1 + 1" is?
There already is. Business interests donate to the election campaigns of politicians who might pass laws allowing accounting practices favored by those business interests. You end up with laws that temporarily allow Enron-esque companies to publish financial statements saying that "1 + 1" = billion$
dont start this shit again, their policies had nothing to do with "science"
It may have had nothing to do with science from some absolute point-of-view, but it had everything to do with science as far as what the propaganda machine and educational systems were feeding the bulk of the populace. That's what a democracy allows the populace to vote against the propaganda machine, even if what that machine has been spitting out is correct according to most scientists.
Scientific Consensus is not a threat to democracy, selfishness and stupidity are.
However, in a 1st-Amendment-style democracy, one is free to believe that "Scientific Consensus" is selfish and stupid, and vote accordingly. Various failed social policies which ended up killing millions were officially the "Scientific Consensus" according to Stalin, Mao, and others. A free country should allow people to vote against any official party line, even if *you* think that the consensus party line is obviously true.
Better yet, boot the OS from flash memory, and make that portion of flash memory unwritable by some physical interlock which is hard to remove by idiots. Some embedded linux appliances are close to this.
Everything about the XO (the actual name of the OLPC project computer) is open source. That includes both software and hardware designs. If these countries had the proper facilities, they could, and would be quite welcome to, build it themselves and keep the money in their own economy.
Just the fab line to build the chips in the XO would likely cost billions. Even given the chips and standard components (assuming they can be got at cost), just a facility in which to manufacture the rest of the XO in large volume at a reasonable cost would likely cost many tens to hundreds of millions.
They're not afraid. They're smart. They paid for some legal
research looking among their thousands of patents. Why give
any specific information away for free when they can wait for
the OSS community to incur equivalent research costs? (in time
if not in cash).
If we started from scratch today could we do better than current engines?
Maybe easily... if current 4-stroke engines had to start from scratch also. During their first decade or so, 4 stroke engines had very poor performance, maybe less than 10 hp. So, take away its roughly 1 century of head start in gained engineering knowledge and technology, plus all the roads and gas stations built in that time frame to support them, and a big unreliable 10 hp 4-stroker should be possible to beat. Or send a bunch of fuel-cell and turbine engineers in a time machine to bring back the best tech from 2107 CE to put against todays 4-strokers.
Money is irrelevant. Money is only relevant when you love 2 things more or less equally and there is a large difference in income between them.
Money is quite relevant. But so is loving ones work and being good at what one does. If you are lucky enough that all three (money, love, and skill) apply to one type of career, then you will have a much higher chance of success. If not, you may be out of luck.
They already are taxed! The more 100W bulbs I use, the higher my electric bill and the higher the tax on my electric bill.
Or are you suggesting that I should pay a significantly higher tax on a 100W bulb I seldom use at all, but not on, say, 10 60W bulbs that I leave burning 24 hours a day? If you want to reduce total power use, you should just tax total power use, and let me choose how to waste the amount I want to pay for.
With whom does the fault rest here? The employers, or the idiots who make themselves available 24/7 at the whim of their workplace?...
As for whether or not you can "get away" with that - Yes, you most certainly can.
Except for the "idiots" who actually do want to get promoted to an executive position (with the stock options as well as the salary) instead of letting pointy-hair types manage them for the rest of their lives. Except for the idiots who don't want to be first in line when there are cut-backs. Except for the types who have looked at or even worked for alternative companies and found them even more farked up than the current employer. Except for the people who actually like to be team players and hold up their share of the workload when all their teammates think it important enough to put in evening and weekend hours. Except for those who feel that their company is actually innovating a valuable contribution to society (for instance, a medical device that will actually save lives the sooner it gets to market). Yes, if you're not one of those, you can certainly just go home and turn the beeping thing off.
This assumes that how much someone would be willing to pay for something is a constant. This is obviously not true. The typical grocery shopper will buy different things on different days even if the prices are constant.
This also assumes that I'm not trying to buy at auction because of some reasonable probability that I might get a better deal than the maximum price I'm willing to pay. Auction buying is a form of gambling. If I bid, given that items of that nature typically sell at a reasonable discount N% of the time at auction, and the seller rigs it so that the probability of a discount is 0%, then the the game has been rigged to be one which I might not play at all (just drive down to the mall instead). e.g. people are far more willing to lose money in a fair card game, then one where someone at the table is cheating.
Which is the wrong way to look at it. Either you're paying the premiums to cover you for medical expenses, regardless of what that expense might be, or you're throwing money down the hole in the off chance that someday, somehow, you'll get hit crossing the street.
I don't like paying for something and not getting anything in return.
Then you don't need insurance. Insurance is to cover risk. It you don't want to cover risks in your life, then you don't need insurance. If you know exactly how much your medical expenses will be, then just pay your doctor directly, and cut out the middleman fees. Insurance is to cover you if you occasionally cross the street, expect not to be hit, but not with complete enough certainty that you would be willing to forgo costly medical attention if you did get hit (by a car, stroke, cancerous mutation, whatever...) If you do want risk coverage, then you are getting an expiring probability of payment in return. This is not the same as nothing unless you can predict the future with absolute certainty before expiration of the coverage.
The original Amiga (Hi Toro) engineering team had a small Data General mini-computer used for chip design. Documentation had an Apple Lisa. The software team first shared a small 68000 based Unix microcomputer. The Sun workstations came later.
You're either being truthful or you're not. You either have good intentions or you don't. Yes, the world *is* this black and white. The world *is* this simple. And you're either lying or you're not. Sometimes it's hard to determine, but it's one way or the other.
The problem is that intelligent people (perhaps even more intelligent than you) with good intentions often come to different and incompatible opinions as to the truth. This happens not only between politicians, theologians and business people, but even with scientists and mathematicians. Some scientific evidence shows that humans merely assume that anyone who agrees with their own intelligent honest opinion is speaking the truth, but question anyone who doesn't agree to find some sort of perceived error or predisposed bias. Googles statistical method seems to be to use a larger set of biases and questions than your own to test statements against.
Charge more for the product than the wages you pay = PROFIT
But charge less than competitive offerings, else the customers go there instead, and your Revenues = 0
OSS has the problem that the cost of installing an alternative and identical distribution often approaches zero, so a company can only charge for things that aren't part of their distribution (phone support, pretty packaging, etc.)
While academics were writing papers about formal proofs of correctness and such, businessmen were noticing that startups that quickly sent to market good demos with crappy to non-existant quality were drawing a boatload of investments and sometimes even producing big profits. The triumph of marketing over theoretical mathematics. It's not difficult to figure out which model most managers would want to copy.
I too support copyrights and patents, but copyrights I'd limit to say not more than five or ten years and patents not more than three or five years, unless the inventor can show they need more tyme to make a profit off of the invention. Once a profit has been realized though I'd have the patent put into the public domain. Well, maybe not profit but the breakeven point, otherwise how are you going to decide how much profit.
Break-even, or a reasonable profit, are not anywhere near enough. The profit has to be proportional to the risk of the R&D investment. If the risk factor is over 100:1, then the profit has to be a windfall to make that bet worthwhile.
Market forces should reward success in the face of risk, if that's what's beneficial to the public. How much does it cost to find and prove safe a new drug, versus what percentage of new drugs turn out to be the cure for cancer or something? What payoff is required to take that gamble? Huge probably.
How do you explain music, poetry, stories and all that which people created before machine presses and copyright? People have been singing and dancing forever and they will continue to do so despite your inability to profit from or diminish their joy.
Of course, but what percentage of the population could afford to do that instead of some non-artistic day job? What percentage of good art comes from artists who are employed for their art instead of just doing it in their free time? How good are the ballerinas who dance full time, versus those who dance weekends after 40 hours of office work? Etc.
Let's turn this on it's head. If it were possible to effortlessly and infinitely reproduce bread, would you degrade that process?
Likely not. But would there be as many artisan bakeries borrowing from the bank and investing in new machinery to bake new and interesting breads?
I hate to point out that what that guy did to your original post can be re-applied here and sound even worse...
Innumericy strikes again. The statistical differences between "black" and "white" are in the genetic noise, and, if resolvable, likely differ from many obvious prejudices. The differences between sexes is as obvious as the difference between the letters X and Y on a chromosome chart, and the hormone effects are big enough to be part of developmental and daily (monthly?) vocabulary.
078-05-1120
It's a specimen number from the Eisenhower era.
What's needed is a law making it legal to give out this number (or some other example number) as your SSN, without penalty, except for your employer and certain governmental agencies. Also make it a legal offense for anybody to penalize you for giving out that number as your SSN, even if you sign that it is your true and correct SSN (except with those aforementioned authorize recipients).
Random numbers aren't good for this purpose because someone elses records might get screwed up before they can notice in time to fix the misreporting or sue somebody.
Indisputably if you ignore the Motorola 6800 and the MOS 6502 and the Z80. Even if you did ignore them, you still wouldn't end up with 100% microprocessor market share for the 8080.
The Z80 and 6502 were done well after the 6800 and 8080, because they were done by some original designers of the 8080 and 6800 (Fagin and Peddle) who later left to start up at new companies (Zilog and Mostek). Not sure how far apart the intoduction dates of the 8080 and 6800 were. The 8080 may have had a time window alone as a shipping fully usable 8-bit CPU (unlike the harder to interface and program 8008).
So you believe you're a better driver than the computer. But are you willing to bet the lives of your passengers, or the lives of other people on the road, that you're a better driver than the computer? More importantly, if I'm driving behind or beside your car in bad weather, am I willing to bet you're a better driver than a computer? I think not.
In fact, he/she might clearly be a better driver than the computer, and willing to bet that, and win that bet.
But not the car company. They don't want to win any one bet. More like the casinos, which will occasionally lose to a "lucky" customer. The car companies want to increase their total fleet safety (as related to the potential average number of lawsuits resulting). Which means they might be quite willing to kill a few good drivers, if it means, in exchange, that they save the lives of an even larger number of average and stupid drivers (and the people on the road around them). The laws probably allows them to do thus because there are a lot more average and stupid voters, than smart ones with excellent driving skills and training.
Slashdot Mirror
This assumes that the permissions to distribute are invalidated, not the obligations of the distributor, nor the possible judgments to which the copyright holder requests entitlement.
Pseudoscience isn't science; but the battle is very much a "rights" issue. If science is taught as the absolute truth, then the system infringes on the 1st Amendment right to have other conflicting beliefs about the absolute truth. The question is how to offer up good science without completely denying the right to believe in some alternate ultimate truth. There's got to be a better way...
As an engineer, I would teach not science, but technology, e.g. what actually works (and can be built or wet-lab'd to possibly falsify in, say, one lifetime career), and leave theories about why it may have worked to another subject area, e.g. philosophy of science, metaphysics, and etc. Philosophy teachers are much better about quaffling appropriately.
There already is. Business interests donate to the election campaigns of politicians who might pass laws allowing accounting practices favored by those business interests. You end up with laws that temporarily allow Enron-esque companies to publish financial statements saying that "1 + 1" = billion$
It may have had nothing to do with science from some absolute point-of-view, but it had everything to do with science as far as what the propaganda machine and educational systems were feeding the bulk of the populace. That's what a democracy allows the populace to vote against the propaganda machine, even if what that machine has been spitting out is correct according to most scientists.
However, in a 1st-Amendment-style democracy, one is free to believe that "Scientific Consensus" is selfish and stupid, and vote accordingly. Various failed social policies which ended up killing millions were officially the "Scientific Consensus" according to Stalin, Mao, and others. A free country should allow people to vote against any official party line, even if *you* think that the consensus party line is obviously true.
Better yet, boot the OS from flash memory, and make that portion of flash memory unwritable by some physical interlock which is hard to remove by idiots. Some embedded linux appliances are close to this.
Just the fab line to build the chips in the XO would likely cost billions. Even given the chips and standard components (assuming they can be got at cost), just a facility in which to manufacture the rest of the XO in large volume at a reasonable cost would likely cost many tens to hundreds of millions.
They're not afraid. They're smart. They paid for some legal research looking among their thousands of patents. Why give any specific information away for free when they can wait for the OSS community to incur equivalent research costs? (in time if not in cash).
Maybe easily... if current 4-stroke engines had to start from scratch also. During their first decade or so, 4 stroke engines had very poor performance, maybe less than 10 hp. So, take away its roughly 1 century of head start in gained engineering knowledge and technology, plus all the roads and gas stations built in that time frame to support them, and a big unreliable 10 hp 4-stroker should be possible to beat. Or send a bunch of fuel-cell and turbine engineers in a time machine to bring back the best tech from 2107 CE to put against todays 4-strokers.
Money is quite relevant. But so is loving ones work and being good at what one does. If you are lucky enough that all three (money, love, and skill) apply to one type of career, then you will have a much higher chance of success. If not, you may be out of luck.
They already are taxed! The more 100W bulbs I use, the higher my electric bill and the higher the tax on my electric bill.
Or are you suggesting that I should pay a significantly higher tax on a 100W bulb I seldom use at all, but not on, say, 10 60W bulbs that I leave burning 24 hours a day? If you want to reduce total power use, you should just tax total power use, and let me choose how to waste the amount I want to pay for.
As for whether or not you can "get away" with that - Yes, you most certainly can.
Except for the "idiots" who actually do want to get promoted to an executive position (with the stock options as well as the salary) instead of letting pointy-hair types manage them for the rest of their lives. Except for the idiots who don't want to be first in line when there are cut-backs. Except for the types who have looked at or even worked for alternative companies and found them even more farked up than the current employer. Except for the people who actually like to be team players and hold up their share of the workload when all their teammates think it important enough to put in evening and weekend hours. Except for those who feel that their company is actually innovating a valuable contribution to society (for instance, a medical device that will actually save lives the sooner it gets to market). Yes, if you're not one of those, you can certainly just go home and turn the beeping thing off.
This assumes that how much someone would be willing to pay for something is a constant. This is obviously not true. The typical grocery shopper will buy different things on different days even if the prices are constant.
This also assumes that I'm not trying to buy at auction because of some reasonable probability that I might get a better deal than the maximum price I'm willing to pay. Auction buying is a form of gambling. If I bid, given that items of that nature typically sell at a reasonable discount N% of the time at auction, and the seller rigs it so that the probability of a discount is 0%, then the the game has been rigged to be one which I might not play at all (just drive down to the mall instead). e.g. people are far more willing to lose money in a fair card game, then one where someone at the table is cheating.
I don't like paying for something and not getting anything in return.
Then you don't need insurance. Insurance is to cover risk. It you don't want to cover risks in your life, then you don't need insurance. If you know exactly how much your medical expenses will be, then just pay your doctor directly, and cut out the middleman fees. Insurance is to cover you if you occasionally cross the street, expect not to be hit, but not with complete enough certainty that you would be willing to forgo costly medical attention if you did get hit (by a car, stroke, cancerous mutation, whatever...) If you do want risk coverage, then you are getting an expiring probability of payment in return. This is not the same as nothing unless you can predict the future with absolute certainty before expiration of the coverage.
The original Amiga (Hi Toro) engineering team had a small Data General mini-computer used for chip design. Documentation had an Apple Lisa. The software team first shared a small 68000 based Unix microcomputer. The Sun workstations came later.
How can I recommend a book that misspells the name of one of the founders of Hi Toro (Amiga, Inc.).
The problem is that intelligent people (perhaps even more intelligent than you) with good intentions often come to different and incompatible opinions as to the truth. This happens not only between politicians, theologians and business people, but even with scientists and mathematicians. Some scientific evidence shows that humans merely assume that anyone who agrees with their own intelligent honest opinion is speaking the truth, but question anyone who doesn't agree to find some sort of perceived error or predisposed bias. Googles statistical method seems to be to use a larger set of biases and questions than your own to test statements against.
But charge less than competitive offerings, else the customers go there instead, and your Revenues = 0
OSS has the problem that the cost of installing an alternative and identical distribution often approaches zero, so a company can only charge for things that aren't part of their distribution (phone support, pretty packaging, etc.)
While academics were writing papers about formal proofs of correctness and such, businessmen were noticing that startups that quickly sent to market good demos with crappy to non-existant quality were drawing a boatload of investments and sometimes even producing big profits. The triumph of marketing over theoretical mathematics. It's not difficult to figure out which model most managers would want to copy.
Break-even, or a reasonable profit, are not anywhere near enough. The profit has to be proportional to the risk of the R&D investment. If the risk factor is over 100:1, then the profit has to be a windfall to make that bet worthwhile.
Market forces should reward success in the face of risk, if that's what's beneficial to the public. How much does it cost to find and prove safe a new drug, versus what percentage of new drugs turn out to be the cure for cancer or something? What payoff is required to take that gamble? Huge probably.
Of course, but what percentage of the population could afford to do that instead of some non-artistic day job? What percentage of good art comes from artists who are employed for their art instead of just doing it in their free time? How good are the ballerinas who dance full time, versus those who dance weekends after 40 hours of office work? Etc.
Let's turn this on it's head. If it were possible to effortlessly and infinitely reproduce bread, would you degrade that process?
Likely not. But would there be as many artisan bakeries borrowing from the bank and investing in new machinery to bake new and interesting breads?
Innumericy strikes again. The statistical differences between "black" and "white" are in the genetic noise, and, if resolvable, likely differ from many obvious prejudices. The differences between sexes is as obvious as the difference between the letters X and Y on a chromosome chart, and the hormone effects are big enough to be part of developmental and daily (monthly?) vocabulary.
What's needed is a law making it legal to give out this number (or some other example number) as your SSN, without penalty, except for your employer and certain governmental agencies. Also make it a legal offense for anybody to penalize you for giving out that number as your SSN, even if you sign that it is your true and correct SSN (except with those aforementioned authorize recipients).
Random numbers aren't good for this purpose because someone elses records might get screwed up before they can notice in time to fix the misreporting or sue somebody.
The Z80 and 6502 were done well after the 6800 and 8080, because they were done by some original designers of the 8080 and 6800 (Fagin and Peddle) who later left to start up at new companies (Zilog and Mostek). Not sure how far apart the intoduction dates of the 8080 and 6800 were. The 8080 may have had a time window alone as a shipping fully usable 8-bit CPU (unlike the harder to interface and program 8008).
In fact, he/she might clearly be a better driver than the computer, and willing to bet that, and win that bet.
But not the car company. They don't want to win any one bet. More like the casinos, which will occasionally lose to a "lucky" customer. The car companies want to increase their total fleet safety (as related to the potential average number of lawsuits resulting). Which means they might be quite willing to kill a few good drivers, if it means, in exchange, that they save the lives of an even larger number of average and stupid drivers (and the people on the road around them). The laws probably allows them to do thus because there are a lot more average and stupid voters, than smart ones with excellent driving skills and training.