"their out-of-the-office creations should not be owned by employers either. This should be a default, intrinsic right, and not something employees have to battle for."
"And get propulsion from a prop in an atmosphere of.6 that on earth?"
There're two things to consider: 1) Of course you get prop: it's a rotating wing, isn't it? So as long as there's any atmosphere, you'll get propulsion. Maybe your question was not about "propulsion" but about "enough propulsion", which gets us into point two. 2) Who said that "enough propulsion" needs to be produced exclusively by the main rotor? In the experiment another quite porwerful prop source is included: gravity. You just take even a pig at 30 Km over the Martian surface and you'll see how it gains speed even without revolving its pig tail.
The thougth experiment was not about flying a Cessna in Mars (and other objects) but about *how* it would *try* to fly over there. See, for instance, in Jupiter it would crush, but it wouldn't crash.
"Can you run that by me a little more slowly. The nuclear power plant down the road is having a shift change, and the plant whistle interrupted you."
No, it wasn't. We are *using* nuclear energy, that doesn't mean Sun-derived energies haven't the ability to *satisfy* all up-to-date energy requirements.
"eothermal energy comes from thermonuclear thorium reactions in the molten layers of the earth."
Yes, I knew somebody would mention this. But I put it under Sun origin because Sun is the thingie that made all that thorium to stay together by means of gravity (only because of gravity, the Earth would have been frozen time ago, but that's another story).
"If they dropped LTS for their server builds, I guarantee Ubuntu's popularity would drop faster than a whale out of the sky."
LTS is needed for (corporate) desktops too.
There's no way for a business to support a rolling release, not even a software development focused company. This means that Canonical either feels it already has a strong enough grip on corporations, so they can play the Red Hat/Fedora game or that they are simply crazy (just crazy, thinking they can retain a corporate grip out of their current position and a so-called "developer-friendly" rolling release which in the end is everything but developer-friendly, or absolutly crazy if they think they can get any business out of a somehow "pure" rolling-release base).
My opinion is that Canonical has lost any sense of the importance of technical ability and its weight in their long term plans (it's not only their marketing-driven changes from release to release, but the lack of proper QA or the lack of understandment of what "stability" really is and what's its value) and as such it's going to go the dodo way, not in a year or two, but yes in half a decade. The future of Ubuntu? Look for instance at Madrake's history and you will know.
"Except that it's not actually possible for it to benefit everybody."
Or it will.
"It exists solely to violate the privacy of the electorate to the benefit of a private organization (the Democratic Party). Every improvement makes it worse, and every additional user makes life a little worse."
Do you know what a fork is? Open source software tends to evolve a bit like biological systems in that there's no finalistic orientation for it. The groups modifying the software act like evolution in an "intelligent design" fashion, yes, but not the code itself: given it's open source, what today is a privacy-invasive tool can migrate to, say, a helper for quick detection of mental illness.
"Nit pick : the requirement to not give the binaries to Al Qaeda would not meed the OSI definition of Open Source software."
Probably not. But then again, nitpicking, you don't put the "not for Al-Qaeda" clause in the same contract/license than the software's one and you will be probably in the bright side.
"You're not permitted to add stipulations on who receives sources or what they are used for."
But that's a stipulation on the limitations of the second party to third parties. As long as the second party abides and doesn't have the intention of dealing with third parties, you are in the safe.
"If Al Qaeda uses your software to make cluster bombs that drop live kittens packed with C4, that's fair game for Open Source licenses."
Which wouldn't be such a bad thing as it seems at first glance. Al-Qaeda members have probably drunk Coca-Cola or coffee at Starbucks, driven Fords and bought at 7-eleven without affecting the reputation of said companies. What would be the problem of Al-Qaeda terrorists using, say, Vim -or even worse, Emacs?
"Say you're developing software to determine the lowest fuel cost route for airplanes. Say it saves the user $1M/year. The government needs it, so do, say, 9 airlines. Say it costs, in round numbers, about $5M to develop that software (15 work years, give or take). Should the government impose 5M in taxes on the population, then fund the full development cost, and release it to the public? Or should the government pay, say 500K, as would those 9 airline companies."
But you already answered your question! "the government needs it" It either makes a business case or not. You said the government saves a million a year, so it returns its expenditure in five years and above that it's net benefit.
Well, if it makes sense, it makes sense, what does it matter to the government who else benefits? (and that's even disregarding the case that those other 9 companies might be from its own country, thus giving them an edge that will return to the GDP and to the government itself in form of taxes -what do you think that made USA a world's leader but government effort specially after WWII?).
And your example hides an implicit (two indeed): that if the government doesn't develop it, others will do that will sell the software at a fair share of the cost to all the implied agents and without a hidden agenda. Well, the last 20~30 years demonstrates beyond all doubt that's not the case: most famous recent billionaires come from software world, and even Adam Smith 101 will tell you that's impossible under "invisible hand"-guided free market: closed source has effectively suffled wealth from the people to the hands of a few because once your hypothetical software development company has developed its software, it won't sell it for 500.000 to each of the nine companies plus the government: it'll sell it for the full 5 millions each, and the ten of them will buy it because -as I already stated at the beginning, it still makes economic sense for them.
And then, they'll use the free 45 millions they got out of the transaction to lobby the government to pass laws that ensure the company no other competitors will enter the market in the future.
"While some software (voting machine) should always be open, need ALL software a government uses fit this requirement?"
A big resounding "YES!"
Please take the time to read any single open source license. Just to name the most famous two, BSD and GPL, please, read them.
Imagine we are talking about an ultrasecret software that makes Al Qaeda bosses piss their pants and all [My Beloved Country]'s enemies, past, present or future, surrender on the spot. "Oh, my God! we don't want this to be open source, do we?"
Well, do we? Now, answer a question to me: being such a software licensed under either GPL or BSD forces the government to give it away to anyone?
But then, imagine such a software is developed by a contractor and the government forces such a contractor to license it under GPL or BSD. Does such agreement force the contractor to give the software away to anybody else? Does it force the government to give it away to anybody else?
Just to state the obvious, if you answered "yes" to any of the questions on the paragraphs above, you really need to re-read the GPL and BSD licenses again.
"Requiring a government to "opensource" software is a nice but difficult proposition."
No, it isn't.
"The biggest problem I see is this: how can say a Western government justify giving stuff free to Al Qaeda or the Chinese?"
Simple: they don't. That they can't avoid a third party from giving it away to Al Qaeda doesn't mean they themselves are giving it to Al Qaeda.
And even then, open source protects *the source code*, not the binaries. Take the GPL as an example: somebody should give you sources only after they give you binaries. Well, don't give such a third party access to the binaries unless they abide not to give them in turn to Al Qaeda. Done.
"So effectively, you subsidize software development in other countries."
That's true and an intended effect. But even if simple and readeable by everybody even if they didn't sell their soul to Mephistopheles (aka lawyers), it doesn't mean it isn't legaleese and once it's legaleese, you can always find ways to diverge from its first intent (i.e.: one thing is copyright, and a different thing export laws).
Problem with LCDs has nothing to do with fluorescents, and neither then with photophobia. Hint: problems with fluorescent lights comes from alternate current being used.
"Let's say a $2200 MacBook Pro which costs EU2200 as well"
First mistake. Is not "costs EUR2200" but "it's price-tagged EUR2200".
Second mistake is that your MacBook Pro really costs somewhere around 300~500EUR, not 2200.
Price is not bound to costs but to whatever marketing says the prospective customer is willing to pay. If what the customer is willing to pay minus your expected profit is less than the production costs, you don't rise the price, you low your costs or leave the market.
espite what the law may imply, the 2-year guarantee is not "free."
The law doesn't imply 2-year warantee should come for free but that must be included in the front price of the product.
"Yet another example of a law taking away your opportunity."
There's a non fair bargaining position on the seller: we knows perfectly what the innards of the product he is selling are, but the seller can't. This way the buyer is protected knowing there's a minimal quality all products needs to abide to. It leverages the playing field for all vendors, hardly a way of taking away oportunities, except for oportunities to abuse the buyer, of course.
"What the hell are you talking about? The EU/US price difference doesn't come from this. It's because none of these things are assembled or manufactured here, everything is imported."
What the hell are you talking about? It is long ago that prices are unrelated to costs but to whatever the buyer is wanting to pay.
"If your phone costs $50, $250, $450, $650, it's about 5-15% of the total cost of ownership."
I claim bullshit on that.
My last but one phone, a Samsung Galaxy S, costed me 450 EUR and lasted me in good use about 2 years.
My voice/data plan (500MB/month, enough for my light usage) was 25EUR/month, which means 600EUR on those two years.
So, 450 versus 600, hardly neglegible cost.
Now I own a Chinese smarphone that costed me 120EUR and doesn't look it's going to have a shorter live than my older Samsung (and, as I already told in a previous message, I didn't even buy it because of the price but because of its feature set) so that means about 30% less for what I consider a better product.
"No one wants crappy, low-end phones that will break within 2 hours."
Certainly not.
On the other hand, I wanted an smartphone capable of managing two SIM cards, 4" screen (I don't want bigger), with Android and a big fat battery. No way finding something like that from any of the "big brands".
I'm a consumer and I vote with my wallet. Would you think all these capitalist-grown companies knows that?
Did I buy it because it was cheap? No -but it certainly costed me about 1/5 of a big brand -if they had something like that in catalogue, I mean. I bought it because that was what I wanted to buy.
I suppose that's capitalism in action, it's only I find funny it has to be somebody from the only big known comunist country in the world the one to teach that lesson.
Slashdot Mirror
"their out-of-the-office creations should not be owned by employers either. This should be a default, intrinsic right, and not something employees have to battle for."
And so it is in more civilized countries.
"And get propulsion from a prop in an atmosphere of .6 that on earth?"
There're two things to consider:
1) Of course you get prop: it's a rotating wing, isn't it? So as long as there's any atmosphere, you'll get propulsion. Maybe your question was not about "propulsion" but about "enough propulsion", which gets us into point two.
2) Who said that "enough propulsion" needs to be produced exclusively by the main rotor? In the experiment another quite porwerful prop source is included: gravity. You just take even a pig at 30 Km over the Martian surface and you'll see how it gains speed even without revolving its pig tail.
The thougth experiment was not about flying a Cessna in Mars (and other objects) but about *how* it would *try* to fly over there. See, for instance, in Jupiter it would crush, but it wouldn't crash.
"Can you run that by me a little more slowly. The nuclear power plant down the road is having a shift change, and the plant whistle interrupted you."
No, it wasn't. We are *using* nuclear energy, that doesn't mean Sun-derived energies haven't the ability to *satisfy* all up-to-date energy requirements.
"eothermal energy comes from thermonuclear thorium reactions in the molten layers of the earth."
Yes, I knew somebody would mention this. But I put it under Sun origin because Sun is the thingie that made all that thorium to stay together by means of gravity (only because of gravity, the Earth would have been frozen time ago, but that's another story).
"No one energy will ever meet "all" of our energy needs. Theres a reason why we still use wind and hydro energy despite centuries/millenia."
Oil comes from Sun
Aeolic comes from Sun
Hydro comes from Sun
Thermal comes from Sun
Solar -obviously, comes from Sun
Only energy that doesn't come from Sun is nuclear.
"Renewable Energy can NEVER satisfy 100% of the total energy requirement to run the current human civilization."
In other news, renewable energy has ALWAYS satisfied 100% of the total energy requirement to run the human civilization up to date.
Yes: all that oil comes from Sun.
"rolling release does not need to be the unstable branch for the lts"
No, it doesn't need to, but it can't be otherwise. Remember the saying about a rock and a hard place?
"you would rolling release the stable branch"
And here you see another individual that doesn't grasp the meaning of "stable"!
No sir, "stable" doesn't mean "bug free", that's a collateral. It means, mainly, "without changing behaviour".
"The benefit of it is to gain advantage relative to an opponent, and everybody can't do that."
Which is exactly the kind of conflict I talk about (really, it's there, in the subject!)
"If they dropped LTS for their server builds, I guarantee Ubuntu's popularity would drop faster than a whale out of the sky."
LTS is needed for (corporate) desktops too.
There's no way for a business to support a rolling release, not even a software development focused company. This means that Canonical either feels it already has a strong enough grip on corporations, so they can play the Red Hat/Fedora game or that they are simply crazy (just crazy, thinking they can retain a corporate grip out of their current position and a so-called "developer-friendly" rolling release which in the end is everything but developer-friendly, or absolutly crazy if they think they can get any business out of a somehow "pure" rolling-release base).
My opinion is that Canonical has lost any sense of the importance of technical ability and its weight in their long term plans (it's not only their marketing-driven changes from release to release, but the lack of proper QA or the lack of understandment of what "stability" really is and what's its value) and as such it's going to go the dodo way, not in a year or two, but yes in half a decade. The future of Ubuntu? Look for instance at Madrake's history and you will know.
"Except that it's not actually possible for it to benefit everybody."
Or it will.
"It exists solely to violate the privacy of the electorate to the benefit of a private organization (the Democratic Party). Every improvement makes it worse, and every additional user makes life a little worse."
Do you know what a fork is? Open source software tends to evolve a bit like biological systems in that there's no finalistic orientation for it. The groups modifying the software act like evolution in an "intelligent design" fashion, yes, but not the code itself: given it's open source, what today is a privacy-invasive tool can migrate to, say, a helper for quick detection of mental illness.
It gets as simply as this:
The developers who created the baby want it grow to be a nice piece of useful code that can benefit everybody.
Politicians want to have an edge on their rivals.
"Actually, the theory of evolution doesn't fly you anywhere."
I'm an Archaeopteryx, you insensitive clod
"Nit pick : the requirement to not give the binaries to Al Qaeda would not meed the OSI definition of Open Source software."
Probably not. But then again, nitpicking, you don't put the "not for Al-Qaeda" clause in the same contract/license than the software's one and you will be probably in the bright side.
"You're not permitted to add stipulations on who receives sources or what they are used for."
But that's a stipulation on the limitations of the second party to third parties. As long as the second party abides and doesn't have the intention of dealing with third parties, you are in the safe.
"If Al Qaeda uses your software to make cluster bombs that drop live kittens packed with C4, that's fair game for Open Source licenses."
Which wouldn't be such a bad thing as it seems at first glance. Al-Qaeda members have probably drunk Coca-Cola or coffee at Starbucks, driven Fords and bought at 7-eleven without affecting the reputation of said companies. What would be the problem of Al-Qaeda terrorists using, say, Vim -or even worse, Emacs?
"Say you're developing software to determine the lowest fuel cost route for airplanes. Say it saves the user $1M/year.
The government needs it, so do, say, 9 airlines. Say it costs, in round numbers, about $5M to develop that software (15 work years, give or take). Should the government impose 5M in taxes on the population, then fund the full development cost, and release it to the public? Or should the government pay, say 500K, as would those 9 airline companies."
But you already answered your question! "the government needs it" It either makes a business case or not. You said the government saves a million a year, so it returns its expenditure in five years and above that it's net benefit.
Well, if it makes sense, it makes sense, what does it matter to the government who else benefits? (and that's even disregarding the case that those other 9 companies might be from its own country, thus giving them an edge that will return to the GDP and to the government itself in form of taxes -what do you think that made USA a world's leader but government effort specially after WWII?).
And your example hides an implicit (two indeed): that if the government doesn't develop it, others will do that will sell the software at a fair share of the cost to all the implied agents and without a hidden agenda. Well, the last 20~30 years demonstrates beyond all doubt that's not the case: most famous recent billionaires come from software world, and even Adam Smith 101 will tell you that's impossible under "invisible hand"-guided free market: closed source has effectively suffled wealth from the people to the hands of a few because once your hypothetical software development company has developed its software, it won't sell it for 500.000 to each of the nine companies plus the government: it'll sell it for the full 5 millions each, and the ten of them will buy it because -as I already stated at the beginning, it still makes economic sense for them.
And then, they'll use the free 45 millions they got out of the transaction to lobby the government to pass laws that ensure the company no other competitors will enter the market in the future.
"While some software (voting machine) should always be open, need ALL software a government uses fit this requirement?"
A big resounding "YES!"
Please take the time to read any single open source license. Just to name the most famous two, BSD and GPL, please, read them.
Imagine we are talking about an ultrasecret software that makes Al Qaeda bosses piss their pants and all [My Beloved Country]'s enemies, past, present or future, surrender on the spot. "Oh, my God! we don't want this to be open source, do we?"
Well, do we? Now, answer a question to me: being such a software licensed under either GPL or BSD forces the government to give it away to anyone?
But then, imagine such a software is developed by a contractor and the government forces such a contractor to license it under GPL or BSD. Does such agreement force the contractor to give the software away to anybody else? Does it force the government to give it away to anybody else?
Just to state the obvious, if you answered "yes" to any of the questions on the paragraphs above, you really need to re-read the GPL and BSD licenses again.
"Requiring a government to "opensource" software is a nice but difficult proposition."
No, it isn't.
"The biggest problem I see is this: how can say a Western government justify giving stuff free to Al Qaeda or the Chinese?"
Simple: they don't. That they can't avoid a third party from giving it away to Al Qaeda doesn't mean they themselves are giving it to Al Qaeda.
And even then, open source protects *the source code*, not the binaries. Take the GPL as an example: somebody should give you sources only after they give you binaries. Well, don't give such a third party access to the binaries unless they abide not to give them in turn to Al Qaeda. Done.
"So effectively, you subsidize software development in other countries."
That's true and an intended effect. But even if simple and readeable by everybody even if they didn't sell their soul to Mephistopheles (aka lawyers), it doesn't mean it isn't legaleese and once it's legaleese, you can always find ways to diverge from its first intent (i.e.: one thing is copyright, and a different thing export laws).
You are kidding, ain't you?
Problem with LCDs has nothing to do with fluorescents, and neither then with photophobia. Hint: problems with fluorescent lights comes from alternate current being used.
"Well, costs too."
No, not at all.
"Let's say a $2200 MacBook Pro which costs EU2200 as well"
First mistake. Is not "costs EUR2200" but "it's price-tagged EUR2200".
Second mistake is that your MacBook Pro really costs somewhere around 300~500EUR, not 2200.
Price is not bound to costs but to whatever marketing says the prospective customer is willing to pay. If what the customer is willing to pay minus your expected profit is less than the production costs, you don't rise the price, you low your costs or leave the market.
espite what the law may imply, the 2-year guarantee is not "free."
The law doesn't imply 2-year warantee should come for free but that must be included in the front price of the product.
"Yet another example of a law taking away your opportunity."
There's a non fair bargaining position on the seller: we knows perfectly what the innards of the product he is selling are, but the seller can't. This way the buyer is protected knowing there's a minimal quality all products needs to abide to. It leverages the playing field for all vendors, hardly a way of taking away oportunities, except for oportunities to abuse the buyer, of course.
"What the hell are you talking about? The EU/US price difference doesn't come from this. It's because none of these things are assembled or manufactured here, everything is imported."
What the hell are you talking about? It is long ago that prices are unrelated to costs but to whatever the buyer is wanting to pay.
"So unless they have a dual core 1.5ghz Android 4.2 phone for $29.00 unlocked... they will not sell many."
No, but you have a lot for 129$ still a very good bang for the buck.
"If your phone costs $50, $250, $450, $650, it's about 5-15% of the total cost of ownership."
I claim bullshit on that.
My last but one phone, a Samsung Galaxy S, costed me 450 EUR and lasted me in good use about 2 years.
My voice/data plan (500MB/month, enough for my light usage) was 25EUR/month, which means 600EUR on those two years.
So, 450 versus 600, hardly neglegible cost.
Now I own a Chinese smarphone that costed me 120EUR and doesn't look it's going to have a shorter live than my older Samsung (and, as I already told in a previous message, I didn't even buy it because of the price but because of its feature set) so that means about 30% less for what I consider a better product.
Now, go figure.
"No one wants crappy, low-end phones that will break within 2 hours."
Certainly not.
On the other hand, I wanted an smartphone capable of managing two SIM cards, 4" screen (I don't want bigger), with Android and a big fat battery. No way finding something like that from any of the "big brands".
I'm a consumer and I vote with my wallet. Would you think all these capitalist-grown companies knows that?
Well, I ended buying a Chinese Jiayu G2 http://www.pandawill.com/jiayu-g2-smart-phone-40-inch-ips-screen-android-40-mtk6577-10ghz-3g-gps-black-p70479.html
which costed me 120â including air transport with a charger and an extra battery and, after about three months of heavy usage, I'd say it is a best buy.
Did I buy it because it was cheap? No -but it certainly costed me about 1/5 of a big brand -if they had something like that in catalogue, I mean. I bought it because that was what I wanted to buy.
I suppose that's capitalism in action, it's only I find funny it has to be somebody from the only big known comunist country in the world the one to teach that lesson.
You can't be more wrong. The primary cause of lost productivity... well I'm leaving now. I'll tell you tomorrow.
"Let him cuss.
"Him"?"
OK then, Mr McCartney... Let IT be.