I don't know what to be more scared of. The impending copy protection doom that we are facing, or the sheer horror of the fact that Celine Dione is Sony's best-selling musician.
I emailed Blizzard, and I'm sure a lot of others did too. Didn't do a damned bit of good, since some 2nd tier technical support guy seems to have been assigned to respond to all the "BnetD whiners" out there with a reply about how evil anybody was who was stealing their games, blah blah blah (totally ignoring the crux of my argument that people playing a beta of WCIII that wasn't released yet was not harming their revenues at all).
A freedom fighter implies that somebody is resisting some sort of armed occupation. If you said that Palestinian militants are only arguably "terrorists" - well, they definitely are terrorists by the dictionary definition - see for example, dictionary.com. They may also be freedom fighters and I can see there is some factual basis for that bilateral interpretation. However, the two concepts seem to me to be formed along two separate axes.
An Afghani who opposed long term Russian occupation of Afghanistan - that might be a freedom fighter, though if he targetted civilians with bombs, his _methods_ are those of a terrorist.
In the cast of a bunch of foreign nations who sneak into a country with the intention of killing large numbers of civilians, the story is quite cut and dried. Their methods are those of terrorists, of the most violent sort. And they are not freedom fighters because they are not resisting an armed occupation of a nation-state.
We should condemn Reuter's unequivocally for refusing, for reasons of political correctness and timidness, to accurately label those who commit acts of violence with civilian targets as the _intentional_ victims. There is no excuse for it. Violence justifies violence in some cases, and resisting armed occupation is one thing. Resisting an oppressive government generally falls under "civil disobedience" and sometimes is justified, and sometimes is not.
But as soon as you pick civilian targets (i.e. people who don't carry guns and don't make it their business to kill others) and make your goal to kill as many innocents as possible, you have become a terrorist, plain and simple. And if you are a terrorist that targets civilians of some foreign entity, you damn well better expect that countries government is going to take organized military action against you, your organization, and probably whatever country you are from, and likely kill you and your family and lots of other innocent people who get caught in the military cross-fire.
I am not defending Outlook's virus propagation - it's a generally decent product with one really stupid feature - namely that it integrates scripting into email received from unknown sources. If you want to make an argument that this feature has legitimate uses, you can, but it's quite clearly so dangerous and likely to be exploited for massive societal harm, that I would never ship a product with such a feature enabled by default.
Nevertheless, very few other mail client products out there offer such nice integrated functionality. Even if you don't use Exchange Server (Exchange Server is a pain in the ass sometimes - it makes it too easy for underskilled sysadmins to shoot themselves and everybody else in the foot) the calendar/tasklist stuff is still nice.
This article is rather schizophrenic. It first claims that the TW staff were forced to use products originally made for consumers. Then it states that they WEREN'T using the AOL email system used in the home version of AOL. Instead they were using "other products" from divisions like Netscape.
So actually they weren't forced to use AOL email. Perhaps they were forced to switch from Outlook to Netscape email or some such thing. But this isn't as moronic as they make it sound - it's not that they switched their entire business over to AOL email. They just switched mail client programs forcefully from one that works to one that didn't work well. To be perfectly honest, Netscape email has never been too great, and it doesn't have the features for the office environment that Outlook or other "groupware" email clients have (scheduling, calendaring, task management).
Clearly if they were using a recent version of Mozilla, they'd probably be using a good web browser with decent email facilities. But god knows, I wouldn't force the use of Netscape anything for email in a corporate environment.
So fine, they made a mistake, clearly they weren't paying attention to the needs of email systems in a corporate environment, but they weren't making people use AOL mail, for god's sake.
Software developers rarely agree on things. I've seen fights (usually relatively calm and technical ones, but sometimes escalating to heated yelling and nearly to blows) in engineering team meetings. The only thing that forces people to work together at a company and come to agreement on some idea (often a shitty one, but decided for them nonetheless) is MONEY. Quite simply, your employer is paying you. Sometimes you just have to give up and accept that the motivations of the source of the money need to be accepted if you want them to keep giving you all this nice cash, rather than your own concepts of what is nice, aesthetic or well-engineered.
Open Source projects are motivated by ego in some cases ("I want to bulid the next great window manager") or some sense of technical correctness in others ("I hate the way OpenOffice looks/I hate Gtk widgets/etc."). So there's no real incentive to work together on a bigger project - why would you want to say "yeah, I built some tiny component that's part of this megalithic Open Source project, UltraOffice" when you can say "I am the lead programmer on KWord".
So knock closed source software all you will, money can be an effective way to motivate people to cooperate on bigger software tasks and put differences aside to achieve an overall better result. And though some Open Source business models make this possible, for lots of products (like office suites), nobody yet has figured out how to do this and it very well may be impossible.
First of all, there is nothing called "X-Windows" technically, nor has the X Consortium ever referred to anything as such. There is something called the "X Window System" produced by the X Consortium, and implemented by quite a few commercial and Free systems.
Secondly, the term "prior art" only has relevance in the world of patent law. Prior art (the existence of an invention materially identical to the patented invention) can result in a ruling against a patent in a court of law. However, in the case of trademark law, the only relevant question is whether a word has become generic, or part of the common usage. There are common rules to avoid this happening - a company should NEVER refer to a product as "Windows" because they are then referring to a product by a very generic common English term. The product should always be called "Microsoft Windows" or even better yet "Microsoft Windows Operating System" if you expect to ever prove later on that you had a legitimately trademarked name for your product. There are other rules for marketing folks about this, like only using the trademark in the adjectival as in "Kelloggs brand cereals" or (if they had been smarter) "Xerox brand copying machines".
Lots of people seem to be missing the point. This guy isn't ignorant of SMTP AUTH or other possibilities and doesn't think they'd be too hard to implement. He is trying to make a political statement against MAPS, ORBZ, etc. The problem is that Gilmore is wrong.
ISPs are out there to make a living, like the rest of us. The reality is that spammers are people who don't care about inflicting what we call a "negative externality" on everybody else. That means they are inflicting a cost on those who have to read through spam, or figure out how to block/filter it, and the ISPs who have to carry large volumes of unsolicited commercial email. While ORBZ, MAPS, etc. may be annoying, these organizations do serve a function. Gilmore is free to run his open relay on his T1, but it's akin to parking your Ferrari in the middle of Harlem, with the keys in the car, and the driver's side door open. Technically, you may not be legally responsible, but ethically, if somebody walks into that car and goes joy riding and gets into a crash killing/maiming others, well, what the hell did you expect?
Society does get to set rules about permissible behavior, and we do get to enforce them by exclusion. Hell, if 40% of ISPs (by volume, or by number, I don't know) use MAPS, ORBZ, by their own choice it's probably for a reason. And frankly, I'd rather use an ISP that does, because I don't want to be on the receiving end of any more spam than I already get.
Gilmore may be right that RBLs are not the correct long term solution. I've heard it said before, so I won't take credit for it - the correct solution is a change in Internet standards - make it more "costly" in some way (bandwidth or other) to send bulk emails. This would bring the economic cost back to the spammer and remove or reduce the negative externality. Make it so it doesn't pay to spam. And no, I don't have the solution to this problem, but I could imagine alternatives to SMTP/mail routing procedures that address the problem. Of course somebody might argue that this just reduces the utility of email. Ah well. Until then, for god sakes, close your open relays.
What's funny is that you and/or Slashdot editors are reading in your own contextual meaning of "open source". I just rechecked the article and there is no analogy drawn to the software world or "Open Source software". Open sources (i.e. publicly available information) and the corresponding intelligence data is just being referred to as "open source intelligence". The author makes no sort of philisophical claim or analogy to similar practices with software source code.
And while I agree that it's US centric, I think you are blowing that issue out of proportion. It's written for an American audience, and like I said, it makes no pretense that such projects have high-minded philisophical goals, beyond perhaps sharing some of the agglomeration of "open source intelligence" with the public or other friendly nations.
Politics is fine and necessary. Incompetence is what sucks. Also fucking people over and stabbing them in the back - that sucks too. There will always be politics, but in a good company, most of the people are competent within their sphere of control and backstabbing shouldn't be necessary.
Or at least that's my personal fantasy.:) And I'm only partially a techie, I'm a manager too. Anyway, my point is that if by "politics" you mean the fact that you have to deal with other people, some of whom are very different from you, and that it pays to be friends with as many of them as possible, and that it pays to understand the business imperatives of your company aside from just your narrow world of code, then you are very much correct.
When politics expands to include empty suits kissing each others asses and jerking each other off as they drive a company into the ground with nepotism and promoting their friends until the organization goes out of business at the expense of the truly competent, hardworking people who were there, then I disagree. That just shouldn't happen, in a company that is properly managed at the top levels and has accountability throughout the organization. This unfortunately seems rare.
I'm sorry, but you are historically inaccurate, or at least deficient in your reporting. The Palestinians began in the early 20th century with attacks on Jewish settlers, who used to settle in areas that were adjacent to, but not on top of the Arabs. For a brief period of time, there was a modestly peaceful coexistance - who exactly incited these Palestinian Arabs to violence, I can't really tell you.
Jewish settlers did begin organizing semi-military organizations when the British Protectorate, well, wasn't doing much protecting of the Jews. There was a lot of inconsistency and weirdness in British policy unfortunately, and they never tried to make things fair or equitable for anybody in the Protectorate. So it devolved into Palestinian attacks on Jewish settlements that were allowed by the British and Jewish resistance against the British occupiers and defense measures (yes, and attacks on other Palestinian targets).
I frankly understand the current Palestinian position that they should have a free independent state, and that defense of the two countries should probably be closely coordinated for logical and safety reasons. Fighting is non-productive - settlement as in land grabbing on either side should be stopped, and lots of financial aid for education and housing needs to go to the Palestinians. But until the Palestinian terrorists and the Palestinian population as a whole get through their thick heads that terrorism and armed resistance are NOT morally equivalent, they will never get the financial assistance they need to build a successful economic and educational base, and unfortunately, a cease fire seems impossible while Arafat and Sharon are in office.
Also, I won't really bother since you are obviously not a historical scholar on the topic, but the state of Israel AND a state of Palestine were established by fiat by world powers. Unfortunately, the greedy and tyrannical abutting nations of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc. saw the exit of the British as an opportunity for a land grab, and the Palestinian Arabs were apparently not well organized as an entity unto themselves, and thought their Arab brethren were there to help them.
The reality was that it wasn't an easy land grab, and the abutting Arab nations didn't really have much room in their hearts for the Palestinans either. And over the years the cycle of violence and the transition from a nationalist issue to a pan-Islamic issue and some perceived battle between the Muslims and Jews has done ill for everyone. Rather than pointing fingers, both sides should be implementing the Mitchell plan, and going ahead with the inevitable, since neither group is going away anytime soon, and reconciliation or extermination are the only possible ends, and the first is obviously preferable for both sides. Even a warmonger and hawk like Sharon knows that and has acknowedged that Palestinian statehood is inevitable, after peace is achieved.
I think this seems to be a bit lost on some people here. Obviously, it takes exponential time to simulate a lot of interesting things that would take polynomial time on a real quantum computer. This Perl simulator module is cool, but it's not going to prove or disprove P==NP.
The real use of this is for people who want to experiment with quantum _algorithms_ on small data sets and learn and understand better how quantum computers work and how quantum calculations are put together. Writing quantum algorithms is hard and confusing to somebody familiar with classical computation, even if you are familiar with quantum mechanics. There are very few useful quantum algorithms (Gover's search and Shor's factorization algorithms are the two most famous and interesting IMHO). This module might encourage more people to come up with and experiment with quantum algorithms that take advantage of the "inherently parallel" nature of quantum computing.
Note that though I am no expert, I did actually write something modestly similar to this Perl - an interpreter that read a series of meta-language commands and turned them into physical magnet pulses for spin flipping on an NMR quantum computer we had at MIT. We never bothered to write a simulator for it, but now that I think about it, it would be cool to have this. Kudos to these guys for doing this.
Now if somebody could just make a quantum computer with, say, 20 or 30 qubits I might be convinced that quantum computing could eventually do useful calculations and that the decoherence problems and setup problems for a large number of weakly coupled qubit units are not intractable. Perhaps an alternative to NMR as the substrate for quantum computing might get farther.
You are spewing out of your ass here. Several real quantum computers DO exist. They are not useful for real calculations because they can only manipulate very small pieces of information (i.e. IBM's 7 qubit computer, MIT's 5 qubit computer). Factoring 2,3 or even 7 bit numbers is not interesting because it's easy to do with a classical computer.
But I have myself used a simple NMR quantum computer to execute Grover's search algorithm on a very small (4 element) search space when I was working at MIT. So there.
Heh. You judge somebody by their Slashdot alias? And assert that somebody with an odd one must not have any business acumen? This is a geek forum, not a pissing ground for business people, in which my goal is to prove to you what a serious businessman I am.
As for the flash site, I hate to break it to you buddy but that was the norm in the B2B software industry we originated in. Customers expected it. If the site didn't look techno-impressive with nifty special effects they didn't buy from us. Furthermore, my job was not "Chief Webmaster", and control of our corporate website was a marketing responsibility. If you want to judge how good I am at what I do, base it on something I actually had responsibility for.
Agreed. However, at the time, a little over 2 years ago, it didn't _seem_ this way. It seemed like we had to grow, big and fast. I realize now that if we hadn't taken this approach from day one, we'd probably be in business, small but profitable and successful by now, and wouldn't have wasted so much time and resources on fundraising, and would have focused on our product's value proposition to our customers, kept a clear goal as a product company and not drifted off to become a services shop, and would have therefore made some real sales and real money.:)
But like I said, hindsight is 20/20, and EVERYBODY was doing what we did in early 2000. Our timing sucked - if we had been two years earlier, we probably would have sold the company for 200 million bucks, good product or not, and if we had been two years later, we would have tried the grow-it-slowly approach.
My whole point is that the next time I do this, I'm not going to jump on the VC unless it's absolutely necessary because the nature of the business opportunity requires big money, and the opportunity is just too huge to pass up. I'd rather go it slowly and keep my ownership to myself, and give some chunks out to key employees who make it happen with me, not to distant VCs who give me cash to overpay stupid employees.
Obviously nobody gives you 5 million bucks so you can make a million bucks a year. VC is intended to fund product development, marketing and sales efforts to increase your revenues. That's not the point - the point is that the VCs often times force in management that doesn't understand the business. I'm not promising the company would have been successful with different management, but I'm promising that with the management put in place the business could never have succeeded.
The point is that if you think you can grow a business yourself, do so - if you don't absolutely need a large amount of outside financing, don't take it. I understand that the VCs want you to take it so they can control the company, but that's why you need to first demonstrate that you can make some money - once that's been proved, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate. You can effectively prove that their returns will be high, and they should give you money at a good valuation, and not try to take control of a product that they don't really understand (at a detailed level, etc.).
I know several of the early Ars Digita folk who Phil plucked out of MIT. I sympathize with Phil Greenspun greatly on this - though he's no longer actively involved in the company, it still feels awful to see your creation boom up and then pop. As he said in his post on his web site, though, you make 10 decisions every day as an entrepreneur and you can't second guess them all with 20/20 hindsight.
My company, which grew over 2 years to 35 employees, raised 5 million dollars in venture capital, and was making over a million a year, slipped out of my control entirely earlier this year. We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers. Since we (the founders) had lost control of the board of directors there was nothing we could do about it. Of course, at the time, we needed the venture capital to fund development and attract good management, which we needed to close deals, etc. etc.
Looking back on it, at almost every stage I made lots of decisions, but most of them were the right decisions at the time. The decision to take VC funding was unavoidable at the time - we were coming into direct competition with companies that had already raised 30 to 40 million dollars. Ironically, those companies went out of business long before we did because their burn rates were outrageous.
Just my personal experiences anyway - I started out knowing a lot about technology and very little about business, and I know a lot more now. If your business if fundamentally sound without venture financing, then you don't need it. If your business is one that requires so much up front venture financing that you anticipate losing control (>50% of the shares of the company), before you get through the initial growth phase of the company, I would recommend rethinking starting that business, unless the returns seem outrageous. Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years. Once you get off the ground, you'll be in a much stronger position to negotiate for further funding anyway.
There are lots of DVDs that you can't even buy in other regions. And release schedules are radically different. So it's much more than just price discrimination. It's often times that the content itself is unavailable in other region codings - it may or may not become available later elsewhere, who knows.
This is generally done for different reasons than what you state - it's usually done because geographical rights to distribute content are sublicensed out to other content distributors, and this guarantees that their contract will be enforced by the technology. Also the funky magic with release schedules probably is done to support the funkiness of first run release times in theaters - if a movie comes out much later in theaters in Australia than in the US, you don't want the Aussies to buy US DVDs and eat into theater revenue. And the release schedule staggering is done primarily to assess how well a movie does in its primary market before deciding how many theaters to release it in in the international markets, and to avoid spreading resources too thin on marketing (imagine having to coordinate marketing campaigns everywhere in the world at the same time).
So there are business reasons for this. I still think it's fucking stupid though, since the enthusiasts who would buy DVDs from other regions are the same people who will just get chipped DVD players and play them anyway, and the rest of the sheeple will deal with what they are spoon fed. So it doesn't accomplish dick in the end, IMHO.
Try www.linuxiso.org if you are looking to leech an ISO of the 8.2beta and finding the official mirror sites a bit packed for your taste. I'm only getting 46KB/sec, but at least you can connect, unlike the ftp mirror sites.
A blessing in disguise...
on
Review: Kung Pow
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· Score: 1, Redundant
This is the best Sunday treat ever. This weeks's Jon Katz movie review is the shortest, most sane posting of all time.
Thank you Katz, for sparing us the usual wordy outpouring of ranting pseudo-journalism.
I honestly don't understand why people make the blanket assumptions that you can impose a EULA on software when such a thing applied to any other medium protected by copyright is totally bogus. I repect the fact that pirating software is bad, but why the hell shouldn't first sale doctrine apply to software?
If the courts actually decide that it doesn't and that EULAs are binding (i.e. click-through/assumed agreements, obviously signed contracts for enterprise software ARE binding by contract law), then I will deem copyright law no longer applies to software. If software isn't covered by copyright law then FUCK everybody, I'm gonna go pirate the shit out of everything.
So you see, it would be irrational to exclude software, as if code were somehow magical. It's already been established that code is more or less equivalent to speech (no that's not a legal statement but a common sense translation), at least here in the US. And any country with some sense would come to the same conclusion. As such, a piece of software is like a book with instructions, very, very detailed instructions. The fact that they are read by a machine that does stuff with them like draw widgets on a screen is fucking irrelevant to the underlying law.
Nevertheless, the argument that a DVD *is* software is absurd - a DVD-Movie is data for a fixed playback algorithm. A DVD-ROM is a platter than may contain software. This is obvious. Even my mother understands the basic fact that a DVD can be used to store stuff like software OR movies, and she's not exactly a computer scientist. Putting menus and perhaps games that use the menu system on a DVD do not change it's primary role as a movie.
However, any legal system that allows this kind of outrageous treatment of the owner of software or movies deserves to go down like a two dollar whore.
I already defined moral relativism for you, I'm not going to do it again. As for your repeated insistence that I'm being dishonest, I think it's primarily because you can't refute my argument by way of logic. You just keep insisting that people have good intentions and therefore don't meet some magical yardstick of moral relativism.
My entire point is that they ARE well intentioned, but when you get right down to it, their philosophies reduce to moral relativism + tautological statements.
Anybody who claims that violence is never permissible and never solves a problem is being EXTREMELY dishonest. Had the US not been willing to enter World War II on the basis of pacifism, the world would have been engulfed by Nazism and fascism.
If you believe this is a better outcome, that's your privilege, but it makes it clear that you are either a) evil and a proponent of a moral system that violates basic principles of ethics and morality (i.e. Utilitarianism) or b) a moral relativist, too weak and lazy to admit that some moral systems are good and some are bad.
You are not winning this argument by way of ad hominem attacks on my person, or by repeatedly calling me dishonest. Prove to me, by way of logic, that pacifists are not moral relativists. Explain the flaw in my logic. I just don't see it. They certainly may THINK they are being moral, but they are failing to apply consistently and logically a system of morals that maximizes utility.
You are factually correct about the Ranger's role in the conflict. This happened with the tacit support of the UN after Aidid killed 25 Pakistani peacekeepers and generally refused to disarm and demilitarize.
This was not a nice man, and the Somalis who supported him, frankly, got what they deserved for the harm the caused to their fellow countrymen. I'm sorry to hear that your friend would associate with his family.
A pacifist is somebody who denies that force is ever permissible. This is either somebody who a) believes there is no right and wrong (a moral relativist) or b) somebody who believes there is a right and a wrong but that putting the world into a more morally upright position is not their responsibility, too much work, or too dangerous. I would characterize this second group of people as either _evil_, and I mean that quite literally - they see wrong and fail to act to prevent it for reasons other than fear (laziness, lack of responsibility to other human beings, selfishness) or _cowardly_ - they see wrong and fail to act to prevent it out of fear.
The only other possibility would be that they are irrational, and interpret the words in a book (the Christian Bible) as overriding their moral obligations to humanity and themselves. These people have failed to apply reason, and chosen blind faith instead. This puts them in the same category as the evil folks mentioned above, as far as I can tell, it's just that the aforementioned laziness in this case is _intellectual_ laziness.
So you are right, it was an oversimplification to say they are moral relativists. It's just that I don't really believe in the existence of knowingly evil people. Most of the folks out there in the world who are pacifist, if you dig right down into it, turn out to be moral relativists. I've had conversations with a lot of them, probing at the root of their beliefs, and I guess I haven't talked to too many radical Christians. Almost all of them turn out to be full and outright moral relativists.
So accept it or not, I'm pretty sure it's true. It's not a dishonest rhetorical attack at all. It is a logical conclusion supported by my personal observations about leftists at Harvard University, who are fairly representative of the radical Ivory Tower leftist group.
I suppose we should have let them starve, and let the warlords take over without saying anything. Mind you, I'm not saying the US didn't have any other motives in being so actively involved, but take a god damned look at the pictures from the country and the statistics that everyone on both sides of the political spectrum does agree on - something like 1/3 of the population was in imminent danger of starvation before the US came in there.
And Aidid was an unstable egomaniac who killed 25 Pakistanis without provocation (they were destroying depots of illegal weapons that were being used to disrupt aid distribution).
I'm sorry, but this wasn't an invasion - it was a strategic operation to further the stability and security of a country and a people who we wanted to help - of course we sometimes have other ulterior motives, but that doesn't reduce the validity of the fact that this was a legitimate humanitarian operation.
By the way, US troops and other nationals were in Somalia under UN Resolutions because Somalia had no national government to speak of, and the UN, largely populated by leftists like yourselves (or like you seem to be, as you are defending Somali warlords, proving yourself aligned with the radical leftist moral relativists), were trying to save the people of Somalia. As I remember, Clinton campaigned partially on the fact that the US wasn't doing ENOUGH to help Somalis and other poor, starving people around the world.
You leftists need to get your story straight - are we supposed to help or butt out of countries embroiled in famine and civil war?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what to be more scared of. The impending copy protection doom that we are facing, or the sheer horror of the fact that Celine Dione is Sony's best-selling musician.
I emailed Blizzard, and I'm sure a lot of others did too. Didn't do a damned bit of good, since some 2nd tier technical support guy seems to have been assigned to respond to all the "BnetD whiners" out there with a reply about how evil anybody was who was stealing their games, blah blah blah (totally ignoring the crux of my argument that people playing a beta of WCIII that wasn't released yet was not harming their revenues at all).
An Afghani who opposed long term Russian occupation of Afghanistan - that might be a freedom fighter, though if he targetted civilians with bombs, his _methods_ are those of a terrorist.
In the cast of a bunch of foreign nations who sneak into a country with the intention of killing large numbers of civilians, the story is quite cut and dried. Their methods are those of terrorists, of the most violent sort. And they are not freedom fighters because they are not resisting an armed occupation of a nation-state.
We should condemn Reuter's unequivocally for refusing, for reasons of political correctness and timidness, to accurately label those who commit acts of violence with civilian targets as the _intentional_ victims. There is no excuse for it. Violence justifies violence in some cases, and resisting armed occupation is one thing. Resisting an oppressive government generally falls under "civil disobedience" and sometimes is justified, and sometimes is not.
But as soon as you pick civilian targets (i.e. people who don't carry guns and don't make it their business to kill others) and make your goal to kill as many innocents as possible, you have become a terrorist, plain and simple. And if you are a terrorist that targets civilians of some foreign entity, you damn well better expect that countries government is going to take organized military action against you, your organization, and probably whatever country you are from, and likely kill you and your family and lots of other innocent people who get caught in the military cross-fire.
Nevertheless, very few other mail client products out there offer such nice integrated functionality. Even if you don't use Exchange Server (Exchange Server is a pain in the ass sometimes - it makes it too easy for underskilled sysadmins to shoot themselves and everybody else in the foot) the calendar/tasklist stuff is still nice.
So actually they weren't forced to use AOL email. Perhaps they were forced to switch from Outlook to Netscape email or some such thing. But this isn't as moronic as they make it sound - it's not that they switched their entire business over to AOL email. They just switched mail client programs forcefully from one that works to one that didn't work well. To be perfectly honest, Netscape email has never been too great, and it doesn't have the features for the office environment that Outlook or other "groupware" email clients have (scheduling, calendaring, task management).
Clearly if they were using a recent version of Mozilla, they'd probably be using a good web browser with decent email facilities. But god knows, I wouldn't force the use of Netscape anything for email in a corporate environment.
So fine, they made a mistake, clearly they weren't paying attention to the needs of email systems in a corporate environment, but they weren't making people use AOL mail, for god's sake.
Open Source projects are motivated by ego in some cases ("I want to bulid the next great window manager") or some sense of technical correctness in others ("I hate the way OpenOffice looks/I hate Gtk widgets/etc."). So there's no real incentive to work together on a bigger project - why would you want to say "yeah, I built some tiny component that's part of this megalithic Open Source project, UltraOffice" when you can say "I am the lead programmer on KWord".
So knock closed source software all you will, money can be an effective way to motivate people to cooperate on bigger software tasks and put differences aside to achieve an overall better result. And though some Open Source business models make this possible, for lots of products (like office suites), nobody yet has figured out how to do this and it very well may be impossible.
Secondly, the term "prior art" only has relevance in the world of patent law. Prior art (the existence of an invention materially identical to the patented invention) can result in a ruling against a patent in a court of law. However, in the case of trademark law, the only relevant question is whether a word has become generic, or part of the common usage. There are common rules to avoid this happening - a company should NEVER refer to a product as "Windows" because they are then referring to a product by a very generic common English term. The product should always be called "Microsoft Windows" or even better yet "Microsoft Windows Operating System" if you expect to ever prove later on that you had a legitimately trademarked name for your product. There are other rules for marketing folks about this, like only using the trademark in the adjectival as in "Kelloggs brand cereals" or (if they had been smarter) "Xerox brand copying machines".
ISPs are out there to make a living, like the rest of us. The reality is that spammers are people who don't care about inflicting what we call a "negative externality" on everybody else. That means they are inflicting a cost on those who have to read through spam, or figure out how to block/filter it, and the ISPs who have to carry large volumes of unsolicited commercial email. While ORBZ, MAPS, etc. may be annoying, these organizations do serve a function. Gilmore is free to run his open relay on his T1, but it's akin to parking your Ferrari in the middle of Harlem, with the keys in the car, and the driver's side door open. Technically, you may not be legally responsible, but ethically, if somebody walks into that car and goes joy riding and gets into a crash killing/maiming others, well, what the hell did you expect?
Society does get to set rules about permissible behavior, and we do get to enforce them by exclusion. Hell, if 40% of ISPs (by volume, or by number, I don't know) use MAPS, ORBZ, by their own choice it's probably for a reason. And frankly, I'd rather use an ISP that does, because I don't want to be on the receiving end of any more spam than I already get.
Gilmore may be right that RBLs are not the correct long term solution. I've heard it said before, so I won't take credit for it - the correct solution is a change in Internet standards - make it more "costly" in some way (bandwidth or other) to send bulk emails. This would bring the economic cost back to the spammer and remove or reduce the negative externality. Make it so it doesn't pay to spam. And no, I don't have the solution to this problem, but I could imagine alternatives to SMTP/mail routing procedures that address the problem. Of course somebody might argue that this just reduces the utility of email. Ah well. Until then, for god sakes, close your open relays.
And while I agree that it's US centric, I think you are blowing that issue out of proportion. It's written for an American audience, and like I said, it makes no pretense that such projects have high-minded philisophical goals, beyond perhaps sharing some of the agglomeration of "open source intelligence" with the public or other friendly nations.
Or at least that's my personal fantasy.
Anyway, my point is that if by "politics" you mean the fact that you have to deal with other people, some of whom are very different from you, and that it pays to be friends with as many of them as possible, and that it pays to understand the business imperatives of your company aside from just your narrow world of code, then you are very much correct.
When politics expands to include empty suits kissing each others asses and jerking each other off as they drive a company into the ground with nepotism and promoting their friends until the organization goes out of business at the expense of the truly competent, hardworking people who were there, then I disagree. That just shouldn't happen, in a company that is properly managed at the top levels and has accountability throughout the organization. This unfortunately seems rare.
Jewish settlers did begin organizing semi-military organizations when the British Protectorate, well, wasn't doing much protecting of the Jews. There was a lot of inconsistency and weirdness in British policy unfortunately, and they never tried to make things fair or equitable for anybody in the Protectorate. So it devolved into Palestinian attacks on Jewish settlements that were allowed by the British and Jewish resistance against the British occupiers and defense measures (yes, and attacks on other Palestinian targets).
I frankly understand the current Palestinian position that they should have a free independent state, and that defense of the two countries should probably be closely coordinated for logical and safety reasons. Fighting is non-productive - settlement as in land grabbing on either side should be stopped, and lots of financial aid for education and housing needs to go to the Palestinians. But until the Palestinian terrorists and the Palestinian population as a whole get through their thick heads that terrorism and armed resistance are NOT morally equivalent, they will never get the financial assistance they need to build a successful economic and educational base, and unfortunately, a cease fire seems impossible while Arafat and Sharon are in office.
Also, I won't really bother since you are obviously not a historical scholar on the topic, but the state of Israel AND a state of Palestine were established by fiat by world powers. Unfortunately, the greedy and tyrannical abutting nations of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc. saw the exit of the British as an opportunity for a land grab, and the Palestinian Arabs were apparently not well organized as an entity unto themselves, and thought their Arab brethren were there to help them.
The reality was that it wasn't an easy land grab, and the abutting Arab nations didn't really have much room in their hearts for the Palestinans either. And over the years the cycle of violence and the transition from a nationalist issue to a pan-Islamic issue and some perceived battle between the Muslims and Jews has done ill for everyone. Rather than pointing fingers, both sides should be implementing the Mitchell plan, and going ahead with the inevitable, since neither group is going away anytime soon, and reconciliation or extermination are the only possible ends, and the first is obviously preferable for both sides. Even a warmonger and hawk like Sharon knows that and has acknowedged that Palestinian statehood is inevitable, after peace is achieved.
The real use of this is for people who want to experiment with quantum _algorithms_ on small data sets and learn and understand better how quantum computers work and how quantum calculations are put together. Writing quantum algorithms is hard and confusing to somebody familiar with classical computation, even if you are familiar with quantum mechanics. There are very few useful quantum algorithms (Gover's search and Shor's factorization algorithms are the two most famous and interesting IMHO). This module might encourage more people to come up with and experiment with quantum algorithms that take advantage of the "inherently parallel" nature of quantum computing.
Note that though I am no expert, I did actually write something modestly similar to this Perl - an interpreter that read a series of meta-language commands and turned them into physical magnet pulses for spin flipping on an NMR quantum computer we had at MIT. We never bothered to write a simulator for it, but now that I think about it, it would be cool to have this. Kudos to these guys for doing this.
Now if somebody could just make a quantum computer with, say, 20 or 30 qubits I might be convinced that quantum computing could eventually do useful calculations and that the decoherence problems and setup problems for a large number of weakly coupled qubit units are not intractable. Perhaps an alternative to NMR as the substrate for quantum computing might get farther.
But I have myself used a simple NMR quantum computer to execute Grover's search algorithm on a very small (4 element) search space when I was working at MIT. So there.
As for the flash site, I hate to break it to you buddy but that was the norm in the B2B software industry we originated in. Customers expected it. If the site didn't look techno-impressive with nifty special effects they didn't buy from us. Furthermore, my job was not "Chief Webmaster", and control of our corporate website was a marketing responsibility. If you want to judge how good I am at what I do, base it on something I actually had responsibility for.
But like I said, hindsight is 20/20, and EVERYBODY was doing what we did in early 2000. Our timing sucked - if we had been two years earlier, we probably would have sold the company for 200 million bucks, good product or not, and if we had been two years later, we would have tried the grow-it-slowly approach.
My whole point is that the next time I do this, I'm not going to jump on the VC unless it's absolutely necessary because the nature of the business opportunity requires big money, and the opportunity is just too huge to pass up. I'd rather go it slowly and keep my ownership to myself, and give some chunks out to key employees who make it happen with me, not to distant VCs who give me cash to overpay stupid employees.
The point is that if you think you can grow a business yourself, do so - if you don't absolutely need a large amount of outside financing, don't take it. I understand that the VCs want you to take it so they can control the company, but that's why you need to first demonstrate that you can make some money - once that's been proved, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate. You can effectively prove that their returns will be high, and they should give you money at a good valuation, and not try to take control of a product that they don't really understand (at a detailed level, etc.).
My company, which grew over 2 years to 35 employees, raised 5 million dollars in venture capital, and was making over a million a year, slipped out of my control entirely earlier this year. We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers. Since we (the founders) had lost control of the board of directors there was nothing we could do about it. Of course, at the time, we needed the venture capital to fund development and attract good management, which we needed to close deals, etc. etc.
Looking back on it, at almost every stage I made lots of decisions, but most of them were the right decisions at the time. The decision to take VC funding was unavoidable at the time - we were coming into direct competition with companies that had already raised 30 to 40 million dollars. Ironically, those companies went out of business long before we did because their burn rates were outrageous.
Just my personal experiences anyway - I started out knowing a lot about technology and very little about business, and I know a lot more now. If your business if fundamentally sound without venture financing, then you don't need it. If your business is one that requires so much up front venture financing that you anticipate losing control (>50% of the shares of the company), before you get through the initial growth phase of the company, I would recommend rethinking starting that business, unless the returns seem outrageous. Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years. Once you get off the ground, you'll be in a much stronger position to negotiate for further funding anyway.
This is generally done for different reasons than what you state - it's usually done because geographical rights to distribute content are sublicensed out to other content distributors, and this guarantees that their contract will be enforced by the technology. Also the funky magic with release schedules probably is done to support the funkiness of first run release times in theaters - if a movie comes out much later in theaters in Australia than in the US, you don't want the Aussies to buy US DVDs and eat into theater revenue. And the release schedule staggering is done primarily to assess how well a movie does in its primary market before deciding how many theaters to release it in in the international markets, and to avoid spreading resources too thin on marketing (imagine having to coordinate marketing campaigns everywhere in the world at the same time).
So there are business reasons for this. I still think it's fucking stupid though, since the enthusiasts who would buy DVDs from other regions are the same people who will just get chipped DVD players and play them anyway, and the rest of the sheeple will deal with what they are spoon fed. So it doesn't accomplish dick in the end, IMHO.
Try www.linuxiso.org if you are looking to leech an ISO of the 8.2beta and finding the official mirror sites a bit packed for your taste. I'm only getting 46KB/sec, but at least you can connect, unlike the ftp mirror sites.
Thank you Katz, for sparing us the usual wordy outpouring of ranting pseudo-journalism.
If the courts actually decide that it doesn't and that EULAs are binding (i.e. click-through/assumed agreements, obviously signed contracts for enterprise software ARE binding by contract law), then I will deem copyright law no longer applies to software. If software isn't covered by copyright law then FUCK everybody, I'm gonna go pirate the shit out of everything.
So you see, it would be irrational to exclude software, as if code were somehow magical. It's already been established that code is more or less equivalent to speech (no that's not a legal statement but a common sense translation), at least here in the US. And any country with some sense would come to the same conclusion. As such, a piece of software is like a book with instructions, very, very detailed instructions. The fact that they are read by a machine that does stuff with them like draw widgets on a screen is fucking irrelevant to the underlying law.
Nevertheless, the argument that a DVD *is* software is absurd - a DVD-Movie is data for a fixed playback algorithm. A DVD-ROM is a platter than may contain software. This is obvious. Even my mother understands the basic fact that a DVD can be used to store stuff like software OR movies, and she's not exactly a computer scientist. Putting menus and perhaps games that use the menu system on a DVD do not change it's primary role as a movie.
However, any legal system that allows this kind of outrageous treatment of the owner of software or movies deserves to go down like a two dollar whore.
My entire point is that they ARE well intentioned, but when you get right down to it, their philosophies reduce to moral relativism + tautological statements.
Anybody who claims that violence is never permissible and never solves a problem is being EXTREMELY dishonest. Had the US not been willing to enter World War II on the basis of pacifism, the world would have been engulfed by Nazism and fascism.
If you believe this is a better outcome, that's your privilege, but it makes it clear that you are either a) evil and a proponent of a moral system that violates basic principles of ethics and morality (i.e. Utilitarianism) or b) a moral relativist, too weak and lazy to admit that some moral systems are good and some are bad.
You are not winning this argument by way of ad hominem attacks on my person, or by repeatedly calling me dishonest. Prove to me, by way of logic, that pacifists are not moral relativists. Explain the flaw in my logic. I just don't see it. They certainly may THINK they are being moral, but they are failing to apply consistently and logically a system of morals that maximizes utility.
This was not a nice man, and the Somalis who supported him, frankly, got what they deserved for the harm the caused to their fellow countrymen. I'm sorry to hear that your friend would associate with his family.
The only other possibility would be that they are irrational, and interpret the words in a book (the Christian Bible) as overriding their moral obligations to humanity and themselves. These people have failed to apply reason, and chosen blind faith instead. This puts them in the same category as the evil folks mentioned above, as far as I can tell, it's just that the aforementioned laziness in this case is _intellectual_ laziness.
So you are right, it was an oversimplification to say they are moral relativists. It's just that I don't really believe in the existence of knowingly evil people. Most of the folks out there in the world who are pacifist, if you dig right down into it, turn out to be moral relativists. I've had conversations with a lot of them, probing at the root of their beliefs, and I guess I haven't talked to too many radical Christians. Almost all of them turn out to be full and outright moral relativists.
So accept it or not, I'm pretty sure it's true. It's not a dishonest rhetorical attack at all. It is a logical conclusion supported by my personal observations about leftists at Harvard University, who are fairly representative of the radical Ivory Tower leftist group.
And Aidid was an unstable egomaniac who killed 25 Pakistanis without provocation (they were destroying depots of illegal weapons that were being used to disrupt aid distribution).
I'm sorry, but this wasn't an invasion - it was a strategic operation to further the stability and security of a country and a people who we wanted to help - of course we sometimes have other ulterior motives, but that doesn't reduce the validity of the fact that this was a legitimate humanitarian operation.
By the way, US troops and other nationals were in Somalia under UN Resolutions because Somalia had no national government to speak of, and the UN, largely populated by leftists like yourselves (or like you seem to be, as you are defending Somali warlords, proving yourself aligned with the radical leftist moral relativists), were trying to save the people of Somalia. As I remember, Clinton campaigned partially on the fact that the US wasn't doing ENOUGH to help Somalis and other poor, starving people around the world.
You leftists need to get your story straight - are we supposed to help or butt out of countries embroiled in famine and civil war?