[Company] having a monopoly with [Product] is perfectly legal
Agree (modulo jurisdiction).
no problem there
Disagree.
A fairly straightforward microeconomic analysis will (if you believe the models are good models) show that monopolies cause society losses by setting prices above the market rate---i.e. they make all of us less well off compared to how well off we could have been if there was effective competition.
I think Michele Boldrin agrees with you. His view is basically that the basic idea of patents is sound, but today's reality doesn't mesh well with that idea because of a radically different cost structure (i.e. the cost of starting a company and the cost of copying an idea is different from when patents where instituted).
[On a side note, I thumbs-up Econtalk, so if your podcatcher is hungry here's one more feed for it].
Two... only _two_ languages?
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Once you have programmed in at least two languages, you have a much better idea of what you are doing I think. So given that you'll learn some "practical" language to do something, let Lisp be that "other language".
I concur, and would add that being proficient with five languages is not too high a bar to set for a professional developer. (Not a world-leading expert, but able to Write Good Code(tm))
Heck, I know C, C++, python and shell scripting *very* well (IMNSHO); haskell, java and scala decently; scheme, elisp and SML/NJ somewhat; javascript, C# and perl superficially, [...].
But then again, scheme and javascript are basically the same language, and python is a funky dialect of it with elisp being a close cousin. C++, java and C# are becoming more and more similar (there's a language conceptual overlap, aneehoo), C is a subset of C++, ML ~= Haskell. As you might see, ten languages is a lot easier to learn than ten times the difficulty of learning the first language.
(Sorry if I come off as bragging; I don't mean to, I'm just using myself as an example, and I don't think I'm a crazy-ass whiz kid)
"...we could remove applications from handsets - we don't want things to go that far, but we could."
That's probably one of the things that irked me the most: the language in the summary
"[...] but in the rare event that we need to, we have the tools to take action"
They have the tools even when they don't need to use them, and they get to decide when they need to use them. So in fact they can use the app-killing tools at will.
That fact doesn't exactly leap off the page (that is, into Joe Public's eyes), does it?
Nor an iPhone, nor an Android device, nor a Palm webOS device, nor a BlackBerry (assuming you're on a BES system).
I'm with your parent here: I don't want any of these. I like my N900, though---it runs (basically) Debian, and if the "basically" part is too far away from the real deal, it runs the real Debian in a sandbox too. To pwn it, install 'gainroot'.
That's right, most of the horrors of WWII was due to atheist principles.
"There is no god, therefore we must kill people"?
"This is how the different species came about, therefore we must kill people"?
the atheist argument of evolution
[Not believing in the existence of a god] and [believing in what your senses tell you] and [believing only in what your senses tell you] are three distinct things. They tend to overlap in people, but they are different.
Hitler may have conflated them for rhetorical purposes. I don't know, I don't have the primary sources at hand.
Also, based on my understanding, evolution is (and at the time was) a descriptive theory---it tries to explain how the world works and why (in some sense) we observe what we observe. It is not a suggestion of policy, it doesn't say "you should do [something]".
Compare with economics: the basic theory of microeconomics assume the existence of positive-sum games (i.e. win-win trades) and informed trading agents, and comes to the conclusion that if markets are free, the sum of all wealth will be maximal. This is a descriptive claim, "if you do A then B happens". There's a related policy claim, "B should happen" (i.e. wealth should be maximized) which people can have an honest disagreement about, but it's somehow different from the factual claim.
I hope this helps someone put parent into perspective.
Via the (PS) Telephone Network, you can contact you friends, call for a pizza, vote for Idol Talent Factor (SMS fee + voting fee), call personal ad systems or phone sex lines.
"Phone Neutrality" would be that the telephone operator doesn't get to decide which pizza shops you can and can't call. Phone Neutrality would mean that pizza shop A can't pay your phone company to have calls to pizza shop B be more expensive, or have favorable call-drop rates. It would mean that pizza shop A can't pay your phone company's upstream phone company to give pizza shop B worse call-drop rates (without you or your phone company having a say). It means the phone companies aren't in the business of delivering "Service contact packages", but of delivering end-to-end connectivity on equal terms to anyone willing to pay the non-dicriminatory charges.
Somehow it seems like this wouldn't be a problem if you could just divide the country regionally between these two philosophies
I think the left-wing half is called "Scandinavia";-)
Interesting factoid: in a recent episode of The Young Turks featured on Best of the Left, Cenk (the host of TYT) talks about wealth distributions. Americans think the richest 20% of the people own 59% of the wealth, they want the richest 20% to own 32% (59 and 32 are averages among the asked), and in fact the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth. [32, 59, 84: IIRC]
You're welcome over here; we talk english reasonably good, the food's nice, the tax rate is high and the weather is shit during the winter but the people are friendly and trusting. When you've got enough you don't need to squeeze more out of others, and when squeezing isn't the norm people don't have role models to learn it from. [We're like the Canada of Europe:D]
I think these apply reasonably well to Starcraft (and RTSes in general). Let me describe them briefly, in terms of Starcraft 1:
Timmy wants to make a splash; he wants to build big units and cause a splash; he likes tanks, nukes and carriers.
Johnny likes quirky and underused combos; he plays the oddball strategy to see if it might just work---"I have to try statis-fielding my own units to trap the opponent on one side of the ramp", or "Can I reliably win using only melee attacks?" (Johnny also likes to make quirky RPG builds, in the style of MongoJerry's pacifist Diablo II necromancer, see http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/thread-10277.html)
Spike plays to win, and will play whatever is effective. Do you 9-pool or overpool on a 128x128 map? Does the answer change on 128x192 maps? How do you react when the opponent goes for +1 attack _before_ +1 defense vs. after? How good are our relative zergling micro---do I win mirror battles?
These aren't hard-line categorizations; they're attributes you can have more or less of. (I'm a multiclass Johnny/Spike, FWIW.)
They will sacrifice [anything] if it will the game more fun. If that means the AI can be beaten, so be it.
For Spike, if you nerf the AI, you make the game less fun. If godlike micro lets Spike defeat human opponents, he wants an AI to help him hone his godlike micro skills (yes, they _will_ be godlike).
He will want an AI with human-like micro skills, so that he can simulate the real deal closely; he'll also want a different AI that will let him train specific skills---say, a macrobot AI vs. him self-imposing a macrobot playing style; or a custom scenario where you have to multi-task between microing a unit being chased and building your base to defend against the "5 minutes no rush" rush.
Thats what Spike wants. That's what's fun to him. Especially if he's Korean:-)
I don't think you get to tell him he's wrong (it's a chocolate vs. vanilla thing). I think you, if you're the right person in the right job, gets to decide that you want to make a game that appeals more to Timmy and Johnny. I don't think you get to decide that there are more Timmys and Johnnys in the world; that's an empirical question. You do get to comission a survey, though, and base your product development decisions on that survey.
(Based on recent developments in popular games, as I see them mostly from the outside, Timmy is the hot new market segment.)
the style of critical thinking that is exercised in literary analysis
"Agree with teacher" is a kind of critical thinking?
Then maybe I didn't get the message. I would be happy if you would explain to me the point and purpose of literary analysis, or some of the take-away messages that can be applied in my life.
For comparison, history is "a video running in a loop, in which a small group of people try to dominate and extract resources from a much larger group of people" (paraphrasing Brett Veinotte of schoolsucks.podomatic.com). The point of studying history is to learn how to affect societal change and how people might try to extract resources from you.
Most kids, if you tell them in 7th grade that they can stop taking math, they're going to. Then they hit junior or senior year of high school, realize they want to be an engineer
So the minute people have real educational choices within sight, they start thinking about them. I say give people real choices in education much earlier.
It's wasteful as Hell, but I can't think of a better way to do it without forcing life altering career choices on 13-14 year olds.
Good sense comes from experience*, not age. The reason I agree that it would be unresponsible to ask 13-14 year olds to make career decisions is that they have no real idea about what various careers are like, because they are forced to spend all their days in school, which only teaches them about two careers (teacher and administrator) and only from the consumer side, not the producer side.
It might be a good idea to let kids intern where applicable, or just sit by and watch if nothing else is going to work, such that they have first hand experience in various trades and can make informed choices at age thirteen.
(* experince comes from bad sense)
If you stop infantilizing teens, you'll see them as adults wanting to have real responsibility along with some freedom to choose it and to manage it.
The "to improve education, throw more money at it" crowd fails to realize that by far the biggest factor in education is the student's own willingness to learn. If they don't want to be there, students will squirm just as much in an expensive chair as a cheap one, and get just as little out of the experience.
And the most effective way to ensure that students are willing to learn? I'd say making attendance optional.
The most valuable learning I achieved, I achieved in my own time and under my own direction; either from internet tutorials and public library books (programming), or by parent-paid tuition in a free market (musical instruments), or by self-paid tutoring software (touch typing).
The important things I learned in school (math and english), school spent way too much time on and/or gave me way too little of. In return, school required that I spend my time on various activities that were useless to me (making drawings and telling stories spring to mind; music class was okay but somewhat redundant;...). And I probably had the motivation to learn mathematics and english that in the absence of school I would have wanted some non-school tutilege (e.g. a private teacher).
What I would like to know. How does this technology aid in education... Yes the student can access some information faster, and do some research, or if your books were ebook they can search for terms faster, so they are not flipping pages while there is a lecture
By my (first tentative) definition, education is the pursuit of new knowledge and skills. It would seem that an internet connected device helps tremendously in the acquisition of knowledge, and in some skills (programming more so, lockpicking somewhat less so, in my limited experience).
Someone said that "learning happens when people do work at the limit of their ability on something that motivates them". When people are put into classrooms by force and told to study what the teacher has chosen for them, the motivation component tends to be missing. That might explain why people get distracted; but it also highlights why "forced education" is an oxymoron.
Education and schooling are not necessarily the same.
Z_3, i.e. integers modulo 3. Compare with "2**32 == 0 (as an unsigned int)".
(As 3 is a prime, Z_3 is a field; Z_(2**32) isn't, as 2**32 isn't a prime, but there is a field with 2**32 elements which is unique up to isomorphism, as all finite fields are.)
I understand that the US government can regulate the interaction between US citizens and US companies, and that it can also regulate US citizens and US companies each in their own right.
But if series-of-facetubes.dk (a hypothetical Danish company, operating in Denmark, privately owned by a Danish citizen) became the hot new social network, the US gov. can't really regulate it, can it? Of course, the US can always threaten to "bring democracy" to Denmark if we aren't obedient enough, but that would be kind of iffy.
So... given that any regulation can only give incomplete results, the point of it is... the incomplete results? I.e. "They're better than nothing"? Granted, some of the biggest perceived privacy threats are american (google, facebook).
Just a thought: whenever anyone wants to regulate the internet, ask yourself "how will this work, internationally?"
So "truth" is only relative to what the most powerful group of professors (admins) that give a damn about the subject matter? [...] Run universities like Wikipedia?
Net neutrality would make it illegal for a company to offer this service.
"Please overwrite your/etc/hosts or \blah\etc\hosts with this file: [link]".
Either that, or allow the bill payer to log in to the ISP's web-based control center thing and enable/disable filtering there.
I'm sure it's possible to draft legislation that allows internet users to self-impose censorship and allows ISPs to help, without letting web service providers (i.e. Youtube) screw over users by paying ISPs to screw over competitors.
The BSA folk have trouble with the very concept of libre software [...] They have an easier time with "open source"
I suspect they will have a hard time articulating the differences.
If you want to know what they are, look at the two definitions, by the FSF and OSI, respectively, and compare. They are very minor.
IIRC, the TeX license is open source but not free software, because it places a restriction on the naming of changed files in redistributed derived works. That's the only example I know. (IANAL, TINLA)
Open standards are very similar to units of measure in this respect and we can all imagine what things would be like if we didn't operate from the same ones...
The international association of patent trolls takes offense at any legal moves that complicates the business of their clients.
Really? I always though it took offense at the moves which simplified the business of their non-clients.
Generally speaking, big companies love flat per-company costs, since relative to size it hurts small companies the most. Second to that, they love fixed percentage-of-revenue costs, since it amplifies the per-company flat costs (they're bigger relative to the remaining funds). Searching for patents and getting licensed where appropriate seems to be one of these (or a mixture of the two).
So big companies love patents: it squeezes out all the small companies, which incidentally are vital to a healthy economy (i.e. one in which the involved human beings prosper).
Slashdot Mirror
[Company] having a monopoly with [Product] is perfectly legal
Agree (modulo jurisdiction).
no problem there
Disagree.
A fairly straightforward microeconomic analysis will (if you believe the models are good models) show that monopolies cause society losses by setting prices above the market rate---i.e. they make all of us less well off compared to how well off we could have been if there was effective competition.
it may even feature nostril rape, but that site is an absolute mess and looks like shit, and its basically a shitty blog of images.
You're going to love /b/ ;-)
I think Michele Boldrin agrees with you. His view is basically that the basic idea of patents is sound, but today's reality doesn't mesh well with that idea because of a radically different cost structure (i.e. the cost of starting a company and the cost of copying an idea is different from when patents where instituted).
Here's his discussion with economist Russ Roberts on the subject: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/boldrin_on_inte.html (which links to his book, Against Intellectual Property, which you can read for free on-line).
[On a side note, I thumbs-up Econtalk, so if your podcatcher is hungry here's one more feed for it].
Once you have programmed in at least two languages, you have a much better idea of what you are doing I think. So given that you'll learn some "practical" language to do something, let Lisp be that "other language".
I concur, and would add that being proficient with five languages is not too high a bar to set for a professional developer. (Not a world-leading expert, but able to Write Good Code(tm))
Heck, I know C, C++, python and shell scripting *very* well (IMNSHO); haskell, java and scala decently; scheme, elisp and SML/NJ somewhat; javascript, C# and perl superficially, [...].
But then again, scheme and javascript are basically the same language, and python is a funky dialect of it with elisp being a close cousin. C++, java and C# are becoming more and more similar (there's a language conceptual overlap, aneehoo), C is a subset of C++, ML ~= Haskell. As you might see, ten languages is a lot easier to learn than ten times the difficulty of learning the first language.
(Sorry if I come off as bragging; I don't mean to, I'm just using myself as an example, and I don't think I'm a crazy-ass whiz kid)
"...we could remove applications from handsets - we don't want things to go that far, but we could."
That's probably one of the things that irked me the most: the language in the summary
"[...] but in the rare event that we need to, we have the tools to take action"
They have the tools even when they don't need to use them, and they get to decide when they need to use them. So in fact they can use the app-killing tools at will.
That fact doesn't exactly leap off the page (that is, into Joe Public's eyes), does it?
Nor an iPhone, nor an Android device, nor a Palm webOS device, nor a BlackBerry (assuming you're on a BES system).
I'm with your parent here: I don't want any of these. I like my N900, though---it runs (basically) Debian, and if the "basically" part is too far away from the real deal, it runs the real Debian in a sandbox too. To pwn it, install 'gainroot'.
(I don't work for Nokia, I'm just a happy owner)
That's right, most of the horrors of WWII was due to atheist principles.
"There is no god, therefore we must kill people"?
"This is how the different species came about, therefore we must kill people"?
the atheist argument of evolution
[Not believing in the existence of a god] and [believing in what your senses tell you] and [believing only in what your senses tell you] are three distinct things. They tend to overlap in people, but they are different.
Hitler may have conflated them for rhetorical purposes. I don't know, I don't have the primary sources at hand.
Also, based on my understanding, evolution is (and at the time was) a descriptive theory---it tries to explain how the world works and why (in some sense) we observe what we observe. It is not a suggestion of policy, it doesn't say "you should do [something]".
Compare with economics: the basic theory of microeconomics assume the existence of positive-sum games (i.e. win-win trades) and informed trading agents, and comes to the conclusion that if markets are free, the sum of all wealth will be maximal. This is a descriptive claim, "if you do A then B happens". There's a related policy claim, "B should happen" (i.e. wealth should be maximized) which people can have an honest disagreement about, but it's somehow different from the factual claim.
I hope this helps someone put parent into perspective.
So here's a telephony analogy:
Via the (PS) Telephone Network, you can contact you friends, call for a pizza, vote for Idol Talent Factor (SMS fee + voting fee), call personal ad systems or phone sex lines.
"Phone Neutrality" would be that the telephone operator doesn't get to decide which pizza shops you can and can't call. Phone Neutrality would mean that pizza shop A can't pay your phone company to have calls to pizza shop B be more expensive, or have favorable call-drop rates. It would mean that pizza shop A can't pay your phone company's upstream phone company to give pizza shop B worse call-drop rates (without you or your phone company having a say). It means the phone companies aren't in the business of delivering "Service contact packages", but of delivering end-to-end connectivity on equal terms to anyone willing to pay the non-dicriminatory charges.
(At least, that's my interpretation)
Somehow it seems like this wouldn't be a problem if you could just divide the country regionally between these two philosophies
I think the left-wing half is called "Scandinavia" ;-)
Interesting factoid: in a recent episode of The Young Turks featured on Best of the Left, Cenk (the host of TYT) talks about wealth distributions. Americans think the richest 20% of the people own 59% of the wealth, they want the richest 20% to own 32% (59 and 32 are averages among the asked), and in fact the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth. [32, 59, 84: IIRC]
In Denmark, the richest 20% own 34% of the wealth, see http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Europe/Denmark-POVERTY-AND-WEALTH.html
You're welcome over here; we talk english reasonably good, the food's nice, the tax rate is high and the weather is shit during the winter but the people are friendly and trusting. When you've got enough you don't need to squeeze more out of others, and when squeezing isn't the norm people don't have role models to learn it from. [We're like the Canada of Europe :D]
"myndigheter". I don't think there is any English word for that concept
"Authorities"? (We say "myndigheder" in Denmark, fwiw)
Video games are designed to be fun
For whom? What do people consider fun? Do all people consider the same kinds of things fun?
I think the answer is no. In the case of Magic: The Gathering (the card game), Mark Rosewater (lead designer) thinks the answer is no---his three psychographic profiles Timmy, Johnny and Spike want different things. See http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr11 and http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr220a
I think these apply reasonably well to Starcraft (and RTSes in general). Let me describe them briefly, in terms of Starcraft 1:
Timmy wants to make a splash; he wants to build big units and cause a splash; he likes tanks, nukes and carriers.
Johnny likes quirky and underused combos; he plays the oddball strategy to see if it might just work---"I have to try statis-fielding my own units to trap the opponent on one side of the ramp", or "Can I reliably win using only melee attacks?"
(Johnny also likes to make quirky RPG builds, in the style of MongoJerry's pacifist Diablo II necromancer, see http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/thread-10277.html)
Spike plays to win, and will play whatever is effective. Do you 9-pool or overpool on a 128x128 map? Does the answer change on 128x192 maps? How do you react when the opponent goes for +1 attack _before_ +1 defense vs. after? How good are our relative zergling micro---do I win mirror battles?
These aren't hard-line categorizations; they're attributes you can have more or less of. (I'm a multiclass Johnny/Spike, FWIW.)
They will sacrifice [anything] if it will the game more fun. If that means the AI can be beaten, so be it.
For Spike, if you nerf the AI, you make the game less fun. If godlike micro lets Spike defeat human opponents, he wants an AI to help him hone his godlike micro skills (yes, they _will_ be godlike).
He will want an AI with human-like micro skills, so that he can simulate the real deal closely; he'll also want a different AI that will let him train specific skills---say, a macrobot AI vs. him self-imposing a macrobot playing style; or a custom scenario where you have to multi-task between microing a unit being chased and building your base to defend against the "5 minutes no rush" rush.
Thats what Spike wants. That's what's fun to him. Especially if he's Korean :-)
I don't think you get to tell him he's wrong (it's a chocolate vs. vanilla thing). I think you, if you're the right person in the right job, gets to decide that you want to make a game that appeals more to Timmy and Johnny. I don't think you get to decide that there are more Timmys and Johnnys in the world; that's an empirical question. You do get to comission a survey, though, and base your product development decisions on that survey.
(Based on recent developments in popular games, as I see them mostly from the outside, Timmy is the hot new market segment.)
the style of critical thinking that is exercised in literary analysis
"Agree with teacher" is a kind of critical thinking?
Then maybe I didn't get the message. I would be happy if you would explain to me the point and purpose of literary analysis, or some of the take-away messages that can be applied in my life.
For comparison, history is "a video running in a loop, in which a small group of people try to dominate and extract resources from a much larger group of people" (paraphrasing Brett Veinotte of schoolsucks.podomatic.com). The point of studying history is to learn how to affect societal change and how people might try to extract resources from you.
Most kids, if you tell them in 7th grade that they can stop taking math, they're going to. Then they hit junior or senior year of high school, realize they want to be an engineer
So the minute people have real educational choices within sight, they start thinking about them. I say give people real choices in education much earlier.
It's wasteful as Hell, but I can't think of a better way to do it without forcing life altering career choices on 13-14 year olds.
Good sense comes from experience*, not age. The reason I agree that it would be unresponsible to ask 13-14 year olds to make career decisions is that they have no real idea about what various careers are like, because they are forced to spend all their days in school, which only teaches them about two careers (teacher and administrator) and only from the consumer side, not the producer side.
It might be a good idea to let kids intern where applicable, or just sit by and watch if nothing else is going to work, such that they have first hand experience in various trades and can make informed choices at age thirteen.
(* experince comes from bad sense)
If you stop infantilizing teens, you'll see them as adults wanting to have real responsibility along with some freedom to choose it and to manage it.
The "to improve education, throw more money at it" crowd fails to realize that by far the biggest factor in education is the student's own willingness to learn. If they don't want to be there, students will squirm just as much in an expensive chair as a cheap one, and get just as little out of the experience.
And the most effective way to ensure that students are willing to learn? I'd say making attendance optional.
The most valuable learning I achieved, I achieved in my own time and under my own direction; either from internet tutorials and public library books (programming), or by parent-paid tuition in a free market (musical instruments), or by self-paid tutoring software (touch typing).
The important things I learned in school (math and english), school spent way too much time on and/or gave me way too little of. In return, school required that I spend my time on various activities that were useless to me (making drawings and telling stories spring to mind; music class was okay but somewhat redundant; ...). And I probably had the motivation to learn mathematics and english that in the absence of school I would have wanted some non-school tutilege (e.g. a private teacher).
What I would like to know. How does this technology aid in education... Yes the student can access some information faster, and do some research, or if your books were ebook they can search for terms faster, so they are not flipping pages while there is a lecture
By my (first tentative) definition, education is the pursuit of new knowledge and skills. It would seem that an internet connected device helps tremendously in the acquisition of knowledge, and in some skills (programming more so, lockpicking somewhat less so, in my limited experience).
Someone said that "learning happens when people do work at the limit of their ability on something that motivates them". When people are put into classrooms by force and told to study what the teacher has chosen for them, the motivation component tends to be missing. That might explain why people get distracted; but it also highlights why "forced education" is an oxymoron.
Education and schooling are not necessarily the same.
You've collected some blue-ish pale icky green chu-chu jelly.
Z_3, i.e. integers modulo 3. Compare with "2**32 == 0 (as an unsigned int)".
(As 3 is a prime, Z_3 is a field; Z_(2**32) isn't, as 2**32 isn't a prime, but there is a field with 2**32 elements which is unique up to isomorphism, as all finite fields are.)
so their customers accept the abusiveness.
I think you mean "their customers forward the abusiveness onto their underlings (i.e. typical slashdot readers)".
(Or are you saying that the working-class on-the-floor techies are making the RDBMS purchasing decisions... ?)
I understand that the US government can regulate the interaction between US citizens and US companies, and that it can also regulate US citizens and US companies each in their own right.
But if series-of-facetubes.dk (a hypothetical Danish company, operating in Denmark, privately owned by a Danish citizen) became the hot new social network, the US gov. can't really regulate it, can it? Of course, the US can always threaten to "bring democracy" to Denmark if we aren't obedient enough, but that would be kind of iffy.
So... given that any regulation can only give incomplete results, the point of it is... the incomplete results? I.e. "They're better than nothing"? Granted, some of the biggest perceived privacy threats are american (google, facebook).
Just a thought: whenever anyone wants to regulate the internet, ask yourself "how will this work, internationally?"
So "truth" is only relative to what the most powerful group of professors (admins) that give a damn about the subject matter? [...] Run universities like Wikipedia?
No, just the humanities.
*ducks (modulo consensus reality)*
Net neutrality would make it illegal for a company to offer this service.
"Please overwrite your /etc/hosts or \blah\etc\hosts with this file: [link]".
Either that, or allow the bill payer to log in to the ISP's web-based control center thing and enable/disable filtering there.
I'm sure it's possible to draft legislation that allows internet users to self-impose censorship and allows ISPs to help, without letting web service providers (i.e. Youtube) screw over users by paying ISPs to screw over competitors.
The BSA folk have trouble with the very concept of libre software [...] They have an easier time with "open source"
I suspect they will have a hard time articulating the differences.
If you want to know what they are, look at the two definitions, by the FSF and OSI, respectively, and compare. They are very minor.
IIRC, the TeX license is open source but not free software, because it places a restriction on the naming of changed files in redistributed derived works. That's the only example I know. (IANAL, TINLA)
Open standards are very similar to units of measure in this respect and we can all imagine what things would be like if we didn't operate from the same ones...
I can imagine airplanes falling out of the sky. As can Air Canada, if they remember the Gimli Glider incident (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider)
You can also hear Dan Klein tell a story about it (and software testing in general) at http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix05/tech/mp3/klein.mp3
To the uninitiated:
The phrase "[...] will be first against the wall when the revolution comes" is from HHGTTG (grep through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy).
Also, its author, Douglas N. Adams, has written a piece in which he complains about "Little dongly things", at http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html
So the parent refers to a geek culture hero in more ways than one.
(Also, I hear they have a job opening at XKCDexplained.com, and I'm thinking about applying... :D)
The international association of patent trolls takes offense at any legal moves that complicates the business of their clients.
Really? I always though it took offense at the moves which simplified the business of their non-clients.
Generally speaking, big companies love flat per-company costs, since relative to size it hurts small companies the most. Second to that, they love fixed percentage-of-revenue costs, since it amplifies the per-company flat costs (they're bigger relative to the remaining funds). Searching for patents and getting licensed where appropriate seems to be one of these (or a mixture of the two).
So big companies love patents: it squeezes out all the small companies, which incidentally are vital to a healthy economy (i.e. one in which the involved human beings prosper).