If you don't want to read the whole book, try The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (by the same author). By the way, Gatto was New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.
By the way, you seem confused on the point of the tragedy of the commons. Copyrightable works are hardly a finite grass field that will be overgrazed and become useless.... The Tragedy of the Commons completely inappropriate in discussions of intellectual property.
The OP is indeed confused, but he's somewhat on the right track. "Tragedy of the Commons" is an example of market failure due to a negative externality of a rivalrous, non-excludable good. What the OP was probably looking for was the "Free Rider" problem, which is an example of market failure due to a positive externality of a non-rivalrous, non-excludable good.
In other words, when I create a new invention or a new song or a new book, it's difficult to exclude access to my work (non-excludable). But one person copying the invention or song or book doesn't reduce the inherent value of any other copy (non-rivalrous). "The production of [such works] results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. Because no private organisation [the author or inventor] can reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, there will be insufficient incentives to produce it voluntarily. Consumers can take advantage of public goods without contributing sufficiently to their creation." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods, note that "sufficient" here is used in an economic sense).
One solution to the "Free Rider" problem is "legislated exclusion", listed on the above Wikipedia article, which is what we currently have. I personally don't believe that's a very good solution, and would much rather see one of the others take over (such as the "Coasian solution", under which the Street Performer Protocol falls, or patronage, which would probably fall under "public spirit"), as you do. But just wanted to point out that the mentioning of "Tragedy of the Commons" wasn't as far off the mark as you apparently felt it was.
I'm not being funny, but how? How do you make money writing and selling Free Software? Enterprising programmers would like to know.
Charge once for the software you write instead of multiple times. In other words, write Free Software (usually based on or customizing other Free Software) on contract. When you're done, you give your client the software and they give you money. You don't particularly care at that point that they can take your work and give it away--you've already moved on to the next project.
Still, it's not that spammers are mass-OCR'ing images, it's that they actually get humans to enter the captchas, sometimes providing porn as a reward, but it's sometimes also a paid operation with goldfarming-style sweatshops.
I disagree. I run a phpBB site that by default uses a really crappy CAPTCHA, fairly easy for bots to defeat. I was getting about two or three bots registering a day. I switched to using a different, more difficult CAPTCHA (but the URL etc. for the image was the same, only the algorithm for generating it changed) and immediately the spambots disappeared. Haven't had any for weeks.
If the CAPTCHAs were being defeated by humans, there should have been no change. It had to have been spammers mass-OCR'ing images.
I find that on Windows I can handle the fewest windows open, OS X a middling amount (if you count hidden windows), and the most on Linux (Enlightenment WM).
My current count (I'm at work) is 7 windows and 20 browser tabs open on the MS Windows machine, and on the Linux machine, 30 windows (across 8 desktops) and 94 browser tabs open.
On the Linux box, most of the windows and tabs haven't been touched for days, some of them for weeks or months. On the Windows box, everything has been used in at least the five days or so.
As the wired article states, he has a wiki version of his campaign platform where people can contribute. This is awesome, in my opinion. Check it out and tell me you're not impressed!
It's pretty much the same sort of idea--leads you from basic "print Hello World" all the way to "advanced" games with sound and graphics (using a PyGame wrapper). Multi-platform, object-oriented, Python... brilliant!
I haven't been able to figure out how to get somebody else to be a judge on www.diplom.org (so that me and six other friends can play a game over email). Any pointers?
p.s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion didn't help: "a nuclear fusion reaction hypothesized to occur during sonoluminescence, an extreme form of acoustic cavitation" WTF?!?
So you're saying that Gates is simply a producer of "great products and low prices" and the only people complaining are "evil, plunder-seeking competitors and their paid professional obfuscators"? Is this really the position you're taking?
It would be a nightmare to learn Arabic, and many other foreign languages, if they were written phonetically.
Modern Standard Arabic (with diacritics) actually is written phonetically. And yes, related words all have the same three-consonant pattern. Kaatib, kitaab, maktab, maktaba, kataba (writer, book, writing desk, library, he wrote) all share the same "k-t-b" root. But the two (phonetic spelling and roots/prefixes/suffixes) are orthogonal concepts--a language can have either, both, or neither. Arabic happens to have both.
I've actually seen far more developers switch from Linux to OS X than vice-versa. I think there are definitely switchers in both directions, but I'm not sure that there are more in one direction than the other, and I'd be doubtful that there are more switching away from OS X than those switching to. (Full disclosure: I run Linux on my desktop PC and OS X on my media center PC and haven't touched Windows in years.)
As a sibling poster points out, the distinction often gets muddled. But apart from that, Jefferson was actually writing about patents, where such an analogy makes perfect sense.
These days there are lots of clipboard managers for Linux (Klipper for KDE, Gnome Clipboard Manager for Gnome, IIRC). They synchronize all the different clipboards for you.
Personally, I prefer having a separate "selection buffer" clipboard and a CTRL-C/CTRL-V clipboard, so I don't use a clipboard manager, but just thought you should know that they do exist.
You don't have to know your x/y refresh rate in Linux. There's a utility in Fedora called "system-config-display" that will automatically detect your hardware and give you a drop-down list of resolutions and bit depths, just like Windows. You can run it from the command-line before you have X installed, or you can run it from within X to change your settings. I haven't manually twiddled my X configuration for years. (Well, except for dual-monitor support. That's one place Linux is still catching up on.)
Also note that HTML tags (like bold, italics, etc.) still work properly when 'Plain Old Text' is the comment post mode. I don't know why it's not the default for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to read the whole book, try The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (by the same author). By the way, Gatto was New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.
The OP is indeed confused, but he's somewhat on the right track. "Tragedy of the Commons" is an example of market failure due to a negative externality of a rivalrous, non-excludable good. What the OP was probably looking for was the "Free Rider" problem, which is an example of market failure due to a positive externality of a non-rivalrous, non-excludable good.
In other words, when I create a new invention or a new song or a new book, it's difficult to exclude access to my work (non-excludable). But one person copying the invention or song or book doesn't reduce the inherent value of any other copy (non-rivalrous). "The production of [such works] results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. Because no private organisation [the author or inventor] can reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, there will be insufficient incentives to produce it voluntarily. Consumers can take advantage of public goods without contributing sufficiently to their creation." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods, note that "sufficient" here is used in an economic sense).
One solution to the "Free Rider" problem is "legislated exclusion", listed on the above Wikipedia article, which is what we currently have. I personally don't believe that's a very good solution, and would much rather see one of the others take over (such as the "Coasian solution", under which the Street Performer Protocol falls, or patronage, which would probably fall under "public spirit"), as you do. But just wanted to point out that the mentioning of "Tragedy of the Commons" wasn't as far off the mark as you apparently felt it was.
Charge once for the software you write instead of multiple times. In other words, write Free Software (usually based on or customizing other Free Software) on contract. When you're done, you give your client the software and they give you money. You don't particularly care at that point that they can take your work and give it away--you've already moved on to the next project.
If the CAPTCHAs were being defeated by humans, there should have been no change. It had to have been spammers mass-OCR'ing images.
For the desktop, there are some 3D(-ish) ones as well, e.g.:
e nshots/
http://www.linuxgames.co.za/projects/noegnud/scre
http://glhack.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
I find that on Windows I can handle the fewest windows open, OS X a middling amount (if you count hidden windows), and the most on Linux (Enlightenment WM).
My current count (I'm at work) is 7 windows and 20 browser tabs open on the MS Windows machine, and on the Linux machine, 30 windows (across 8 desktops) and 94 browser tabs open.
On the Linux box, most of the windows and tabs haven't been touched for days, some of them for weeks or months. On the Windows box, everything has been used in at least the five days or so.
As the wired article states, he has a wiki version of his campaign platform where people can contribute. This is awesome, in my opinion. Check it out and tell me you're not impressed!
http://www.overlawyered.com/2005/10/urban_legends_ and_stella_liebe.html
I think the original poster just made a mistake. He's not the only one.
Check this out: Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner
It's pretty much the same sort of idea--leads you from basic "print Hello World" all the way to "advanced" games with sound and graphics (using a PyGame wrapper). Multi-platform, object-oriented, Python
I haven't been able to figure out how to get somebody else to be a judge on www.diplom.org (so that me and six other friends can play a game over email). Any pointers?
Amen. I hope this is high on the priority list for FC6.
What the hell is "bubble fusion"?
p.s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion didn't help: "a nuclear fusion reaction hypothesized to occur during sonoluminescence, an extreme form of acoustic cavitation" WTF?!?
So you're saying that Gates is simply a producer of "great products and low prices" and the only people complaining are "evil, plunder-seeking competitors and their paid professional obfuscators"? Is this really the position you're taking?
I've actually seen far more developers switch from Linux to OS X than vice-versa. I think there are definitely switchers in both directions, but I'm not sure that there are more in one direction than the other, and I'd be doubtful that there are more switching away from OS X than those switching to. (Full disclosure: I run Linux on my desktop PC and OS X on my media center PC and haven't touched Windows in years.)
How long until this sort of practice is made illegal? :'(
As a sibling poster points out, the distinction often gets muddled. But apart from that, Jefferson was actually writing about patents, where such an analogy makes perfect sense.
These days there are lots of clipboard managers for Linux (Klipper for KDE, Gnome Clipboard Manager for Gnome, IIRC). They synchronize all the different clipboards for you.
Personally, I prefer having a separate "selection buffer" clipboard and a CTRL-C/CTRL-V clipboard, so I don't use a clipboard manager, but just thought you should know that they do exist.
You don't have to know your x/y refresh rate in Linux. There's a utility in Fedora called "system-config-display" that will automatically detect your hardware and give you a drop-down list of resolutions and bit depths, just like Windows. You can run it from the command-line before you have X installed, or you can run it from within X to change your settings. I haven't manually twiddled my X configuration for years. (Well, except for dual-monitor support. That's one place Linux is still catching up on.)
HTH.
Will Google become Microsoft's new Apple Killer?
Also note that HTML tags (like bold, italics, etc.) still work properly when 'Plain Old Text' is the comment post mode. I don't know why it's not the default for everyone.
http://mozex.mozdev.org/