I think it is. If this is indeed an intelligence agency sending messages to agents in the field, how on Earth would be able to know what does the message mean. Maybe 05765 means a specific embassy, a place where you have to take a photography, a street, the name of a government official. There are 100,000 posible references to places or people we don't know. This is the same technique used by the mob (as shown in movies, that is) to communicate to people in jail and by many people using numbers-only pagers; it's extremely effective because it's related to concrete actions (911=call Mom!) we don't know anything about. If this is the case, there's no way we're going to solve this.
Had JonKatz made this review, we would be all over him for using/. to post this sort of thing. Then again, it's not JonKatz's website so Taco can do anything he wants. But I see a contradiction anyway.
You also might be interested in MicroWorlds. It's a commercial product by LCSI. It's based on Logo and includes a great IDE for multimedia-web-authoring; there's also a Pro version for older kids. Their approach to children education is constructivist, meaning that students will have more meaningful learning experiences when they work on projects that interest them and have a cross-disciplinary approach. It's basically learning by doing not by listening to some boring teacher.
There are tons of projects for kids to pursue on the LCSI website. So your kids will not only learn programming but multimedia authoring, project management and, of course, math, biology or whatever science(s) their project is based on.
There are English, French and Spanish versions of the software. I highly recommend checking LCSI products out. One last and important note, LCSI was founded in 1981 by professor Seymour Papert.
Re:But do you want universal access by company PC
on
Universal Access
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· Score: 2
I concur and I would add, in a somewhat naive fashion, what about better salaries? This company-giving-away-PCs charity sort of thing is nice (conspiracy and surveillance theories aside) but getting more money allows workers to buy PCs, get access from any provider they want or, maybe, forget about the computer and get a whole lot of books or other educational materials. I don't want to sound like a hardcore capitalist but more money can buy them more freedom. What about better distribution of the company earnings? Charity is ok but giving the people the economic means to make their own informed decisions on what, if any, computer to buy and what ISP to choose is, IMO, much better.
You're absolutely right. You might want to check this MSNBC article. It talks about how the paperless office has yet to arrive and how huge is the paper market (this includes, of course, paper itself, but also printers and ink). It says that the printing and imaging worldwide is $40 billion and that Hewlett-Packard expects it to grow to $100 billion in the next three years.
Some reasons for this increase in the use of paper are: 1. More people are surfing the web everyday and not many of them like to read on a monitor, so they print EVERYTHING. 2. Some of these printing companies offer services to print information from cellphones, PDAs. More paper 3. So now you can buy digital cameras but you're still going to want a printout to put in the family album. Yet more paper used.
So, I think that it's improbable that people'll ever get used to reading everything on a monitor, maybe when a new generation of kids grow up using CRTs and LCDs panels instead of sheets of paper. So I think that the right thing to do right now is to start promoting the use of recycled paper or paper made from alternative fibers.
Couldn't find much so far about him but I came across this page where several patents on data compression algorithms are mentioned and this led me to one of his patents, a so-called string searcher and compressor.
It would be interesting to know if what the patent decribes is the technology behind PKZIP.
I first found out about this on CNET Download.com's front page; there was this little message in memoriam of PK but I don't think it was mentioned on News.com; that was strange. This is a sad event and I think it would be more convenient and respectful if we didn't get to know the details of his death just because it turned out to be a morbid and attention-attracting story for the media.
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for but it's pretty similar. It's from Wired News; they were watching NTV too and listened to this conversation where one of the astronauts had a problem with, guess what?, Microsoft Outlook. =) and called Houston for help. I suppose it was running on one of the Thinkpads that they now carry with them on the shuttle.
And his dad's too. I turns out that while they were after this canadian teenager, they discovered while wiretapping his house, that his 45-years-old dad was planning with a hitman to assault or scare the hell out of one of his business associates.
So, be careful, you never know when the police is coming to get your son =)
What a strange (and offtopic, I admit) coincidence.
I'm no paleonthologist but I remember reading somewhere that if an asteroid caused their extinction, it was because the cloud of dust has so thick that the sun couldn't pass through and so the dinosaurs, cold-blooded as they were, died, and the tiny warm-blooded mammals managed to survive.
So is this theory to be discarded? Was it even likely true sometime?
Why indeed? But you seem to imply that switching operating systems is just as easy (and costs the same) as changing the graphic format I use on my website.
So, in this same line of thought, I guess when I draw something in Photoshop and then decide to export it to GIF or PNG I am making the same simple (or transcendental, you tell me) choice that I'm doing when I buy a new PC and decide what OS to install or, maybe, when I write something in C and then start thinking, gee, should I compile this for Win32 or for Linux? Sarcasm aside, it's clearly not the same thing! So, I concede my question should have been: Why, if it's a relatively easy thing to do AND it's free, hasn't everyone switched to PNG?
mmm, I submitted this six hours ago and got it declined.
Anyway, I have some questions maybe someone here can answer. Why hasn't everyone switched to PNG if it's free? Why pay for these licenses? Does GIF have advantages that PNG doesn't that makes it an option worth considering despite the costs? Are we just being witnesses of another marketing influenced stupid decision by IT managers or whoever is responsible for paying these licenses to Unisys?
And what about the current state of PNG? How's browser support? Graphics apps support?
p.s. I'm posting this with Mozilla M15, and yes, it seems faster to me.
The Market as a reflection of our society
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
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· Score: 2
So this is probably not "News for Nerds" but it is, IMHO, "Stuff that matters", maybe not to be discussed on a daily basis but interesting still.
You see, the Market is not just one thing, it's just a name we use to refer to a large group of economical phenomenoms in which participate millions of people, whether individually or organized on companies, unions, consulting firms or whatever. So, I would dare to say that the Market is/.-worthy because tech companies participate in it, specially and more recently, Linux-related ones. And, as other posters have pointed out, there's been plenty of IPO related stories on/. So, CmdrTaco says that the Market is of no interest but the companies performing in it are, my point is that you can't separate them: simplifying, the Market is the companies is the Market.
On the other hand, this overdependence on the Market to me is interesting if not creepy. There's too much speculation which is not bad by itself but becomes dangerous when it has no real foundations. So VA Linux has a huge IPO, but is (was) the company so valuable? Of course not; there's a lot of hype affecting the investors decisions, this is not a perfect free market. Come on, there's even people saying that the Market has been behaving so irrationally lately because too many people are taking Prozac on a regular basis so they don't measure risk well. The point is that the behavior and structure of "The Market" (and the discussion about it) say a lot about our society, specially about our means of productions and development, our individual and collective goals and our ways to apply technology to get to them. This is as relevant as the Govt. policies that have been discussed here at/. And every piece that we can gather to understand our society is "stuff that matters"
Nor will it compensate their bosses for what could be millions of dollars in expenses and business losses.
Now, I don't want to sound like a flamebait poster, but this reminded me of the companies that got Kevin Mitnick in jail. "We lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of him", they said. Were they exaggerating or not?
Seriously, my question is, how can you quantify the expenses and losses of something like this?? How much did the DoS attacks on Yahoo, eBay and others cost? How much money would Microsoft really lose because of a beta copy of Windows Me is on the loose?
I'm not saying that there is no cost, that there will no problem or expenses for the companies whose webmasters will spend the weekend struggling finding patches for a backdoor that is not really one, but will it be millions of dollars as ESR put it? Isn't installing patches already the webmasters job? How can there be additional expenses? Where does this figure come from? Can someone explain to me the economics of this?
So, supposing the PS2 has a modem and a hard drive, could developers write whole games for the PS2 and make them available through download sites such as Download.com. What kind of operating system has (should have) the PS2 that would be necessary for this download-and-play thing to happen?
This would change a lot of things because now you could have freeware, shareware, demoware for the PS2; you could preview PS2 games before you buy them. I think this would be a good thing for independent developers.
Oh, and other comments have said that the HD would be used to save game states but isn't that what memory sticks are supposed to do? The HD should have another purpose.
Man, Insightful doesn't begin to define your comment, that was a huge pearl of wisdom. One of these days here at/. we should start using zen koans too to make our points.
I think you can stop eating vitamins for several days without suffering from any physical problem or performance insufficiency. The thing that you can't live without ingesting on a daily basis are carbohydrates and proteins, right? So, if these patches are meant to be used for one or two days, you wouldn't need to supply vitamins. (I'm no nutriologist, so correct me if I'm wrong).
The article also says that they're experimenting with some sort of patches that will give you the illusion that your stomach is full or your muscles aren't tired, but doesn't everyone with the right amount of motivation has sometime been able to stay 24 or 36 hours without eating or sleeping. And it seems to me that being in a combat situation would make you produce enough adrenaline to stop worrying about you not having a meal yet.
Finally, what about water?? That you gotta have!! Lost of it, everyday, what's the solution for that?? If you don't have access to food or cannot waste time eating you still have to carry water with you or is there gonna be a patch fot this too? Strikes me as unlikely.
Wired Magazine has this interview with him. This is from March 1999. Also, kind of offtopic, but did you know his position on the MS trial "When someone comes along and dominates an industry, of course you get a whole bunch of losers screaming, hoping somehow they can beat 'em down. Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser. Bill Gates is Michael Jordan" and on software pirates: "To the pirates, I say the more the merrier. Success comes from the fans first - if someone is going to pirate something of mine, I just have to make sure to do nine or ten new things. I mean, you can't download me" You might want to check Public Enemy's website too.
Yeah, I'm totally pissed at Netscape too for trying to change my username. I mean, affecting almost HALF A MILLION USERS and call it a good and convenient thing to do??? Who are these engineers running Webmail??. I signed up the second day Webmail was up and running!! And I don't care if some AOL user has the same username (naju), you can't do this kind of things to people, and email address is not just an address, it's an identity!! So, this is offtopic but is anyone doing something about this??, like a boycottnetscape.org sort of thing. I'd really love to help. I already send an email to Webmail tech support which of course they haven't answered and probably won't. They have, of course, no obligation since the service is free but come on! who was the AOL genius behind this?
Charles Platt wrote this fascinating article 2 years ago for Wired Magazine. He actually interviewed Eugene Podkletnov, the scientist mentioned on the BBC article and has a lot of information on his experiments and troubles with the press and the scientific community. Platt also talked to people at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center that are/were doing some anti-gravity experiments too. It's a rather long article but it is a very interesting read. Does anyone have an update on Podkletnov and NASA's work on this??
In a somewhat off-topic note, Wired News ran a story yesterday about MS's problems introducing Win2K in Germany. It seems that Win2K comes bundled with an defragmentation utility called DisKeeper; now, this utility was written by a company called Executive Software and the German government has a problem with this because Executive's CEO is a member of the Church of Scientology. Under German Law, state and federal governments can't do business with a member of the Church of Scientology (maybe someone knows exactly why, I don't). So there were rumors over the weekend that MS was disclosing (parts of) the Win2K code for the German Govt to examine. Just thought this might be interesting.
Aditional information on FEED magazine
on
Date Pagers
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· Score: 1
This very well-written article on the same subject appeared last friday on FEED. The author reports from Hong Kong.
It was interesting to know about the limitations on Internet radio stations. I didn't know that. But now I have to ask: Why, then, hasn't the RIAA sued Shoutcast.com (owned by Winamp owned by AOL) or MyCaster.com? These are services that give the user the ability to webcast anything he wants in the order he wants. Many of these broadcasters use original material but many don't. Wouldn't it be in the RIAA's best interest to track these so-called pirates down?
Second point: Maybe we are wishful thinkers. It has been commented here at/. that it would have been best that instead of complaining on an Act that has ALREADY been passed we had done something to prevent it. Now, this lobbying that would have been necessary is quite expensive. But someone has to do it!! Come on, even big bad corporation Microsoft didn't lobby hard enough and that's one of the reasons they are being prosecuted so energetically by the Justice Department, because there aren't enough lawmakers behind them because Microsoft didn't thought for a minute it would help; they thought thay could win this case by their own arguments. Well, maybe this is a bad example because Microsoft did wrong and it's a corporation. But the point is that it would be very helpful if some of the I-got-a-huge-IPO Linux Companies started lobbying which means, after all, talking to congressmen, explaining the OSS community arguments to them, etc.
Finally, I know it's expensive, but could someone give an opinion on how expensive and what the best means are to have our voice heard on Congress because that's where, corporatism aside (or maybe this is wishful thinking too because you can't separate both things), everything is decided after all.
Yes you're right. Sorry I didn't made the proper distinction between free as in beer and free as in speech. This was a linguistic confusion of mine due to the fact that in spanish we have separate words for these two meanings, we have "gratis" for free as in "free beer" and "libre" as in "free speech". But I think it's also true that I said "ONE of the free predominant characteristics" not "THE predominant characteristic" where THE predominant characteristic would be that's it's free as in "free speech". Thanks anyway for clarifying this for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is. If this is indeed an intelligence agency sending messages to agents in the field, how on Earth would be able to know what does the message mean. Maybe 05765 means a specific embassy, a place where you have to take a photography, a street, the name of a government official. There are 100,000 posible references to places or people we don't know. This is the same technique used by the mob (as shown in movies, that is) to communicate to people in jail and by many people using numbers-only pagers; it's extremely effective because it's related to concrete actions (911=call Mom!) we don't know anything about. If this is the case, there's no way we're going to solve this.
Had JonKatz made this review, we would be all over him for using /. to post this sort of thing. Then again, it's not JonKatz's website so Taco can do anything he wants. But I see a contradiction anyway.
You also might be interested in MicroWorlds. It's a commercial product by LCSI. It's based on Logo and includes a great IDE for multimedia-web-authoring; there's also a Pro version for older kids. Their approach to children education is constructivist, meaning that students will have more meaningful learning experiences when they work on projects that interest them and have a cross-disciplinary approach. It's basically learning by doing not by listening to some boring teacher.
There are tons of projects for kids to pursue on the LCSI website. So your kids will not only learn programming but multimedia authoring, project management and, of course, math, biology or whatever science(s) their project is based on.
There are English, French and Spanish versions of the software. I highly recommend checking LCSI products out. One last and important note, LCSI was founded in 1981 by professor Seymour Papert.
I concur and I would add, in a somewhat naive fashion, what about better salaries? This company-giving-away-PCs charity sort of thing is nice (conspiracy and surveillance theories aside) but getting more money allows workers to buy PCs, get access from any provider they want or, maybe, forget about the computer and get a whole lot of books or other educational materials. I don't want to sound like a hardcore capitalist but more money can buy them more freedom. What about better distribution of the company earnings? Charity is ok but giving the people the economic means to make their own informed decisions on what, if any, computer to buy and what ISP to choose is, IMO, much better.
You're absolutely right. You might want to check this MSNBC article. It talks about how the paperless office has yet to arrive and how huge is the paper market (this includes, of course, paper itself, but also printers and ink). It says that the printing and imaging worldwide is $40 billion and that Hewlett-Packard expects it to grow to $100 billion in the next three years.
Some reasons for this increase in the use of paper are:
1. More people are surfing the web everyday and not many of them like to read on a monitor, so they print EVERYTHING.
2. Some of these printing companies offer services to print information from cellphones, PDAs. More paper
3. So now you can buy digital cameras but you're still going to want a printout to put in the family album. Yet more paper used.
So, I think that it's improbable that people'll ever get used to reading everything on a monitor, maybe when a new generation of kids grow up using CRTs and LCDs panels instead of sheets of paper. So I think that the right thing to do right now is to start promoting the use of recycled paper or paper made from alternative fibers.
Couldn't find much so far about him but I came across this page where several patents on data compression algorithms are mentioned and this led me to one of his patents , a so-called string searcher and compressor.
It would be interesting to know if what the patent decribes is the technology behind PKZIP.
I first found out about this on CNET Download.com's front page; there was this little message in memoriam of PK but I don't think it was mentioned on News.com; that was strange. This is a sad event and I think it would be more convenient and respectful if we didn't get to know the details of his death just because it turned out to be a morbid and attention-attracting story for the media.
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for but it's pretty similar. It's from Wired News; they were watching NTV too and listened to this conversation where one of the astronauts had a problem with, guess what?, Microsoft Outlook. =) and called Houston for help. I suppose it was running on one of the Thinkpads that they now carry with them on the shuttle.
And his dad's too. I turns out that while they were after this canadian teenager, they discovered while wiretapping his house, that his 45-years-old dad was planning with a hitman to assault or scare the hell out of one of his business associates.
So, be careful, you never know when the police is coming to get your son =)
What a strange (and offtopic, I admit) coincidence.
I'm no paleonthologist but I remember reading somewhere that if an asteroid caused their extinction, it was because the cloud of dust has so thick that the sun couldn't pass through and so the dinosaurs, cold-blooded as they were, died, and the tiny warm-blooded mammals managed to survive.
So is this theory to be discarded? Was it even likely true sometime?
Why indeed?
But you seem to imply that switching operating systems is just as easy (and costs the same) as changing the graphic format I use on my website.
So, in this same line of thought, I guess when I draw something in Photoshop and then decide to export it to GIF or PNG I am making the same simple (or transcendental, you tell me) choice that I'm doing when I buy a new PC and decide what OS to install or, maybe, when I write something in C and then start thinking, gee, should I compile this for Win32 or for Linux? Sarcasm aside, it's clearly not the same thing! So, I concede my question should have been: Why, if it's a relatively easy thing to do AND it's free, hasn't everyone switched to PNG?
mmm, I submitted this six hours ago and got it declined.
Anyway, I have some questions maybe someone here can answer. Why hasn't everyone switched to PNG if it's free? Why pay for these licenses? Does GIF have advantages that PNG doesn't that makes it an option worth considering despite the costs? Are we just being witnesses of another marketing influenced stupid decision by IT managers or whoever is responsible for paying these licenses to Unisys?
And what about the current state of PNG? How's browser support? Graphics apps support?
p.s. I'm posting this with Mozilla M15, and yes, it seems faster to me.
So this is probably not "News for Nerds" but it is, IMHO, "Stuff that matters", maybe not to be discussed on a daily basis but interesting still.
/.-worthy because tech companies participate in it, specially and more recently, Linux-related ones. And, as other posters have pointed out, there's been plenty of IPO related stories on /. So, CmdrTaco says that the Market is of no interest but the companies performing in it are, my point is that you can't separate them: simplifying, the Market is the companies is the Market.
/. And every piece that we can gather to understand our society is "stuff that matters"
You see, the Market is not just one thing, it's just a name we use to refer to a large group of economical phenomenoms in which participate millions of people, whether individually or organized on companies, unions, consulting firms or whatever. So, I would dare to say that the Market is
On the other hand, this overdependence on the Market to me is interesting if not creepy. There's too much speculation which is not bad by itself but becomes dangerous when it has no real foundations. So VA Linux has a huge IPO, but is (was) the company so valuable? Of course not; there's a lot of hype affecting the investors decisions, this is not a perfect free market. Come on, there's even people saying that the Market has been behaving so irrationally lately because too many people are taking Prozac on a regular basis so they don't measure risk well. The point is that the behavior and structure of "The Market" (and the discussion about it) say a lot about our society, specially about our means of productions and development, our individual and collective goals and our ways to apply technology to get to them. This is as relevant as the Govt. policies that have been discussed here at
Nor will it compensate their bosses for what could be millions of dollars in expenses and business losses.
Now, I don't want to sound like a flamebait poster, but this reminded me of the companies that got Kevin Mitnick in jail. "We lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of him", they said. Were they exaggerating or not?
Seriously, my question is, how can you quantify the expenses and losses of something like this?? How much did the DoS attacks on Yahoo, eBay and others cost? How much money would Microsoft really lose because of a beta copy of Windows Me is on the loose?
I'm not saying that there is no cost, that there will no problem or expenses for the companies whose webmasters will spend the weekend struggling finding patches for a backdoor that is not really one, but will it be millions of dollars as ESR put it? Isn't installing patches already the webmasters job? How can there be additional expenses? Where does this figure come from? Can someone explain to me the economics of this?
So, supposing the PS2 has a modem and a hard drive, could developers write whole games for the PS2 and make them available through download sites such as Download.com. What kind of operating system has (should have) the PS2 that would be necessary for this download-and-play thing to happen?
This would change a lot of things because now you could have freeware, shareware, demoware for the PS2; you could preview PS2 games before you buy them. I think this would be a good thing for independent developers.
Oh, and other comments have said that the HD would be used to save game states but isn't that what memory sticks are supposed to do? The HD should have another purpose.
Man, Insightful doesn't begin to define your comment, that was a huge pearl of wisdom. One of these days here at /. we should start using zen koans too to make our points.
transfers vitamins to your body transdermally
I think you can stop eating vitamins for several days without suffering from any physical problem or performance insufficiency. The thing that you can't live without ingesting on a daily basis are carbohydrates and proteins, right? So, if these patches are meant to be used for one or two days, you wouldn't need to supply vitamins. (I'm no nutriologist, so correct me if I'm wrong).
The article also says that they're experimenting with some sort of patches that will give you the illusion that your stomach is full or your muscles aren't tired, but doesn't everyone with the right amount of motivation has sometime been able to stay 24 or 36 hours without eating or sleeping. And it seems to me that being in a combat situation would make you produce enough adrenaline to stop worrying about you not having a meal yet.
Finally, what about water?? That you gotta have!! Lost of it, everyday, what's the solution for that?? If you don't have access to food or cannot waste time eating you still have to carry water with you or is there gonna be a patch fot this too? Strikes me as unlikely.
Yes, you're right. I was just trying to be polite and not to jump to any conclusions on Esther Dyson's abilities to run ICANN.
Wired Magazine has this interview with him. This is from March 1999. Also, kind of offtopic, but did you know his position on the MS trial "When someone comes along and dominates an industry, of course you get a whole bunch of losers screaming, hoping somehow they can beat 'em down. Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser. Bill Gates is Michael Jordan" and on software pirates: "To the pirates, I say the more the merrier. Success comes from the fans first - if someone is going to pirate something of mine, I just have to make sure to do nine or ten new things. I mean, you can't download me" You might want to check Public Enemy's website too.
Yeah, I'm totally pissed at Netscape too for trying to change my username. I mean, affecting almost HALF A MILLION USERS and call it a good and convenient thing to do??? Who are these engineers running Webmail??. I signed up the second day Webmail was up and running!! And I don't care if some AOL user has the same username (naju), you can't do this kind of things to people, and email address is not just an address, it's an identity!! So, this is offtopic but is anyone doing something about this??, like a boycottnetscape.org sort of thing. I'd really love to help. I already send an email to Webmail tech support which of course they haven't answered and probably won't. They have, of course, no obligation since the service is free but come on! who was the AOL genius behind this?
Charles Platt wrote this fascinating article 2 years ago for Wired Magazine. He actually interviewed Eugene Podkletnov, the scientist mentioned on the BBC article and has a lot of information on his experiments and troubles with the press and the scientific community. Platt also talked to people at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center that are/were doing some anti-gravity experiments too. It's a rather long article but it is a very interesting read. Does anyone have an update on Podkletnov and NASA's work on this??
And there is also BlockCAD, which is, unlike LeoCAD, based just on Lego pieces and it's made in Delphi so it's Win-only but you get the source code!
In a somewhat off-topic note, Wired News ran a story yesterday about MS's problems introducing Win2K in Germany. It seems that Win2K comes bundled with an defragmentation utility called DisKeeper; now, this utility was written by a company called Executive Software and the German government has a problem with this because Executive's CEO is a member of the Church of Scientology. Under German Law, state and federal governments can't do business with a member of the Church of Scientology (maybe someone knows exactly why, I don't). So there were rumors over the weekend that MS was disclosing (parts of) the Win2K code for the German Govt to examine. Just thought this might be interesting.
This very well-written article on the same subject appeared last friday on FEED. The author reports from Hong Kong.
It was interesting to know about the limitations on Internet radio stations. I didn't know that. But now I have to ask: Why, then, hasn't the RIAA sued Shoutcast.com (owned by Winamp owned by AOL) or MyCaster.com? These are services that give the user the ability to webcast anything he wants in the order he wants. Many of these broadcasters use original material but many don't. Wouldn't it be in the RIAA's best interest to track these so-called pirates down?
/. that it would have been best that instead of complaining on an Act that has ALREADY been passed we had done something to prevent it. Now, this lobbying that would have been necessary is quite expensive. But someone has to do it!! Come on, even big bad corporation Microsoft didn't lobby hard enough and that's one of the reasons they are being prosecuted so energetically by the Justice Department, because there aren't enough lawmakers behind them because Microsoft didn't thought for a minute it would help; they thought thay could win this case by their own arguments. Well, maybe this is a bad example because Microsoft did wrong and it's a corporation. But the point is that it would be very helpful if some of the I-got-a-huge-IPO Linux Companies started lobbying which means, after all, talking to congressmen, explaining the OSS community arguments to them, etc.
Second point: Maybe we are wishful thinkers. It has been commented here at
Finally, I know it's expensive, but could someone give an opinion on how expensive and what the best means are to have our voice heard on Congress because that's where, corporatism aside (or maybe this is wishful thinking too because you can't separate both things), everything is decided after all.
Yes you're right. Sorry I didn't made the proper distinction between free as in beer and free as in speech. This was a linguistic confusion of mine due to the fact that in spanish we have separate words for these two meanings, we have "gratis" for free as in "free beer" and "libre" as in "free speech". But I think it's also true that I said "ONE of the free predominant characteristics" not "THE predominant characteristic" where THE predominant characteristic would be that's it's free as in "free speech". Thanks anyway for clarifying this for me.