And this was almost exactly my point. English shares some nouns and verbs with others, but noone would make the case that it is the same language as french or german.
As such, programming languages are different from english and others. They are languages in and of themselves. For them, the expression of logic is of the utmost importance.
Look at PERL. It has what...2 normal ways of outputing data (print and printf..couple of other related ones....and of course the lowlevel syswrite...) but how many ways of expressing logical operations?
AND, OR, etc all have multiple "words", with different shades of meaning (|| binds more tightly than "or" does for example - but the underlying logic that is being expressed is the same)
They are thus built upon math as their foundation, much more so than english. They only borrow the alphabet and words of english....the grammar, the shades of meaning, these are not taken from english.
> The language of Shakespeare is so different from
> standard English as to have virtually no
> intersection. Yet we somehow recognize it as
> English and can (fairly easily) read it. And it
> is not only the result of the age, thing about
> modern poetry.
Actually shakespearan english is fairly similar to modern in alot of ways. Its fairly easy for any english speaker to read shakespear.
The question is...how many REALLY understand him? Once you have read him a bit, you start to understand the language and man...even the most tragic of his tragedies have some VERY comedic parts. Hamlet makes me bust a gut at times...for most people, thats simply not true.
Programming languages only use the same "nouns" as natural languages, and some of the same verbs. In English, we share nouns and verbs with other languages, but that doesn't make the languages equivalent.
Programming is based highly on math and logic. In fact, thats all it really is. It is a differnt language not based on natural language. As such...a MUCH more interesting topic....
what is the effect of programming languages on thought? Using a language and becoming fluent in it, requires the brain to think in a different way. It has been said that language shapes thought.
There is talk of "Geeks" and "normal people". Perhaps this is a construct not of us being different and learning about programming and administration etc, but that we learn it, and it has changed us. We have a plethora of similar languages of our own, even when not programming we talk with a vocabulary and litterary tradition that, to many people, sounds liek a whole other language, or culture.
I worry about this of late. Look around at how common this is. Turn the focus to law for a min. Do laws get written in normal english? No...they get written in a kind of sub language, by people of another culture, a legal culture. Perhaps their thinking has been shaped by their language, and their patterns of operation? Could that be the link to the reason that those in power and the common man don't seem to understand eachother? Different cultures, different languages (similar but different in usage and somewhat in definitions).
The more I look, the larger the implications get, and the more true it apears. Perhaps it is a good model...then again...perhaps its that damned law of fives all over again.
Communism is a form of socialism. It doesn't actually require a state. Their are certainly Anarcho-communists (I don't know that I would put myself in this catagory...definitly an anarcho-socialist though...but a larval one)
The core idea is not giving power to a state per se. In fact, even Marx considered the "Dictatorship of the Prolitariate" to be temporary. The idea being (whether stated or implied) that it would eventually make itself useless and fade out of existance.
The core is putting the means of production into the hands of the workers. The recognition that work is socially productive and ALL levels of work are needed for society to function.
The idea is to reward all forms of socially productive work, which includes childrearing (which is very socially productive...it should be considered a job just like any other)
Communism is just an extreme form of this, saying that people should organize together into communal communities, shareing and pooling all (or most) resources.
> You can't expect to run referendums on every
> little issue and even if you do (in the future
> electronic paradise), rule by mob rarely if ever
> led to good results.
This is a scalability issue, definitly. It works on the local level though. Its the old "Town meeting" style government. Its a matter of seprating the decisions that should be made by the community, versus the ones made by the individual.
Government which spans outside of the local community tends to go into what you might call "Cathedral mode". Look at the current situation.
In the US we have congress. They make the federal laws that affect everyone. They are a huge clique. They spend time together, talk amongst themselves. They have developed their own sub language.
They write laws which affect EVERYONE, but...the average man could not read such things. They are not written in plain english. The average man has almost no say in these whatsoever. This has alienated the people, and caused a situation ripe for power abuse.
I guess I am arguing for the return of the autonomous city-state. A place where every citizen not only could take part in the decision making, but was expected to.
> Authorship IS equal to ownership. If I create
> something, you damn well better believe it
> belongs to me. But once I sell or give away a
> copy to a person, things change. I now own the
> ORIGINAL.
Right. Thats actually what I said. Authorship is NOT ownership. You can own the original, the original is a physical thing. You can own a copy of the original, a copy is a physical thing.
However you can't own the words, code, sound thats encoded into it. If you sell a copy to someone, you no longer OWN the copy...they do. However, you still retain Authorship of it.
Authorship is not ownership. It remains even after ownership is transfered. (does that make more sense?)
> Well, guess what - the author wrote it, and he
> is under no obligation to do anything else. I
> get so sick of the crowd that thinks they are
> entitled to everything. Go create something of
> your own.
You rmissing the point. Noone is asking the author to DO anything. This is not about releasing source or anything like that.
The question is this: Does the author have the right to stop copying and redistribution? Yes he does. but WHY does he?
He does for the reason you say: if he didn't, he couldn't make money because publishers would just sell his work and not pay him. That is why copyright exists...to make it safe for authors to publish and thus to encourage publication.
Using copyright to stop someone else from distributing a work is fine then. However I contend that doing it, solely for the purpose of stopping distribution, in and of itself, when the copyright holder is NOT doing it themselves or liceing someone else to do it, THEN it is an abuse of the copyright system.
Copyright is a temporary monopoly, given not because it is deserved, but as a reward to encourage more works. If it is not used, it should lapse. If your not going to take advantage of you rmonopoly, it is right that you lose it.
IMNSHO the only reason that this isn't the case today is that when copyright laws were written, noone imagined the situation that we have today.
And now that we have the situation, there is too much special interest in that NOT happening.
> However that's not a very useful definition of
> communism for the sake of our discussion. For
> example, it's not possible for it to fail since
> a philosophy cannot fail.
The correct definition (well actually a semi-correct one, communism is older than marx, and not all communists are marxist communists - Marx had some good ideas, but made some stupid assumptions too) is a useless one?
Yes a philosophy cannot fail. My issue is simply with the statment that "Communism failed". It hasn't. Communism is a philosophy. It is fundamentally wrong to look at a couple of instantiations of an idea and claim that the idea itself has failed.
> If, on the other hand, you define communism as
> a social, political, and economic system that
> was implemented in the Soviet Union, Eastern
> Europe, China, etc (somewhat differently in
> each), then it possible to claim that it failed
> and I do make this claim.
Ok this is obviously an argument of definitions. That would be like defining capitalism as "The economic system in the United States". Its a very useless definition. Why call it communism at all if your defining it in terms of states.
> Whether this real socio-political system had
> much in common with Marx's ideas is a subject
> much debated by Marxists but not of much
> interest to anybody else.
Right....and the reason for that seems mostly to be because alot of people have defined communism as "the USSR" and have no idea what it means beyond that.
> You seem to think that communism was a good idea
> that was corrupted/tainted/misformed by bad
> people.
At its core I think socialism and to a lesser extent communism have alot of potential and are generally very good ideas. I think that the problem has lay in the creation of powerful central states. The "dictatorship of the proletariate" is, itself a problem.
I think its also an issue of scalability. These systems do not scale well beyond the local community. Attempting to impliment them on wide scales, forcing entire continents to follow them, is a big mistake.
However I think that of any stateist system. Anytime the people are separated from the running of the government, the system has failed (which is why I think representative democracy is a horrid abomination and refuse to vote for representatives)
> I'm sorry, I have no idea what you mean by
> having the common curtesy to know down strawmen
I would highly recomend the jargon dictionary:
http://www.netmeg.net/jargon
and everything2:
http://www.everything2.com
Very good for jargon. Strawman isn't in common usage (ie most people on the street don't know what one is)
> However, I actually find it quite provocative
> that you don't think people should have the
> rights to their own work, and calling it abuse
> if they won't give away what they won't sell.
Again, not what I said.
People DO have rights to their work. They certainly are allowed to not give it away or not sell it. The question is this: What gives them the right to stop someone else from selling it or giving it away?
The answer is "Copyright". Which means, they are given FOR A LIMITED TIME exclusive rights to copy. Once that lapses, its gone. Anyone can copy and redistribute.
Copyright was NOT intended to allow authors to stop the distribution of their own works (nor was it ever intended to protect publishers, it was intended to protect authors FROM publishers who would distribute and sell copies of the authors work and not pay the author)
If an author's work is being sold and distributed activly, then he certainly has the right, via copyright, to stop its redistribution. The ENTIRE REASON for this is to encourage publication. That is key to my argument.
When an author/publisher uses copyright to stop redistribution of something that they have stopped publishing and "Abandoned", then that goes against the fundamental purpose of copyright. It is an abuse of the system.
> If I take something without permission,
> I am stealing.
Stealing is wrong not because you get something,
but because the rightful owner loses it. In the
case of a copy, the rightful owner loses nothing, he still has his copy.
This is not stealing, it is unauthorized copying. Its a different action. Again copyright is not ownership like physical property ownership. It is very different and can't be expected to follow the same rules.
> because I play them instead of buying new games,
> the games manufacturers loose money.
Its not their money, how can they lose it?
They can not lose money until that money is in their bank acounts or hands. Then the money is theirs, and they can lose it. You can't lose something that you don't have.
> Communism clearly failed -- this is one of the
> major lessons of the XX century
The problem with this is the assumption that communism failed because communism is, in and of itself, flawed.
You make the perfect mention above...Stalin's death camps. Death camps are no part of communism itself. They are the work of a powerful and corrupt autocrat.
Can you blame the basic philosophy for the atocities commited by the people who do things in its name? Should we then blame Christianity itself for the actions of those who carried out the spanish inquisition?
I think this points more to the fact that its really hard to find good leaders. The people who tend to rise to power in any system, tend to be the least moral, and most uniquely self-interested of the bunch (and I see that as much here in the US as any time or place throught the world and throughout history).
How nice....you make a straw man then don't even have the common curtesy to knock him down. Very nice. Not terribly effective though.
You see the whole point of mis-representing what I say, is so that you can attack what I said based on flaws in reasoning that were introduced in your representation of what I said, rather than in what I actually said. All you did was mis-represent what I said, you never attacked the flaws.
As I said in my post, Authorship is not Ownership. Your analogy shows a complete lack of understanding of this concept and of the foundations of copyright.
As I said, an author has every right to share or not share his own physical copies of his work. Which is the only thing that is anaolgous to your car. So in short, no. I would not feel that anyone should be able to take your car because you stop using it. That was very strongly stated in my original post.
Now copyright is another matter entirely. Ownership does not end. If you own something, you do not cease to own it (unless you discard or sell it) until you die. When you die, it becomes property of your heirs (assuming that you have any). However copyright lasts only a limited time (a long period of time when compared to our daily lives, but limited none the less).
After copyright ends can NEVER be claimed again on the work. Again, not so with property. Property can be owned again by someone else after you die with no heirs.
In short, copyright was designed NOT to "protect authors rights to property" but to encourage them to produce and publish works. When copyright is used solely to stop the distribution of old works, it is an abuse of the system. It is an abuse against the very people who gave up their rights to the authors, so that the authors could profit initially.
It is right use of the system for an author to publish his work and stop unauthorized publishers from profiting off his work without paying him. It is a gross abuse of the system to use copyright to stop the continued distribution of the work, after the author is no longer using his copyright to profit.
> Until recently (relatively speaking), slavery
> was right - does that mean that it's wrong to
> say that slavery is wrong?
This depends on your perspective. Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery and treat them as property, no matter how many people are willing to tolerate it or think that its ok.
> Capatalism has long been accepted as the best
> model for the development of society -
> universally since the fall of Communism.
A) Capitalism and communism are general catagories of ideologies. Many form sof both have never been tried. The failure of one or more forms of communism does not prove capitalism correct.
B) Communism has been quite sucessfull in some places. I direct you to The Farm a community in Tennessee which has experimented with a couple of forms of progressive communism for the past 30 years.
> This isn't about the Corporate Republic
> - instead, it's the early Free Market pioneer's
> dream
Hardly! A free Market pioneers dream is what the corperations crush. All of the benefits that capitalism lovers point to as the result of "market forces" are actually hindered by mega-corps.
Large corperations have found that it is more profitable to crush competition or buy them out than to compete with them on fair ground. They have found that its more profitable to take away peoples choices, than to produce good products.
Once a company is so large and has such a product base that the average person can't help but buy their product, is it really a free market? Noone can compete with them. Nothing can touch their profits.
When its more profitable to make producing better products unprofitable for others than to produce good products yourself, the people get screwed over. It is a moral atrocity to do so. It acts to the detriment of society itself. It makes the corperation a parasite rather than a productive member.
Free market pioneers would roll in their graves to have this perversion called their dream.
> Perhaps, but it's their code, and if they don't
> want to share it that's their perogative, no?
Authorship is not equal to Ownership.
They Own Copyright on the code. They own hard drives and other storage media that conain the code. However, the code is intangible and cannot be owned.
The question is NOT whether they should be allowed to "Not Share". Of course they should be allowed to not share. The question is whether they shoul dbe allowed to stop others from shareing it.
Copyright says that they can. However, I would submit that this is a mistake. Copyright was invented to encourage publication by ensuring that authors have a way to make sure that they get paid for their work by publishers.
The reason that copyright holders are given this "right" is to give them temporary monopoly. However, if they are no longer using it, and they use copyright to stop further distribution, they are perverting and in fact working against the entire reason that copyright exists.
They are taking something that was given to them for one reason (making it safe for them to publish) and they are using it to stop the distribution of things that they have no intention of publishing again.
This is clear and simple abuse of the copyright system, and a shining example of why it needs heavy updating.
> Open source is a great concept - that still
> remains to be proven
I dunno.... I can go, find a free software program, I can download it. I can read the source, I can modify and redistribute it. I can compile and use it. Have done each at least once and some many times. Whats left to be proven?
That is of course unless you plan to judge Free Software by the standard marketspeak of "its more effcient" "it makes more stable code" and "bugs get fixed faster". Those may be yet to be proven absolutely...but they are all side effects of the system anyway.... more bonuses than central points.
> This new system does in NO way affect your
> ability to manually edit these files.
Good. I wholeheartedly aprove then.
This was completely non-obvious from the description, and I just have this horrid vision of these tools doing completely their own thing...
But whats often worst is generated config files that arn't meant to be read and edited by humans anymore.
> In fact, Miguel propses that the Helix Setup
> Tools store all their data in XML files and
> that you could easily revert back to, say,
> the settings you used last week, with only a
> few clicks.
Sounds great. YAS (yet another syntax) is one thing we don't need any more of. It would be GREAT to see all config files of all programs be native XML. It would simplify life alot.
While I agree with this philosophy on the application level...yes code re-use is good. Code reuse without cut and paste is even better, and code reuse through CORBA is way cool.
However, I disagree when he gets down to the system level. Yes, sendmail is a bitch to configure...and yes its a completely different procedure/config/etc from configuring samba, or working with the groups.
Is this sub-optimal? Probably. However there is one peice thats important. The BASE system is SMALL and separated.
There are very very few things that can be corrupted on a Unix system that would completely make recovery impossible, without going to backups.
In fact, anything short of a hardware failure or massive disk corruption, you always get a shell on the machine by briniging it into single user mode.
Its small and simple. If your config files are broken badly, you can bring the system up in single user mode and fix the system, by hand, if need be.
Now, lets pretend that this is all managed through corba. We have objects for this and that. All of the configs are stored somewhere else in the corba architechture.
So if the CORBA server breaks, the whole system is useless. At 3 am, when the system will only come up in single user mode, and ORBit wont run...what do you do?
I have yet to see any adressing of this issue. Until it is properly adressed (perhaps just have objects that edit the files in/etc themselves for you? so an experienced admin can still go in and change themn on his own?) then I think this must stay exclusivly in user application space.
This doesn't make it any less cool. Its just not a panacea, like it sounded like this talk was trying to make it out to be.
As the guy wearing the oncall pager this week, if one of our systems breaks at 3 am, I have to come in and fix it. I am very glad that just about everything I need to work with can be manipulated via some text file. I am extremely glad that the system has lots of tiny independant parts.
What carnivore does, according to its description, is a simple, passive thing. It collects the emails going to/from a specific person.
It is trivial to design a system, or any number of systems, which do this, are undetectible, and impossible to fool (well short of keeping a second email acount under a different name...but that is beyond the scope of the system anyway - it woul dbe like a second phone line that they don't know about).
Since this is the case, disclosure of the source code should have NO effect on the usability of the system. So, if they are telling the truth, then they have NOTHING to lose by publication of the source code.
Its OUR (US Citizens) source code, paid for by OUR tax dollars. Since, if they are telling the truth, no security would be lost by publication, they have NO right to NOT publish it.
Then again, I supose thats like a store keeper saying "the mob boss used the money he extorted from me to pay for that mansion, he has no right to not let me inside". Which is much closer to the truth, since I doubt they will publish it. Then again, I have been called cynical.
> That's completely independent of whether or not > the deed being committed is an actual crime.
Is it? we are talking abou speach here. How do you deinfe "Criminal speach"?
I don't think this confuses the issue at all. In fact it clarifies it. It is never morally or ethically wrong to express yourself. (unless that expression comes in the form of violence against another who is not consenting to said violence)
I would go as far as to say that any law which attempts to abridge speach is itself a crime against the people.
This case comes down to the old question "what is speach". It is my solem belief that the only answer which can possibly be correct is "anything that conveys information" whether that information is technical, emotional, visual, or what is what is really beside the point.
I think part of the problem with the system that we have, now that I think some more about it, is that we don't have "Democracy". We have "represenatative Democracy".
Why? Well I know the answer, real democracy isn't scalable. You can't have a town meeting style government that encompasses all of the USA. Hell, even all of england, or even all of Maine or Rhode Island.
Good government just doesn't scale well. If we truely want a fair system thats going to work, it needs to be local, where the separation between the people and the government doesn't exist.
This is why I am no longer a libertarian. I think even the libertarian ideas are just wrong. If they have their way, big buisness will replace big government, and we will be right back where we started, possibly even worst.
Thoreau said "That government governs best which governs not at all". I have to agree. As long as we are putting individuals into positions where they make decisions for large swaths of population and have no real contact with the masses themselves, we will ALWAYS be in the situation that we are in.
When it comes to running a community, I think democracy makes sense. However when you try to scale it up to the level we have, it becomes WORST than monarchy. At least monarchs can be groomed from birth to rule. We, instead, have the worst of both worlds. We have rulers, chosen by popularity contest and how well they can manipulate the masses.
This is not my own idea, just one that a co-worker infected me with, but one that I am begining to like, the more that I think about it.
It is well known that language and environment have tremendous effects on the way the mind thinks. Spend some time talking with someone whose native language isn't your own and you will find interesting and subtle differences in how they think about the world.
Well working with computers is different than people. We have our own languages, like perl, different interfaces. Admin and programmer work requires a specific set of thought modes for problem solving.
Perhaps its not that "geeks" are attracted to computers, but rather that dealing with these systems constantly changes how we think. We learn to work in these "modes". Most people arn't required to think in terms of raw logic, cause and effect, flow control etc at the level that we do on a daily basis.
This has led to a whole sub-culture of people who think in these modes. To the outside we may apear bizzare and different. Like any culture we tend to accept those like us, and reject thopse who arnt. They are foreign, they don't think like us.
Honestly, talking with someone who hasn't spent alot of time doing what I do is painful. Really truely painful. I realize that nothing I say will be understood without ALOT of explanation, and its very easy to lose them in the explanation....even people with a good aptitude for it. They don't think like me yet, I can't express my thoughts on the subject in their "language" (normal social english versus technical english).
I think we will find this to be a real problem. Another factor, especially when talking about government, its the same situation. Law makers have their own language. Its not english! its "Legal English". They think differently, they have their own culture. They are just as elitist as us.
I think that this is one of the fundamental problems with government in fact. Representative governments cause elite cliques to form. Sub-cultures, like our own, which have their own customs and their own ways of thinking, and thus they become separated from the people who they are suposedly serving.
I think this is a problem that requires some thought. Its also a good example of why strong central government is such a bad thing. It separates the government and the people into seprate entities. I personally think that it is that separation which is the problem much more so than anything else.
Ours is a subculture which cause ssome conflict, but in the end has little real world power. Theirs is a subculture which has an army of men with guns who will drag people from their homes and throw them in cells if told to do so.
The question is, how do we solve the problem that this creates? On an individual level, being in conflict with "the law" isn't bad, a person can slip under the 'legal radar' and live a peaceful life. As a culture we can't do it though, so somehow we must work with the legal culture to stop it from happening, in any of the forms which conflict could arise (be it napster or encryption regulations or what not)
> Doesn't anyone make flowcharts or other software > and data diagrams before they launch their text > editor?
> Then, and only then, start doing serious real > coding. If you wing it, you're liable to get > stuck
Actually, unless I am stuck on a concept, I don't find I have much of a need for such things. Generally what I personally do is write it once, fast and dirty.
Then start over with my template program and re-write what I just wrote.
It cleans the code up tremendously. The problem is avoiding the tempotation to just use it as is and not re-write it.
I have to agree with this one. Mostly because I am in that spot right now. Living with my ex-girlfriend still (thats an uncomfortable situation), looking at moving out, my motorcycle is in the shop for an expensive carb overhaul.
Soon as all this started happening my productivity just plain dropped. Just now am I starting ot get it back, now that some of these situations are working themselves out.
Ive also found, as others have said, having de-stresors outside of work is a MUST. My motorcycle was just that until it was giving me problems.
When I was an Undergrad at WPI (www.wpi.edu - I was only there 1 year, school life didn't work out) I heard of such a thing. Evidently there was an ongoing research project there to develop just such an OS.
The idea was that all machines running it (and I assume all ones running it AND setup as part of the same group - though personally I like the idea of a singal global distributed system with no boundaries) would be able to use eachothers resources over the network for the applications they were running.
Im not sure HOW distributed it was but it sounded cool. It must have a web page, I wish I could remember the name of the project.
Personally, I always kind of wanted to write a layer on top of the beowulf stuff. Setup the cluster and then make a shell that ran on it.
Really though, the more I think about it, the less I think its needed. How much do most things that are done on a system benefit from paralelism?
It seems to me like this type of problem solution is best suited to large computations and basically large jobs more than normal OS use.
> For anyone who has ever been in a graduate > program, as he was, it is absolutely impossible > not to know
Its statments like that which make so much sense yet turn out to be proven wrong time and again.
I have often thought "its impossible for a person to do x and not know y" but no matter what I substitute for X and Y I always find some idiot who manages to do it. I have given up believeing in absolutes of any kind.
> Unfortunately for him, the doctorate is not a > self-certification program
No but its arguably of no more real world value than if it was.
> Now the question is, with all the RXC pseudonyms > and committees going around, is this guy the > liar, or just someone stuck with the same > pseudonym?
A very good question. I personally don't give a shit though. I much prefer to judge a person on the content of their work than the papers they hang on their walls.
Ive met too many Doctors to be fooled into thinkin that the title means a thing, other than the fact that they know how to pile it higher and deeper when they need to.
More than anything else, if this is the man, I would be curious as to how stanford reacted and whether he would be allowed to go back and get his doctorate. Beyond that...its really a non-issue.
It sounds to me like a case of misunderstanding more than anything else. His claim (which I have no reason to doubt) is that he was following what he believed to be an accepted, or at least common practice and on the second issue mistook the meaning of a job title.
I would be much more interested in what happend after the article? Did he contact stanford about finishing his Doctorate work? What was their attitude?
All in all its just a peice of paper and a fancy title. No real meaning. I prefer to let the quality of his work for the past 20 years or so speak for itself.
All I know is that OS and all this 7 gig disk (which I can't count as one of my disks since its at work) is about half full...and thats including mp3s lots and lots of packages (debian user:)) and all sorts of other data.
Maybe I overestimated the number of packages that I have installed.:)
Slashdot Mirror
And this was almost exactly my point. English shares some nouns and verbs with others, but noone would make the case that it is the same language as french or german.
As such, programming languages are different from english and others. They are languages in and of themselves. For them, the expression of logic is of the utmost importance.
Look at PERL. It has what...2 normal ways of outputing data (print and printf..couple of other related ones....and of course the lowlevel syswrite...) but how many ways of expressing logical operations?
AND, OR, etc all have multiple "words", with different shades of meaning (|| binds more tightly than "or" does for example - but the underlying logic that is being expressed is the same)
They are thus built upon math as their foundation, much more so than english. They only borrow the alphabet and words of english....the grammar, the shades of meaning, these are not taken from english.
-Steve
> The language of Shakespeare is so different from
> standard English as to have virtually no
> intersection. Yet we somehow recognize it as
> English and can (fairly easily) read it. And it
> is not only the result of the age, thing about
> modern poetry.
Actually shakespearan english is fairly similar to modern in alot of ways. Its fairly easy for any english speaker to read shakespear.
The question is...how many REALLY understand him? Once you have read him a bit, you start to understand the language and man...even the most tragic of his tragedies have some VERY comedic parts. Hamlet makes me bust a gut at times...for most people, thats simply not true.
-Steve
I have to agree here.
Programming languages only use the same "nouns" as natural languages, and some of the same verbs. In English, we share nouns and verbs with other languages, but that doesn't make the languages equivalent.
Programming is based highly on math and logic. In fact, thats all it really is. It is a differnt language not based on natural language. As such...a MUCH more interesting topic....
what is the effect of programming languages on thought? Using a language and becoming fluent in it, requires the brain to think in a different way. It has been said that language shapes thought.
There is talk of "Geeks" and "normal people". Perhaps this is a construct not of us being different and learning about programming and administration etc, but that we learn it, and it has changed us. We have a plethora of similar languages of our own, even when not programming we talk with a vocabulary and litterary tradition that, to many people, sounds liek a whole other language, or culture.
I worry about this of late. Look around at how common this is. Turn the focus to law for a min. Do laws get written in normal english? No...they get written in a kind of sub language, by people of another culture, a legal culture. Perhaps their thinking has been shaped by their language, and their patterns of operation? Could that be the link to the reason that those in power and the common man don't seem to understand eachother? Different cultures, different languages (similar but different in usage and somewhat in definitions).
The more I look, the larger the implications get, and the more true it apears. Perhaps it is a good model...then again...perhaps its that damned law of fives all over again.
Now this is getting interesting :)
Communism is a form of socialism. It doesn't actually require a state. Their are certainly Anarcho-communists (I don't know that I would put myself in this catagory...definitly an anarcho-socialist though...but a larval one)
The core idea is not giving power to a state per se. In fact, even Marx considered the "Dictatorship of the Prolitariate" to be temporary. The idea being (whether stated or implied) that it would eventually make itself useless and fade out of existance.
The core is putting the means of production into the hands of the workers. The recognition that work is socially productive and ALL levels of work are needed for society to function.
The idea is to reward all forms of socially productive work, which includes childrearing (which is very socially productive...it should be considered a job just like any other)
Communism is just an extreme form of this, saying that people should organize together into communal communities, shareing and pooling all (or most) resources.
> You can't expect to run referendums on every
> little issue and even if you do (in the future
> electronic paradise), rule by mob rarely if ever
> led to good results.
This is a scalability issue, definitly. It works on the local level though. Its the old "Town meeting" style government. Its a matter of seprating the decisions that should be made by the community, versus the ones made by the individual.
Government which spans outside of the local community tends to go into what you might call "Cathedral mode". Look at the current situation.
In the US we have congress. They make the federal laws that affect everyone. They are a huge clique. They spend time together, talk amongst themselves. They have developed their own sub language.
They write laws which affect EVERYONE, but...the average man could not read such things. They are not written in plain english. The average man has almost no say in these whatsoever. This has alienated the people, and caused a situation ripe for power abuse.
I guess I am arguing for the return of the autonomous city-state. A place where every citizen not only could take part in the decision making, but was expected to.
-Steve
> Authorship IS equal to ownership. If I create
> something, you damn well better believe it
> belongs to me. But once I sell or give away a
> copy to a person, things change. I now own the
> ORIGINAL.
Right. Thats actually what I said. Authorship is NOT ownership. You can own the original, the original is a physical thing. You can own a copy of the original, a copy is a physical thing.
However you can't own the words, code, sound thats encoded into it. If you sell a copy to someone, you no longer OWN the copy...they do. However, you still retain Authorship of it.
Authorship is not ownership. It remains even after ownership is transfered. (does that make more sense?)
> Well, guess what - the author wrote it, and he
> is under no obligation to do anything else. I
> get so sick of the crowd that thinks they are
> entitled to everything. Go create something of
> your own.
You rmissing the point. Noone is asking the author to DO anything. This is not about releasing source or anything like that.
The question is this: Does the author have the right to stop copying and redistribution? Yes he does. but WHY does he?
He does for the reason you say: if he didn't, he couldn't make money because publishers would just sell his work and not pay him. That is why copyright exists...to make it safe for authors to publish and thus to encourage publication.
Using copyright to stop someone else from distributing a work is fine then. However I contend that doing it, solely for the purpose of stopping distribution, in and of itself, when the copyright holder is NOT doing it themselves or liceing someone else to do it, THEN it is an abuse of the copyright system.
Copyright is a temporary monopoly, given not because it is deserved, but as a reward to encourage more works. If it is not used, it should lapse. If your not going to take advantage of you rmonopoly, it is right that you lose it.
IMNSHO the only reason that this isn't the case today is that when copyright laws were written, noone imagined the situation that we have today.
And now that we have the situation, there is too much special interest in that NOT happening.
> However that's not a very useful definition of
> communism for the sake of our discussion. For
> example, it's not possible for it to fail since
> a philosophy cannot fail.
The correct definition (well actually a semi-correct one, communism is older than marx, and not all communists are marxist communists - Marx had some good ideas, but made some stupid assumptions too) is a useless one?
Yes a philosophy cannot fail. My issue is simply with the statment that "Communism failed". It hasn't. Communism is a philosophy. It is fundamentally wrong to look at a couple of instantiations of an idea and claim that the idea itself has failed.
> If, on the other hand, you define communism as
> a social, political, and economic system that
> was implemented in the Soviet Union, Eastern
> Europe, China, etc (somewhat differently in
> each), then it possible to claim that it failed
> and I do make this claim.
Ok this is obviously an argument of definitions. That would be like defining capitalism as "The economic system in the United States". Its a very useless definition. Why call it communism at all if your defining it in terms of states.
> Whether this real socio-political system had
> much in common with Marx's ideas is a subject
> much debated by Marxists but not of much
> interest to anybody else.
Right....and the reason for that seems mostly to be because alot of people have defined communism as "the USSR" and have no idea what it means beyond that.
> You seem to think that communism was a good idea
> that was corrupted/tainted/misformed by bad
> people.
At its core I think socialism and to a lesser extent communism have alot of potential and are generally very good ideas. I think that the problem has lay in the creation of powerful central states. The "dictatorship of the proletariate" is, itself a problem.
I think its also an issue of scalability. These systems do not scale well beyond the local community. Attempting to impliment them on wide scales, forcing entire continents to follow them, is a big mistake.
However I think that of any stateist system. Anytime the people are separated from the running of the government, the system has failed (which is why I think representative democracy is a horrid abomination and refuse to vote for representatives)
--Steve
> I'm sorry, I have no idea what you mean by
> having the common curtesy to know down strawmen
I would highly recomend the jargon dictionary:
http://www.netmeg.net/jargon
and everything2:
http://www.everything2.com
Very good for jargon. Strawman isn't in common usage (ie most people on the street don't know what one is)
> However, I actually find it quite provocative
> that you don't think people should have the
> rights to their own work, and calling it abuse
> if they won't give away what they won't sell.
Again, not what I said.
People DO have rights to their work. They certainly are allowed to not give it away or not sell it. The question is this: What gives them the right to stop someone else from selling it or giving it away?
The answer is "Copyright". Which means, they are given FOR A LIMITED TIME exclusive rights to copy. Once that lapses, its gone. Anyone can copy and redistribute.
Copyright was NOT intended to allow authors to stop the distribution of their own works (nor was it ever intended to protect publishers, it was intended to protect authors FROM publishers who would distribute and sell copies of the authors work and not pay the author)
If an author's work is being sold and distributed activly, then he certainly has the right, via copyright, to stop its redistribution. The ENTIRE REASON for this is to encourage publication. That is key to my argument.
When an author/publisher uses copyright to stop redistribution of something that they have stopped publishing and "Abandoned", then that goes against the fundamental purpose of copyright. It is an abuse of the system.
> If I take something without permission,
> I am stealing.
Stealing is wrong not because you get something,
but because the rightful owner loses it. In the
case of a copy, the rightful owner loses nothing, he still has his copy.
This is not stealing, it is unauthorized copying. Its a different action. Again copyright is not ownership like physical property ownership. It is very different and can't be expected to follow the same rules.
> because I play them instead of buying new games,
> the games manufacturers loose money.
Its not their money, how can they lose it?
They can not lose money until that money is in their bank acounts or hands. Then the money is theirs, and they can lose it. You can't lose something that you don't have.
-Steve
> Communism clearly failed -- this is one of the
> major lessons of the XX century
The problem with this is the assumption that communism failed because communism is, in and of itself, flawed.
You make the perfect mention above...Stalin's death camps. Death camps are no part of communism itself. They are the work of a powerful and corrupt autocrat.
Can you blame the basic philosophy for the atocities commited by the people who do things in its name? Should we then blame Christianity itself for the actions of those who carried out the spanish inquisition?
I think this points more to the fact that its really hard to find good leaders. The people who tend to rise to power in any system, tend to be the least moral, and most uniquely self-interested of the bunch (and I see that as much here in the US as any time or place throught the world and throughout history).
How nice....you make a straw man then don't even have the common curtesy to knock him down. Very nice. Not terribly effective though.
You see the whole point of mis-representing what I say, is so that you can attack what I said based on flaws in reasoning that were introduced in your representation of what I said, rather than in what I actually said. All you did was mis-represent what I said, you never attacked the flaws.
As I said in my post, Authorship is not Ownership. Your analogy shows a complete lack of understanding of this concept and of the foundations of copyright.
As I said, an author has every right to share or not share his own physical copies of his work. Which is the only thing that is anaolgous to your car. So in short, no. I would not feel that anyone should be able to take your car because you stop using it. That was very strongly stated in my original post.
Now copyright is another matter entirely. Ownership does not end. If you own something, you do not cease to own it (unless you discard or sell it) until you die. When you die, it becomes property of your heirs (assuming that you have any). However copyright lasts only a limited time (a long period of time when compared to our daily lives, but limited none the less).
After copyright ends can NEVER be claimed again on the work. Again, not so with property. Property can be owned again by someone else after you die with no heirs.
In short, copyright was designed NOT to "protect authors rights to property" but to encourage them to produce and publish works. When copyright is used solely to stop the distribution of old works, it is an abuse of the system. It is an abuse against the very people who gave up their rights to the authors, so that the authors could profit initially.
It is right use of the system for an author to publish his work and stop unauthorized publishers from profiting off his work without paying him. It is a gross abuse of the system to use copyright to stop the continued distribution of the work, after the author is no longer using his copyright to profit.
--Steve
> Until recently (relatively speaking), slavery
> was right - does that mean that it's wrong to
> say that slavery is wrong?
This depends on your perspective. Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery and treat them as property, no matter how many people are willing to tolerate it or think that its ok.
> Capatalism has long been accepted as the best
> model for the development of society -
> universally since the fall of Communism.
A) Capitalism and communism are general catagories of ideologies. Many form sof both have never been tried. The failure of one or more forms of communism does not prove capitalism correct.
B) Communism has been quite sucessfull in some places. I direct you to The Farm a community in Tennessee which has experimented with a couple of forms of progressive communism for the past 30 years.
> This isn't about the Corporate Republic
> - instead, it's the early Free Market pioneer's
> dream
Hardly! A free Market pioneers dream is what the corperations crush. All of the benefits that capitalism lovers point to as the result of "market forces" are actually hindered by mega-corps.
Large corperations have found that it is more profitable to crush competition or buy them out than to compete with them on fair ground. They have found that its more profitable to take away peoples choices, than to produce good products.
Once a company is so large and has such a product base that the average person can't help but buy their product, is it really a free market? Noone can compete with them. Nothing can touch their profits.
When its more profitable to make producing better products unprofitable for others than to produce good products yourself, the people get screwed over. It is a moral atrocity to do so. It acts to the detriment of society itself. It makes the corperation a parasite rather than a productive member.
Free market pioneers would roll in their graves to have this perversion called their dream.
> Perhaps, but it's their code, and if they don't
> want to share it that's their perogative, no?
Authorship is not equal to Ownership.
They Own Copyright on the code. They own hard drives and other storage media that conain the code. However, the code is intangible and cannot be owned.
The question is NOT whether they should be allowed to "Not Share". Of course they should be allowed to not share. The question is whether they shoul dbe allowed to stop others from shareing it.
Copyright says that they can. However, I would submit that this is a mistake. Copyright was invented to encourage publication by ensuring that authors have a way to make sure that they get paid for their work by publishers.
The reason that copyright holders are given this "right" is to give them temporary monopoly. However, if they are no longer using it, and they use copyright to stop further distribution, they are perverting and in fact working against the entire reason that copyright exists.
They are taking something that was given to them for one reason (making it safe for them to publish) and they are using it to stop the distribution of things that they have no intention of publishing again.
This is clear and simple abuse of the copyright system, and a shining example of why it needs heavy updating.
> Open source is a great concept - that still
> remains to be proven
I dunno.... I can go, find a free software program, I can download it. I can read the source, I can modify and redistribute it. I can compile and use it. Have done each at least once and some many times. Whats left to be proven?
That is of course unless you plan to judge Free Software by the standard marketspeak of "its more effcient" "it makes more stable code" and "bugs get fixed faster". Those may be yet to be proven absolutely...but they are all side effects of the system anyway.... more bonuses than central points.
> This new system does in NO way affect your
> ability to manually edit these files.
Good. I wholeheartedly aprove then.
This was completely non-obvious from the description, and I just have this horrid vision of these tools doing completely their own thing...
But whats often worst is generated config files that arn't meant to be read and edited by humans anymore.
> In fact, Miguel propses that the Helix Setup
> Tools store all their data in XML files and
> that you could easily revert back to, say,
> the settings you used last week, with only a
> few clicks.
Sounds great. YAS (yet another syntax) is one thing we don't need any more of. It would be GREAT to see all config files of all programs be native XML. It would simplify life alot.
-Steve
While I agree with this philosophy on the application level...yes code re-use is good. Code reuse without cut and paste is even better, and code reuse through CORBA is way cool.
/etc themselves for you? so an experienced admin can still go in and change themn on his own?) then I think this must stay exclusivly in user application space.
However, I disagree when he gets down to the system level. Yes, sendmail is a bitch to configure...and yes its a completely different procedure/config/etc from configuring samba, or working with the groups.
Is this sub-optimal? Probably. However there is one peice thats important. The BASE system is SMALL and separated.
There are very very few things that can be corrupted on a Unix system that would completely make recovery impossible, without going to backups.
In fact, anything short of a hardware failure or massive disk corruption, you always get a shell on the machine by briniging it into single user mode.
Its small and simple. If your config files are broken badly, you can bring the system up in single user mode and fix the system, by hand, if need be.
Now, lets pretend that this is all managed through corba. We have objects for this and that. All of the configs are stored somewhere else in the corba architechture.
So if the CORBA server breaks, the whole system is useless. At 3 am, when the system will only come up in single user mode, and ORBit wont run...what do you do?
I have yet to see any adressing of this issue. Until it is properly adressed (perhaps just have objects that edit the files in
This doesn't make it any less cool. Its just not a panacea, like it sounded like this talk was trying to make it out to be.
As the guy wearing the oncall pager this week, if one of our systems breaks at 3 am, I have to come in and fix it. I am very glad that just about everything I need to work with can be manipulated via some text file. I am extremely glad that the system has lots of tiny independant parts.
> Digital watches have never been fashionable
Actually, I think that they are a pretty neat idea.
I have to agree here.
What carnivore does, according to its description, is a simple, passive thing. It collects the emails going to/from a specific person.
It is trivial to design a system, or any number of systems, which do this, are undetectible, and impossible to fool (well short of keeping a second email acount under a different name...but that is beyond the scope of the system anyway - it woul dbe like a second phone line that they don't know about).
Since this is the case, disclosure of the source code should have NO effect on the usability of the system. So, if they are telling the truth, then they have NOTHING to lose by publication of the source code.
Its OUR (US Citizens) source code, paid for by OUR tax dollars. Since, if they are telling the truth, no security would be lost by publication, they have NO right to NOT publish it.
Then again, I supose thats like a store keeper saying "the mob boss used the money he extorted from me to pay for that mansion, he has no right to not let me inside". Which is much closer to the truth, since I doubt they will publish it. Then again, I have been called cynical.
I have always been an advocate of creative spelling. Its a damned fule who can only think of one way to spell a word.
Afterall, as Ambrose Beirce said, a Dictionary is a "malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of language".
--Steve
> That's completely independent of whether or not
> the deed being committed is an actual crime.
Is it? we are talking abou speach here. How do you deinfe "Criminal speach"?
I don't think this confuses the issue at all. In fact it clarifies it. It is never morally or ethically wrong to express yourself. (unless that expression comes in the form of violence against another who is not consenting to said violence)
I would go as far as to say that any law which attempts to abridge speach is itself a crime against the people.
This case comes down to the old question "what is speach". It is my solem belief that the only answer which can possibly be correct is "anything that conveys information" whether that information is technical, emotional, visual, or what is what is really beside the point.
-Steve
I think part of the problem with the system that we have, now that I think some more about it, is that we don't have "Democracy". We have "represenatative Democracy".
Why? Well I know the answer, real democracy isn't scalable. You can't have a town meeting style government that encompasses all of the USA. Hell, even all of england, or even all of Maine or Rhode Island.
Good government just doesn't scale well. If we truely want a fair system thats going to work, it needs to be local, where the separation between the people and the government doesn't exist.
This is why I am no longer a libertarian. I think even the libertarian ideas are just wrong. If they have their way, big buisness will replace big government, and we will be right back where we started, possibly even worst.
Thoreau said "That government governs best which governs not at all". I have to agree. As long as we are putting individuals into positions where they make decisions for large swaths of population and have no real contact with the masses themselves, we will ALWAYS be in the situation that we are in.
When it comes to running a community, I think democracy makes sense. However when you try to scale it up to the level we have, it becomes WORST than monarchy. At least monarchs can be groomed from birth to rule. We, instead, have the worst of both worlds. We have rulers, chosen by popularity contest and how well they can manipulate the masses.
This is, at its heart, a scalability issue.
This is not my own idea, just one that a co-worker infected me with, but one that I am begining to like, the more that I think about it.
It is well known that language and environment have tremendous effects on the way the mind thinks. Spend some time talking with someone whose native language isn't your own and you will find interesting and subtle differences in how they think about the world.
Well working with computers is different than people. We have our own languages, like perl, different interfaces. Admin and programmer work requires a specific set of thought modes for problem solving.
Perhaps its not that "geeks" are attracted to computers, but rather that dealing with these systems constantly changes how we think. We learn to work in these "modes". Most people arn't required to think in terms of raw logic, cause and effect, flow control etc at the level that we do on a daily basis.
This has led to a whole sub-culture of people who think in these modes. To the outside we may apear bizzare and different. Like any culture we tend to accept those like us, and reject thopse who arnt. They are foreign, they don't think like us.
Honestly, talking with someone who hasn't spent alot of time doing what I do is painful. Really truely painful. I realize that nothing I say will be understood without ALOT of explanation, and its very easy to lose them in the explanation....even people with a good aptitude for it. They don't think like me yet, I can't express my thoughts on the subject in their "language" (normal social english versus technical english).
I think we will find this to be a real problem. Another factor, especially when talking about government, its the same situation. Law makers have their own language. Its not english! its "Legal English". They think differently, they have their own culture. They are just as elitist as us.
I think that this is one of the fundamental problems with government in fact. Representative governments cause elite cliques to form. Sub-cultures, like our own, which have their own customs and their own ways of thinking, and thus they become separated from the people who they are suposedly serving.
I think this is a problem that requires some thought. Its also a good example of why strong central government is such a bad thing. It separates the government and the people into seprate entities. I personally think that it is that separation which is the problem much more so than anything else.
Ours is a subculture which cause ssome conflict, but in the end has little real world power. Theirs is a subculture which has an army of men with guns who will drag people from their homes and throw them in cells if told to do so.
The question is, how do we solve the problem that this creates? On an individual level, being in conflict with "the law" isn't bad, a person can slip under the 'legal radar' and live a peaceful life. As a culture we can't do it though, so somehow we must work with the legal culture to stop it from happening, in any of the forms which conflict could arise (be it napster or encryption regulations or what not)
> Doesn't anyone make flowcharts or other software
> and data diagrams before they launch their text
> editor?
> Then, and only then, start doing serious real
> coding. If you wing it, you're liable to get
> stuck
Actually, unless I am stuck on a concept, I don't find I have much of a need for such things. Generally what I personally do is write it once, fast and dirty.
Then start over with my template program and re-write what I just wrote.
It cleans the code up tremendously. The problem is avoiding the tempotation to just use it as is and not re-write it.
-Steve
I have to agree with this one. Mostly because I am in that spot right now. Living with my ex-girlfriend still (thats an uncomfortable situation), looking at moving out, my motorcycle is in the shop for an expensive carb overhaul.
Soon as all this started happening my productivity just plain dropped. Just now am I starting ot get it back, now that some of these situations are working themselves out.
Ive also found, as others have said, having de-stresors outside of work is a MUST. My motorcycle was just that until it was giving me problems.
--Steve
When I was an Undergrad at WPI (www.wpi.edu - I was only there 1 year, school life didn't work out) I heard of such a thing. Evidently there was an ongoing research project there to develop just such an OS.
The idea was that all machines running it (and I assume all ones running it AND setup as part of the same group - though personally I like the idea of a singal global distributed system with no boundaries) would be able to use eachothers resources over the network for the applications they were running.
Im not sure HOW distributed it was but it sounded cool. It must have a web page, I wish I could remember the name of the project.
Personally, I always kind of wanted to write a layer on top of the beowulf stuff. Setup the cluster and then make a shell that ran on it.
Really though, the more I think about it, the less I think its needed. How much do most things that are done on a system benefit from paralelism?
It seems to me like this type of problem solution is best suited to large computations and basically large jobs more than normal OS use.
> For anyone who has ever been in a graduate
> program, as he was, it is absolutely impossible
> not to know
Its statments like that which make so much sense yet turn out to be proven wrong time and again.
I have often thought "its impossible for a person to do x and not know y" but no matter what I substitute for X and Y I always find some idiot who manages to do it. I have given up believeing in absolutes of any kind.
> Unfortunately for him, the doctorate is not a
> self-certification program
No but its arguably of no more real world value than if it was.
> Now the question is, with all the RXC pseudonyms
> and committees going around, is this guy the
> liar, or just someone stuck with the same
> pseudonym?
A very good question. I personally don't give a shit though. I much prefer to judge a person on the content of their work than the papers they hang on their walls.
Ive met too many Doctors to be fooled into thinkin that the title means a thing, other than the fact that they know how to pile it higher and deeper when they need to.
More than anything else, if this is the man, I would be curious as to how stanford reacted and whether he would be allowed to go back and get his doctorate. Beyond that...its really a non-issue.
I went back and re-read the article.
It sounds to me like a case of misunderstanding more than anything else. His claim (which I have no reason to doubt) is that he was following what he believed to be an accepted, or at least common practice and on the second issue mistook the meaning of a job title.
I would be much more interested in what happend after the article? Did he contact stanford about finishing his Doctorate work? What was their attitude?
All in all its just a peice of paper and a fancy title. No real meaning. I prefer to let the quality of his work for the past 20 years or so speak for itself.
-Steve
Actually...I was guestimating wildly.
:)) and all sorts of other data.
:)
All I know is that OS and all this 7 gig disk (which I can't count as one of my disks since its at work) is about half full...and thats including mp3s lots and lots of packages (debian user
Maybe I overestimated the number of packages that
I have installed.
-Steve