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Pastimes : Neocon's Seminar Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (508)	5/9/2001 1:44:32 AM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1112

Lme try to show I understand your pov. The American Indians are prime examples for your case. To eat for a few days, they would drive a whole herd of buffalo off a cliff. Classic case of overkill. The Noble Savage Theory is a complete myth. But yet, the American Indian myths hold the best explanation of how a descendant can retain experience. That is by the spirit of the buffalo, etc. I agree that civilization is grand. But what about the Acropolis? Was that democratic to build it? I think not. But to the point. I do not pretend to go further than the God of Nature that the DOI references in public discussions. It is not that I am ashamed or do not want to be a martyr. I just want to participate. I do not deny the grandeur of civilization. And I do not claim that it is a mirage paid for by the sweat of the proletariat. It is a colloborative effort based on an instinct for survival. But this same instinct for survival is shared by demons, who know God lives.

To: Neocon who wrote (508)	5/9/2001 8:39:46 AM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1112

I am really in a dilemma here. Who paid for the art? The Church? The nobility? Or was it freeware? Is Linus Torvalds right? The Great Wall of China is known as the longest cemetary on Earth, but it is a tourist attraction. I think Bill Gates is right, that intellectual property rights are the important thing. Torvalds Replies to Microsoft About OSS As predicted, the Open Source Software (OSS) community is in an uproar over Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie's remarks about Linux and OSS development. Every two-bit Linux advocate has come out against Mundie's talk with various conspiracy theories related to the Great Threat from Redmond. We can ignore these people, of course, who are too fanatical to be taken seriously. But Linux-creator Linus Torvalds, himself no stranger to online flamefests, has chimed in with his own take on the Mundie controversy. And Torvalds, who posted his response on the Internet, is not a person to be taken lightly. "[Mundie's] claim seems to focus on the assertion that research and development is founded on the principles of the importance of intellectual property rights," Torvalds wrote late last week, "which is entirely ignoring the fact that pretty much all of modern science and technology is founded on [ideals] very similar [to] open source. When Mundie wants you to think about all the work that companies have done in order to get patents, he also wants you to forget about all the work done by people like Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, Leonardo da Vinci, and a lot of other people who have done a lot more for humanity than most companies [that have received patents] have ever done. "Those people did it for the love of the art, not for some petty intellectual property rights. Yet Mundie, with a straight face, claims that those intellectual property rights are the thing that drives science and technology. He seems to think that Microsoft has done more for the US economy than the discovery of the electron ever did." Torvalds says that Microsoft's new shared-source philosophy proves that the company just doesn't get it. "I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton?" Torvalds asks. "He's not only famous for having basically set the foundations for classical mechanics (and the original theory of gravitation), but he is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement: 'If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.' One of the greatest scientists of our time, having done more for modern technology (and thus, by the way, for the modern economy) than Microsoft will ever do, acknowledged the fact that he did so by being able to use the knowledge (what we now call intellectual property) gathered by others. "Mundie throws all that away, because he wants Microsoft to own it all and make tons of money on it. I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. [Newton] may have been dead for almost 300 years, but despite that he stinks up the room less." It's still somewhat confusing that Microsoft presented its opinion about OSS the way it did. The company had to know that OSS proponents would rip Microsoft to shreds for Mundie's speech. It's true that the company's model has been economically successful; on the other hand, most of that success came before OSS went mainstream with Linux. Whether Microsoft chose to air its views about OSS or not, the respective strengths and weaknesses of each approach to software development will likely be played out in the marketplace and not the court of public opinion. wininformant.com