And here was the result I got:

Except I used the Gimp instead of photoshop and I’m not the most artistically inclined person either.

I think it came out alright on the whole.  My colors and stem and shadows and highlights and reflections and shapes and … well it’s not perfect, but like I said I suck at photoshop/gimp.  Just imagine what a real artist could do with the Gimp.  99% of what an artist could do with photoshop they could do with Gimp.  And there are probably some things they can’t do with photoshop they can do with Gimp.

All I’m saying, if I can come pretty close to making a realistic looking image, there’s no room left for artists to bitch (except maybe the lack of native CKMY or whatever it’s called).

-Adam

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Elizabeth mentions that they looked up the difference between strategy and tactics during the debates too.  And I thought Obama was supposed to be the intellectual here.  Oh, campaign posturing, you’ve fooled me again!

My understanding is that the plural, tactics, is equivalent to strategy.  The singular, tactic, would be equivalent to stratagem except the latter has the connotation of trickery or deception, which is a subset of tactics and strategies.

This election has seen many stratagem of attacking the opponent over language.  We’ve seen metaphors involving swine, doctrines that redefine themselves by an egg timer (and somehow remained owned by their minter), and so on.

It is obvious that neither candidate is familiar with the principle of charity nor do they believe winning on the issues alone is more important than winning.

Come Guy Fawkes Day, the cheese stands alone.  With all 300 million of us standing in a big circle.  That is the level of maturity our political landscape has devolved into.  Hi-ho, the derry-o!

How to Create Good Law

Even in the midst of a financial market meltdown the question on the tip of their tongues is “How do we show off?”  So McCain straps on his bullet-proof vest and charges into the fray.  Obama talks some sense about regulations, but seems to favor a bailout nonetheless.

Meanwhile, we’ve still got soldiers trying to stop the violence of two foreign lands and no real consolidated plan to stop buying all this oil.  We’ve still got millions without health insurance, one heartbeat away from bankruptcy.  Our electricity grid is aging.  Our internet service sucks.  Our transportation system is regressive.  Our tax structure is about as sensible as Ahmadinejad (again, in many ways caused more by perception than any intrinsic conviction).

One of the big problems is that we still legislate using 20th (err, 18th) century methods: a bill is born, and the staples fly until a simple three-section bill turns into a 200-section monstrosity. Then, as Obama said about funding the troops during the debate, a disagreement about something like time-tables (or in the case of the update to FISA that Obama voted for, illegal immunity for telecommunications companies) may force a voter’s hand either way.

In software we call the concept of having a module or class directed at a single, specific task “cohersion.”  When a bill focuses on everything from Iraq funding to the drinking age to a resolution praising the latest Pixar film we call that “coincidental cohesion.”  We should have law created according to the same principles that govern (proper) software engineering.

What’s more, we should have a context free language that describes the law.  That is the kind of thing that might drag me back to school some day.

Peace.

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“There’s free software and then there’s open source,” he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries.

There’s free software, which is any software which has no monetary cost, and then there’s Free software which is any software which has liberty bundled with it. Microsoft does not give away liberty in developing countries. In fact, they don’t even allow liberty to exist in Norway if they can help it.

With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.” Open source, he said, creates a license “so that nobody can ever improve the software,” he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. [...]

The GPL actually provides the complete opposite and Mr. Gates knows this. The truth is that a million times a day someone using Windows punches their inner child while wishing they could change something about the operating system. Everything from the look of the windows to changing the file system to one that doesn’t require constant defragmentation.

With Windows you can’t do that without a lot of effort. With sanely written software that’s designed to be malleable (such as many Open Source projects) it’s second nature. And when there’s source available there’s an open market to pay people to make those changes for you.

He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: “I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,” he said, adding with a shrug: “That may seem radical.”

Of course you can charge for them. You can already charge for Open Source. The difference is that if you sell and distribute GPL software you’ve got to give them the source and the right to distribute that software. That doesn’t mean that you can’t customize the software for a company to give them a competitive edge. Just the opposite.

If software X can pump out 100 widgets a day by default and the company modifies it to pump out 200 widgets a day, they can make more widgets. Unless they’re distributing the software to third parties they can effectively keep those changes internally and benefit exclusively from them.

Google does this. They also do many things that are supportive of Open Source, but they modify the source internally and use it. If you don’t distribute the software to others you do not have to give them the source.

This is what Mr. Gates really disagrees with. His company is in the business of selling software to others. He doesn’t like the competition. If they can get a better, more customized application for free, or for free plus the cost of paying a developer to customize it, they won’t want to overpay for inferior software from Microsoft.

Sorry Mr. Gates, but it’s inferior because it can’t be customized. It’s inferior because it costs too much. It’s inferior because it’s encumbered by the inventor’s greed. You can sell your drugs, but increasingly you’ll find the people practicing preventative medicine, using Open Source to avoid the need for your “invented” anti-virus.

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