Slashdot Mirror

America isn't a democracy it's a “limited-government constitutional republic.”
see: http://users.law.capital.edu/dmayer/Blog/blogIndex.asp?entry=20050606.asp

I know wikipedia says "Federal presidential constitutional republic" But it gave up being a "Representative democracy" of the people when it erroneously allowed the fiction of corporate personhood to persist.

If you take it to mean the author simply said GPL and did not mean "Gnu General Public License" then you have no protection at all.

I think you have a few things that would protect you both legally and in likely feelings of the author.

1) The meaning of GPL is quite clear in the context (Linux magazine, license for code) (This I think is legal protection).

2) It appears clear that the author does not look at this as a project, but a cool little tool they developed and wanted to share/brag about(the lack of any other reference anywhere else) (this would be a non-legal protection)

The author did leave an email and ask to contact, of course 4 year old email addresses at places of employment are often wrong. And yet...

I would email the guy, and lacking a response call him myself. License sloppiness should be punished, since it can be as damaging to the community as shared source style licenses. And a (one not a horde of assholes) stranger calling to clarify what you meant in a 4 year old article would be appropriate in my mind.

RE: For the record, you would not know how many people are being tortured and killed in North Korea. In addition, why are these people being killed? For dissention? To be experimented on as the article mentions?

Does it really matter? Does the ideology matter? Do you think some Arab's mother gives a crap about the supposed Fight For Freedom that resulted in the loss of all four of her three year old's limbs? Difference is, Kim Jong Il kills his own people, we kill our own and other people.

RE: On forced labor camps, how is that equivalent to the ghetto at all?

Both are necessary, and the people who are in both don't choose to be there. Both have very high death rates, especially infant mortality.

RE: The ghetto is the ghetto because of a lack of jobs in that community. So its more like an anti-labor camp. So I think the comparison between the two is totally off base.

For there to be incentive to work demeaning minimum wage jobs, there must be the unemployed to point at and say "this could be you".

RE: We are at war in Iraq so of course there are going to be casualties caused by that. There may be more or may be less than North Korea, but name one other country that spends millions of dollars on one bomb to blow up a mud shack with our enemies in it. We could easily carpet bomb, nuke, or use chemical warfare (as Hussein and Chemical Ali did)

With weapons we provided for them. Are you starting to see how much damage we do worldwide?

RE: the city and it would be way cheaper, but we don't. Why do we do it? Because we're the United States of America and we have the technology, money, and humanity to try and limit collateral damage to civilian populations.

Are you freaking nuts? We're spending obscene amounts of money to enrich Halliburton, not because we care how many "Hajis" we're killing.

RE: If you truly feel President Bush and our government is equivalent to, or maybe even more evil than North Korea, I challenge you to move there and see how different they really are.

Evil? No. Dangerous? Yes.

RE: I was a little confused on the distinction between a Representative Democracy and a Republic. They seem kinda close in definition. Wikipedia and Encarta are confused too as Encarta calls the United States a Representative Democracy [msn.com] and Wikipedia calls the United States a Republic [wikipedia.org]. So please feel free to enlighten me on the distinction.

I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the REPUBLIC, for which it stands.....

Dude, this is a Republic. End of story. We have a rule of law and an indirect rule by people (Electoral college????) as opposed to direct running of government, which can and does turn into mob rule. A democracy by definition is direct involvement in government, which we do not have. Ah hell, just read this http://users.law.capital.edu/dmayer/Blog/blogIndex .asp?entry=20050606.asp

Or just as good, a crack for iDVD that allows burning DVDs in a 16:9 aspect ratio, so that it works like its supposed to... as this guy's workaround is reporting

> I don't think anything would stop it from running ... DOOM!

Well, you probably already know this, but Linux has had a (semi-official) Doom port for quite a while. And since iD released the source, there are at least 2 more ports under active development right now.

I'll also take this opportunity to shamelessly plug psDooM again. :-)

> I'm grateful for what we've been given so far, but it's time to innovate.

Actually, I think Linux (and *BSD) have quite a number of innovative programs. Just look at Freshmeat or SourceForge; there's tons of stuff there.

I believe part of the problem is that there are so many half-finished innovations and programs. Not to say half-finished projects are bad, I'm just saying that since they are not 'complete', people may ignore them as opposed to a program advertised as 'release quality'. That, and the sheer number of projects, keeps them from being recognized anywhere else than a small circle of developers and users.

Also, many programs are developed to scratch an itch on a *nix-like system, and are not really applicable to DOS/Windows/MacOS. Case in point: this morning I got an e-mail from a guy wondering if psdoom would be ported to DOS. I told him that DOS had no concept of processes, so it couldn't be done. But this does show that (at least in this one case) there is interest in porting OSS programs and innovations to traditionally closed-source platforms.

> A few months back, there was a slashdot article about exactly this sort of thing. Well, sort of. It's here

Blatent Plug Alert!!!
I am working on enhancements to that same Doom process manager. Check it out if you're interested.

David