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your chosen licence"

He's not saying that the lack of licence information is GitHub's problem, nor that it's unique to GitHub. Rather, he's saying that there is a problem — code without clearly attributed licence information — and, whilst each would-be user could contact each developer and find out the licensing conditions, GitHub could make a simple tweak to their platform to encourage developers to select a licence.

I would not favour pre-selecting a default licence, but rather having a developer presented with a set out option, perhaps with a tool to help aid selection based on requirements. No requirement, no default licence, but just a helpful reminder — if someone wants their code to be reused, but didn't know to think through the legal aspects, this would help them out, without harm to anyone who would rather not specify a licence for whatever reason.

Sounds sensible to me.

... this for sure will broaden the semantics of hack attack.

CC.

we have massively scaled out server systems that are (software-wise) closer to microcomputers than minis or mainframes.

I thought the defining feature of a mini over a micro was that a mini had virtual memory. An i386-family 32-bit CPU acts a lot more like a VAX minicomputer (if you know x86 asm, see how many of these elements of vaxocentrism still apply) than like the 8- and 16-bit micros that preceded it.

I've found watching the facial ticks and foam build up around the mouth from real programmers when they encounter a GOTO to be quite entertaining!

Clearly you've never met a Real Programmer.

Cheers,
Michael

Feed = meadow grazing supplemented by locally grown grain in most climates, and hay in the winter.

Horses require a lot of pasture, and they tend to eat it down to bare earth, so you must move horses around. Horses can be economically viable only in a small rural setting where there is plenty of pastures and few horses. "Hay in the winter" needs to be stored and transported, and stables are not any smaller than a garage for a car (and you can't park the horse on your driveway or at the curb and forget about it for a week.) Horses also are relatively delicate creatures, can get diseases, can get overworked, and ultimately die; then they need to be disposed of. Sick and weak horses can not work, instead they must be cared for until they get better (or just the opposite.) It's a lot of work, far more than turning a key in a car (or pressing the POWER button in Prius.)

And you don't need much land to feed a single horse

It would be advisable to leave the city for a day and observe reality:

Horses require at least 2 acres per animal for a good exercise and forage area in good forage country. The stocking rate in southern Oklahoma probably varies from 2 to 5 acres per horse on improved pasture that is well managed.

So no, your 1/16" acre backyard won't do it (and you won't like it anyway.)

I'd say feed is far less expensive than gasoline, oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, antifreeze, and wiper fluid.

From the same source:

A well-nourished horse will consume about 2 percent of its body weight per day on a dryweight basis. Thus, a 1,000-pound horse will require approximately 20 pounds of forage or feed per day, or almost 4 tons of dry matter yearly per horse.

Today hay prices are about $150 per ton, which means you have to spend at least $600 plus transportation - say, $1,000 in total. This money would buy you today 400 gallons of gasoline, and with 30 mpg you could drive 12,000 miles on it (32 miles per day at 60 mph.) A horse would be totally wasted, if not dead, even at half the speed, and though it surely can walk that distance every day you probably have other interests in life than walking your horse :-)

Oh, by the way, your horse will want to eat and drink even if it is not working much. Your car needs gas only when you drive it.

I'd argue that horse shit is preferable to find in the streets, since horses and people share very few diseases, whereas spit on the sidewalk could carry any number of human pathogens.

Firstly, presence or absence of horses is orthogonal to the presence of spit and other human waste on streets. Secondly, horse manure is a breeding ground for insects which can and do carry diseases of all kinds. A fly can be sitting on a pile of horse manure in one moment and then on your forehead just a second later. I don't see much of health benefits from such an arrangement.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/singleton

singleton
One entry found.

Main Entry:
sin*gle*ton
Function:
noun
Etymology:
French, from English single
Date:
1876
1: a card that is the only one of its suit originally dealt to a player
2 a: an individual member or thing distinct from others grouped with it b: an offspring born singly <singletons are more common than twins>

I like the way MW has a joke for Singleton. If you look up other words with a single definition it doesn't say "one entry found".

It reminds of the definition of recursive in the hacker's dictionary.

http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_33.html#TAG1486
recursion /n./

See recursion.

Clearly both are an attempt at meta humour.

Oh hey, someone else has already posted this -- that Napoleon uttered that quotation is likely apocryphal, the phrase is usually referred to as Hanlon's Razor and is more likely sourced as follows:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon

For the reason there are many people willing to post about this one line on Slashdot, see here:

http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_23.html#TAG856

I.e., we're all nerds.

It's certainly very easy to read, and the formatting reminds me of Dr. Seuss books.

This 12-step program is missing the essential step: "Accept Shub-Internet as your personal Savior."

http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/mythopoeia.html

Science today, Myth tomorrow. Either is just a framework for modeling reality, which satisfies our questioning and curious nature, and gives us hope for the future.

Life thrives on the irrational notion that it is superior to nonlife, that existence has a manifest destiny in relation to nonexistance.

But objective reality, the asteroids and supernovae, they don't make this distinction. To "them", life is just more atoms.

In American English, closing quotes always go after commas and periods.

I believe slashdot uses hacker english. your american english is semantically ambiguous and is constantly crashing our parsers.

http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html#Engl ish

Written English is essentially a variety of Old French invented by somebody who spoke only Saxon and read only Latin.
--Basilius

English is essentially an imprecise dialect of Java, without the object orientation.
--Julian Morrison

English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.
--Eugene Holman

English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
--Benct Philip Jonsson

English is essentially a bizarre dialect of Chinese, pronounced entirely in the first tone.
--John Cowan

English is essentially Low German plus even lower French minus any sense of culture.
--Danny Weir

English is essentially Anglo-Saxon with all the cool bits taken out.
--Thomas Leigh

I was first introduced to the net via ESR's old free isp, sponsored by Chester County Pennsylvania.

I suppose it's a good thing such things existed from the start before ISPs became so monopolized.. maybe in the future we'll see large ISPs taking a stand against community free internet too.

The only argument for such regulation that holds water for me is all the added laws and taxes regarding phone service: net phones shouldn't get a pass on such while traditional phones suffer. frankly, i'd prefer to see such laws rolled back or redesigned than try to fit a new paradigm into old rules.

(-1 pointy hair for using 'paradigm')

Well, he wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which has helped to show people that the open-source model of development is viable. He personally talked with executives at Netscape, who had previously read this paper, and convinced them to open-source their browser product, which we know today as Mozilla and its derivatives.

He also maintains the Jargon File, and as you probably know, he published the Halloween Documents, which give the open-source community a look into Microsoft's "attack plans" so we know what to expect and can respond accordingly.

On a smaller scale, he's also one of the founders of CCIL, a freenet in Chester County, Pennsylvania, USA which provides Internet access to people who live or work in the area. This was my first exposure to the Internet (aside from a few emails to AOL and Compuserve members back when I was using Prodigy) and I still use my account, so I think it's a very worthwhile project.

A few evenings later, I got called by a guy named Eric who gave me a password.

It was only later that I realized I talked to Eric Raymond, technical wizard and cofounder of the Chester County Interlink. My brush with celebrityhood!

The latest builds of Gnome have the same feature for the task bar. See screenshot (133kb).

Eric S. Raymond had helped design and maintain the free ISP for Chester County, called Chester County Interlink. Their mission is "to ensure that Chester County residents and organizations have easy and equitable electronic access to information while encouraging interaction among them as part of an electronic community". Perhaps Hosuton based hackers could help out in similar ways, lending expertise if not equipment?

If decss backers had the ability &/or could afford to apply this level of debug they would not have this problem. Instead they try and ruin the life of someone who did it for them and better yet for free. What is happening here is the wrong people are getting caught with their collective heads up their big greedy asses.

You see they still just don't get it . Fearful greed fueled by the bravado of secured political favor dominates nearly ALL large business entity's, NOT just US businesses. The ONLY ways to effectively de nut political or business types are A:-$$$ B:-$$$ C:-$$$ and so on. Boycott the products, bring public focus on the weakness of the product and distasteful practices. Then hit the political end with endless very public queries and argument.

Hey that's kinda what we are doing here, just spread it around some. FWIW I personally despise Adobe products. I find a PDF document to be a beast from hell. And I'll take 'da GIMP, Colorworks or Impos/2 over Photoshop any day. As for these Media barons, well I'm at Slashdot NOT at Amazon buying a CD, and I'm not using M$ or M$ crony software anyway, until they all get it .

A few more pertinent observations on these matters:

"Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue, and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free." Thomas Jefferson

"The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government." Thomas Jefferson

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." Thomas Jefferson

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." Thomas Jefferson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Benjamin Franklin

"We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Benjamin Franklin

"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." Abraham Lincoln

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly" Henry David Thoreau

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." Plato (427-347 B.C.)

"It's not what folks don't know that get's them in the most trouble. It's the things they know that ain't so." Will Rodgers

"It has to fit. I measured it myself!" Unknown

"Those who look for problems find problems, those who look for nothing find nothing, those who look for solutions find solutions, and those who hide their heads in the sand get bit in the ass when the problems find them." Me

The Big 3 US auto manufacturers took over 15 years to effectively respond to the Japanese, but they had to start losing money. NASA is in a lot worse shape than the Big 3 US auto manufacturers were in the early 1970s because NASA is more:

• government funded (and therefore immune to external demands placed on it).
• immune to private law suits.
• a monopoly.
• more insolent when it comes to grassroots political pressure (see the shuttle launch of the ACTS subsequent to and in violation of the passage of the grassroots Public Law 101-611 and failure to execute on the grassroots Launch Vouchers Experimental Program).

Now, what are the chances NASA is going to act to reform itself based on the Japanese embarrassment alone? I think they need to be embarrassed a whole lot more before they'll wake up and smell the coffee like the Big 3 US automakers did in the 1980s.

I hate it when I browse a Star Trek web site and I can't read that Klingon.

In fact we often hear that developers are reluctant to write documentation; this is true for everybody else.


Personally, I very often see this true. But it is especially true of developers (particularly hackers) who perceive documentation to be a waste of their time.

A few hackers, such as ESR, don't mind writing documentation. As a result you see certain projects have excellent documentation with other projects having almost non-existant documentation. For ESR, my example would be fetchmail. This program is not only very well written, its extremely well documented, although I have to believe that the documentation was NOT written in a bazaar mode like the program itself is.

That faq-o-matic is very interesting, though. I hadn't heard of it prior to your posting this.

Making noise is one of the things that keeps the open source system healthy. I think that in general the Linux kernel has had good stewardship, and though I personally have not had direct interactions with Al Viro, I think that extends to him as well.

I agree with this statement, especially the first part. Anyone not sure that making noise keeps open source healthy, particularly in the bazaar mode of development that is present in Linux, should read the writings of ESR, particularly Homesteading the Noosphere and possibly the Cathedral and The Bazaar. (Not necessarily in that order though :)

I think this should change. I think that the design documentation we need should be readily available - it has to be posted somewhere where everybody can get at it, and contribute to it.

Yeah, current documentation would be great. But I don't think that documentation lends itself well the bazaar mode of development. The "roadmaps" you speak of reek very much of "requirements documents" and I don't think you will find any of those in Linux development.

The name of the BBS was Stuart ][. (The name "Stuart" was chosen, nearly at random, by the author; as far as I know, it has no deeper meaning. The "][" was because it was a second impmentation; "Stuart I", the older one, wasn't tree-structured.) The tree structure was inspired by Dave Winer's outline-structured BBS, which he called LBBS (the "Living BBS").

It was, perhaps, the expense of long distance calls (almost no users were local) and the fact that it could take only one call at a time that kept the population of the system from exploding. (One advantage of this was that it really was possible to keep up with every message.) There was no private e-mail (due, probably, to laziness; the owner said that he had planned to write code for it but never got around to it), so all conversations were out in the open. And the tree-structured nature of the system required a certain amount of abstract thinking to sort out. (You really had to read a tutorial -- not a long one, but it did consist of several screens of material -- to get going.)

The board was, until it fell apart due to some unwise (and, some would say, perfidious) actions on the part of the owner, unlike any other. The level of discourse was light years ahead of what one saw on other systems at the time. Many people who are now rich, famous, or both -- names you'd likely know, at least if you work with computers -- stopped in, often under pseudonyms. (I won't name names, since I'm not sure that all of them want to be identified or want this little bit of history to be dredged up.) My name on the system was "Rogue."

Other BBSes began to copy the system's tree structure. XBBS and Pyrzqxgl, two BBSes in the Santa Cruz, CA area, used a nearly identical interface. Steve Manes' Magpie HQ, in New York, was also a derivative. (This was the BBS on which Rahul Dhesi, Thom Henderson, and Phil Katz debated compression software. Soon after, Thom sued Katz for writing PKARC, a program compatible with Thom's ARC. The lawsuit, in turn, caused the hacker community to shun Thom and his products. Soon after, ARC was a distant memory and PKPAK -- later renamed PKZIP -- was the de facto standard compressor for Microsoft platforms.) The WELL, the famous conferencing system run by The Point Foundation/Whole Earth Catalog people, likewise drew some inspiration from the Stuart ][ community, though it was not a tree-structured system.

Years after Stuart ][ fell apart, former users had such fond memories that they took an old snapshot of the tree-structured database and converted it to a tree of Web pages. It can be viewed at http://www.ccil.org:6502/0.html.

--Brett Glass

"Virii" isn't a word: true

"Virii" is used by script kiddies: true

"Virii" was coined by script kiddies: false

The usage of "virii" as the plural of virus is older than the script kiddie phenominon. It is an instance of standard hacker word play, like the usage of "boxen" as the plural of "box", unices as the plural of unix, etc...

For more info, see the Jargon file.

"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

From the FAQ:

3.1) Are there any OSs that don't suck?

No.

3.2) How about any hardware?

The PDP-10 was pretty nice. Pity they aren't common any more.
[Ok. Still haven't got the exact year they stopped being made, but there IS a company that makes clones; Check out http://locke.ccil.org/retro/retromuseum. html for an emulator.]

Um, just to put a damper on your vitriole...I daresay esr has hacked upon more things than you have. And has been a part of the hacker community for way longer than you think.

Don't take my word for it...take his. Eric's resume.

Some of the mentioned projects, in case you are feeling lazy:

• [He] wrote the IEEE reference implementation of PILOT.
• He was the principle co-developer of ncurses.
• fetchmail, of course.
• He wrote keeper, the archivist's robot assistant used to maintain the Metalab site. (aside from the fact that he is the co-maintainer of metalab.)
• He is listed in the Linux credits file.
• "Many of the new features in Emacs 19 were my work."-- esr

I daresay that you've heard of some of these, maybe even used them? Why not do some research next time, before you put your foot in your mouth?

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project around 1983. He wrote gcc, emacs, gdb, etc. The GNU Project created hundreds of programs : bash, the GNU File Utilities, mc, gnome, gimp, etc. I'm using this software. It's great.

GNU also created the General Public License. The GPL is a very important license to enable the bazaar-style of software development to actually work. FSF, most importantly RMS, constantly advocated Free Software, defended programmers around the world to get the rights they deserve.

There seem to be problems with the definition of Operating System. In my opinion, OS is a synonym for kernel. The OS I'm using is Linux. However, my system, the distribution I'm using, is GNU/Linux. I don't really care about names. But I do think we must give credits to the people who deserve them. RMS/Linux wouldn't be a good name. RMS might be the founder of GNU, but he ISN'T GNU. However, "Linux" as a name for the entire system, including the core programs like bash, cp, ls, gcc, etc. isn't good either. It might be easier to pronounce, but that's it.

So I prefer the name GNU/Linux. Anyway, this is something that can be discussed. But when I see these comments, in which people are comparing RMS with Hitler, Stalin, a crying baby, a piece of shit that doesn't have a life, I get sad. Sad, because this is not what I expected from this community. RMS might be a weirdow, but what he has done for the hacking community is incredibly important and the way you folks are talking about him is... I can't find the words for it...

Check out www.gnu.org/philosophy. Read about the history of GNU. Read the jargon file. Just INFORM yourself so you know what you're talking about.

One last thought... I would really suck if this philosophical issue would stop people from using GNU/Linux... You don't have to agree to work together... Personnally I like the things RMS says, and I share his ideas. But that doesn't mean that I won't use or like programs/texts made by people that think otherwise ! Although I don't fully agree with the Open Source people that want to have as much GNU/Linux users as possible, I think they're important too for our community. They are the link between us and the Real World (tm). It's because of them that Quake III Arena will be released for X. But it's because of RMS/FSF that this community his a got a soul. We need electrons to produce electricity, but we also need morons to produce morality.

GNU/Linux. (>) Copyleft 1983-1999 The Free Software Foundation - All Rights Reversed.

[wb, wilde_beast@usa.net]