Bulk mail is when an entity, with a bulk mail permit, send "mass quantities" (250+ pcs?) of mail at one time. All the mail MUST be the same. You can not even have someone wet sign each one. But you can have the signature printed with the normal printing process. They can not be personalized in any way.
About 5 years ago I received a newsletter that was bulk mailed; the person doing the mailing was under that impression, too. However, he asked the post office about it, and apparently that wasn't quite correct. What he wanted (and was allowed) to do was put some check boxes on the newsletter with the recipient's subscription status, and checked off various boxes in red marker.
1) JD, who (at least claimed to) knew of no debts that he owed (the information may or may not have been in error).
2) Someone ordered comics by mail, thought he had stopped ordering them, moved, went off to college, had no reason to believe that he was still being billed.
These don't sound like profiles of people who "rip off" other people to me.
The peopel and examples listed clearly showed that these people had indeed made a mistake in their past (drinking and driving, and being delinquint with BMG when he thought he was too young for it to matter)....
And Katz is saying that these people shouldn't be held reponsible for their actions, or that credit agencies and banks are somehow intruding on our privacy by finding this out? I can't beleive this!
Being followed around for life by a minor misdeed from years ago is a bit too much; the punishment should fit the crime. At some point, one has paid one's debt to society and should be free to move on.
I trust that the next time a significant source release of this kind is done that you, personally, will download the source and study it exhaustively in this fashion.
When I was at Thinking Machines, they took the entire company to see Jurassic Park. What was more interesting to us was when the ubergeek bragged about networking together 8 Connection Machines (actually, they were just the cabinets, no processors; I don't remember, but they were probably running the random & pleasing blinkenlights hack that was floating around).
The C-300A was known to overclock extremely well to 450 MHz; I've been running mine that way pretty much 24x7 for over 18 months without a glitch. The overclock, of course, was to run the FSB at 100 MHz, since the chip is multiplier locked.
If a major seller of new books such as Amazon (particularly an internet retailer - as if Barnes and Noble had instantly this up in their brick and mortar stores nationwide, rather than doing a local trial) make it so easy to buy a used book as providing the option every time you want to buy a new one, then they really are changing the marketplace very fundamentally.
Certainly, and as usual there will be winners and losers. Seems to me that Amazon is doing the book purchasing community a great service (for once).
Say you're the author of a high priced low volume technical book (priced high because you know it's going to be low volume) - how would you feel if every purchaser was offered the choice of buy it new for $60 (you get your cut), or buy it used for $20 (you get zip)?
When I buy a good technical book I'm not likely to want to sell it all that quickly; it's a good reference to turn to when I need it. If it's not a useful reference, and it's not well written in the first place, I'm going to want to dump it and get at least a few pennies on the dollar for it. So what's so bad about that?
It's one thing if people on a budget search for something in a used book store or on e-bay, but it really alters the balance if everyone buying the book new automatically gets offered the "or buy it cheaper used" option. No laws being broken, for sure, but it's easy to see how this could have a huge impact on book sales, and ultimately reduce choice or increase prices for us all as book writing becomes finacially less attractive (not that it's very attractive to start with).
In which case a new equilibrium will (at least temporarily) be reached which may or may not result in more books being written. It might result in the distribution of books becoming more efficient.
However I will always feel that it would be great if the GNU people would realize that they are not writing "free" code and they are in fact writing code that will never be of as much use as it could be because software will never be "free". There will always be commercial software. Always. And it would be nice if the companies could benefit from the technology in the GNU stuff without having to worry about releasing the source and other licensing crap.
So it's to be a one-way street, then? Companies that wish to sell proprietary software should be able to benefit from the efforts of the free software community without giving anything back in return? That's a distinctly one-sided kind of "freedom".
The GPL isn't forcing anyone to do anything. It's simply saying "If you want to use my code, you have use it under the same conditions I am".
I am opposed to patents in general, but it would be less of an issue if people were more honest about what patents are for. Cloaking patents in terms such as "property" confuses the issue. The goal of patents is to promote innovation by giving inventors exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited amount of time. If it's admitted that patents are an attempt to increase innovation, we can discuss them on pragmatic grounds: where are they needed, what qualifies as sufficiently novel, what the terms should be in particular instances, and so forth. Instead, because of the word "property" a lot of people are convinced to believe that there's somehow an inherent right to a patent of the same degree as the right to own personal property.
If there are going to be patents at all, I don't see any particular reason why a patent couldn't apply to a particularly innovative software-based mechanism if it's determined that that's what's needed to encourage innovation. But the rules should be analogous to those for hardware inventions; software patents as they exist today undoubtedly have the opposite effect. Part of that is because of the incremental innovation that's so common in software, where using components as building blocks for other components is a common method of construction, and part of it is due to the proliferation of really trivial patents that just create barriers.
However, even if the goal is to be stimulation of innovation, we should look at it more closely; merely stimulating innovation doesn't necessarily result in progress. If people are stimulated to merely seek slight variations on the same theme in order to grab a patent, it isn't terribly productive, and likewise if people have to spend a lot of time working around existing patents.
Patents are what are socialistic; they're about as blatant a form of industrial policy as exists. In a true free market, people would be free to copy someone else's invention and undercut their price.
I said the exact opposite. The OS isn't GPL and Apple can't ship GPL software with it.
That's not true. Aggregation does not trigger the GPL. Please read section 2 of the GPL.
You need libraries to develop for an OS effectively. But nearly all libraries for Linux are GPL, and I don't have the time nor the money to develop everything myself (readline for example, icqlib for example).
Readline is an enhanced facility that's not a standard part of POSIX. Everything you need to develop for any other POSIX-compatible operating system (libc and the like) is LGPL. So if you can develop for any other POSIX-compatible system, you can develop for Linux just as well.
The thing that really gets me about most of the anti-GPL rants is that the basic attitude is "I really want to use all this good stuff, but since I want to make money, I should be entitled to use this without giving anything back," as though making money is somehow the highest calling in life and other people should respect that desire and allow you to use their sweat for your proprietary program. That's precisely what the GPL is all about; if you want to use GPL'ed code, you have to play by the same rules.
I would be willing to give up the GPL and copyleft if it also meant losing copyright altogether. In that case, I couldn't copyleft my code, but someone else also couldn't forbid me from using their code, they could only make it harder.
One pattern that is a pure random guess (I hate it when I reach the end of the game and have this. If I see it, or a related pattern, I take the guess on the spot to save time):
X X X
3 ? 3
1 ? 1
-----
You have absolutely no information about which of the two ? points is the mine and which is clear.
I like to start in the corner. My reasoning is that there are only three surrounding cells, and thus there is a better chance that there will be no adjacent mines. Having no adjacent mines clears additional territory and gives me more known points of attack. When the corners are exhausted, and there are no more provable clear points, I try edge points for the same reason (only five surrounding points). The idea's not to change the risk of hitting a mine (this has no effect on that), but rather to improve the chance of hitting a clear region that allows me more points of attack.
I haven't kept track (and I always make sure to remove minesweeper after I install a new version of Gnome or KDE after playing a game or two, or else I'd never have any spare time), but I'd SWAG that I win on the order of 15-20% of the time at expert level.
I don't believe 30 is enough to see really fluid motion. Motion on a TV never really looks fluid, and I believe that a lot of the disorientation that accompanies some Imax films is less from the very large screen than from the refresh rate being too low to permit really smooth motion.
I've found even a very simple scene, such as watching a wheeled vehicle move, in an Imax movie to be disorienting. The part of the view that seemed to cause me particular trouble was the wheels turning.
I think it also depends on the "velocity" of an object in motion on the screen. Very fast moving objects require faster update than slower moving objects. The test (which is admittedly imperfect) that I use is to turn my head rapidly from side to side. Even at 80 Hz refresh rate I can see the discrete frames. Again, this particular test has a lot of problems, and I may be testing the wrong thing, but I suspect that the reality lies somewhere between the 72-80'ish fps of the article and the 200 fps that some people are trying for.
They don't care that the decisions they make can ruin their family's lives as easily as it ruins their own.
Putting aside the fact that some of these people don't even have families, what's the difference between this and the example I gave of mountaineering? Mountaineering has a much higher fatality rate than drug use.
They don't care that being strung out on drugs keeps them from accomplishing their work and leads to other employees having to pick up for them.
That's strictly between the person and his or her employer. Plenty of people who are cold sober sandbag, too. Sandbagging at work isn't (in most cases) illegal, but it's grounds for disciplinary action. Why problems caused by drug use should be treated differently than other such problems is unclear to me, and why someone who is functioning well despite drug use should be read out of society is even more bizarre.
They lead you to cheat, to lie, to steal, and yes, to even murder your fellow man... all because of an addiction.
I'm actually rather less inclined to entirely dismiss this than one might think; there's plenty of evidence that gambling (legal as well as illegal) leads people to do many of the same things, and a lot of alcoholics are very good at covering up their problem, too. Nonetheless, if drugs were legally available at reasonable prices there would certainly be much less incentive -- or need -- to cover things up. It would also be a lot easier for people to seek treatment.
However, what is clear from the European experience is that a lot of these highly addictive drugs (specifically, opiates) have valid medical uses. Heroin is one of the strongest anti-pain agents known, and for people with terminal cancer such palliatives are their only hope for comfort in many cases. Yet it's illegal to prescribe them for this purpose in the US, because politicians are scared that it will send the wrong message to children (there's also fear of addiction, which seems somewhat beside the point, but it has also been demonstrated that people taking these drugs for intense pain rarely if ever develop addiction. Maybe only certain people can ever become addicted, or maybe only under certain circumstances). How that would be the case is beyond me; the message it sends is that there's a clear and very specific purpose for these agents, and that their use should be reserved for that purpose.
There is a class of drugs that I believe should be illegal to use and kept under tight control without a prescription: antibiotics. Yes, they are prescription-only, but they're also very easy to get in practice; just ask many doctors. The problem with antibiotics is that they do have effects on other people's health; they encourage the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can cause hard to treat illnesses in others. Antiviral agents may fall under the same category. In particular, the use of antibiotics in animal feed to promote growth is IMHO reprehensible.
Have to disagree here. I've seen way too many people who's lives have been adversely affected by drug use. What they don't realize is that just because they aren't out shooting and killing people, that doesn't mean that people's lives are not being affected by their choice of living. There may be a few exceptions, yes, but the large majority of drug users don't do any good by their drug use.
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of people's lives affected by my decision to become a software engineer. Other people's lives may be affected because I'm shy, or what not. Rob Hall's and Scott Fischer's families were deeply hurt by their choice to climb Mt. Everest (read Into Thin Air). Your point precisely is?
Everyone's choice of living ultimately affects everyone else, indirectly or otherwise. It isn't mandated that everyone has to live their lives in ways that are most beneficial to everyone else.
This is exactly the tenet of most drug users, especially the casual users. They believe what they're doing is OK, even though they are affecting the lives of those that care for them and love them, in a negative way.
Is that really a matter for the legal system, or would that best be handled by the people in question? What precisely is your point here?
He sees zero comprimise here, its his way or no way "Please don't develop non-free software".
Well, I think the very fact that he uses the word "please" should make clear the difference between RMS and any proprietary software vendor out there. I would be quite surprised to see any Microsoft EULA with the word "please" in it.
As far as Debian is concerned, the proper name for the Debian distribution is "Debian GNU/Linux".
Read the exchange more carefully -- RMS clearly noted the difference between Microsoft keeping something secret and a putative free software author keeping something secret.
Yes, you can buy the CD with precompiled binaries, but you will also get source. You can also download the source and compile it yourself. You could do so and then offer other people the precompiled binaries (with source) at zero charge and you'll hear nary a peep from the FSF. There's no hypocrisy at all here.
When will people learn that RMS means precisely what he says, nothing more and nothing less? He has made it abundantly clear that "free software" does not mean "zero price", but rather "liberty", and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with selling GPL'ed software for any price as long as the terms of the GPL are upheld. For years, Cygnus charged as much as $50,000 for support contracts on GNU software; the more you paid, the more service you got, but all changes went right back into the common pool. If you purchased a top tier support contract you went straight to the head of the queue if you had a problem. All of this happened in plain view, and with no assault whatsoever on the principles of the FSF. Yet people persist in misinterpreting what RMS means by "free" and use this misunderstanding to accuse him of hypocrisy for selling CD's.
I think it has been drummed into us constantly that the only way to make money from software is to sell it under proprietary terms, to the point that it is assumed that the only way that it is possible to make money from software is to keep it proprietary. Therefore, anyone claiming to sell free software must be guilty of GPL violation or of hypocrisy. This is one place where the Open Source movement has been more effective than the Free Software movement; it's a fundamental principle of Open Source that it is possible to build business models around what I'll call "free source" software. From an Open Source perspective, there's no particular difficulty here; ESR and friends have been proclaiming that it is possible to make money from "free source", and the FSF selling CD's is nothing more than an instance of this. It's not really an issue from a Free Software perspective either; it simply isn't addressed within that framework. However, since people don't (or won't) recognize this, RMS takes an undeserved thrashing over it.
Back to the parent comment, RMS has no objection to porting the API to the PS2. What RMS does object to is the means by which this is proposed: signing an NDA with Sony.
Your distinction between "Free Software" and "Open Source" makes no sense. GPLed code is "licensed by contract" (the GPL) while the Open Source Definition explicitely states that Open Sourec is freely redistributable -- in fact, it's the first requirement.
NO! The GPL is not a contract. It is a unilateral grant of rights above and beyond what copyright law allows, and it states precisely this. If you choose not to agree to the GPL, you possess the rights you would otherwise possess under copyright law in any case. Please see section 5 of the GPL.
UCITA is not a federal law. Blaming Clinton and Gore for that seems a bit much. As for the more people in prison, the vast majority of *those* are in state prisons; the number of federal prisoners is tiny compared to the number of state prisoners.
(And note that Texas has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.)
$ ls -l
total 15758
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 rlk bin 1835540 Sep 22 08:31 icvmjunk.h
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 rlk bin 13958826 Sep 23 21:42 icvmsup.c
...
There are about 25 files total. What's more, that big.c file is actually remarkably, er, compact, in that all of the actual code is macros. I tend to actually rather like macros more than is considered healthy in C (much less C++, but there are things that templates just can't do, or at least couldn't a few years ago), and I'm a big fan of metaprogramming, but this is seriously over the top even by my standards.
A tax cut stimulates the economy. Why? If you're a fairly high income earner, your marginal tax rate (the rate you pay on each additional dollar) can be very high. So high, in fact, that it may not be worth it to you do work harder/work overtime. If taxes are cut, the disincentives to working harder are decreased, so people work harder.
This is the accepted Trvth, but is it actually true, or is it simply what's been repeated so many times that people just assume that it's true? Note that the following might work against this:
It assumes that the marginal value of an extra dollar's income is the same at all levels of income. If the marginal value of income decreases greatly above a certain level, then a tax cut that puts someone above this line (for that particular individual) might not encourage that person to work harder at all; it might encourage that person to work less, to put his or her income closer to that knee.
It is clearly true that the marginal value of income is less for wealthy people than for poor people. Wealthy people are not likely to spend their off hours flipping burgers for an extra $3-4/hour (net). The issue is whether someone receiving additional income because of a tax cut chooses to spend some of that income purchasing extra leisure time (people talk about working harder to pay the taxman -- that's exactly what I mean).
Income level is not necessarily proportional to level of effort, particularly at high levels. For someone performing piece work, it quite clearly is; for an executive or professional, it often isn't.
There is a fairly clear region where a high tax rate does discourage productivity, but it's not one that people like to talk about -- it's the fact that welfare (and other) benefits are withdrawn quite abruptly at certain levels of income. This acts as an extremely high marginal tax rate, which I suspect is well in excess of 100% in some cases (certainly when there's a hard wall it is). In that situation, there's a very clear lack of incentive (and if the marginal rate exceeds 100%, an outright disincentive) to produce. But this isn't the situation people usually think of when they talk about reducing the tax rate.
This, in turn, increases the growth rate of GDP. Now maybe that increase in the growth rate looks insignificant, but remember, we're dealing with exponential growth.
Will the (hypothetical) extra growth really be sustained, or will it simply be a one-off effect that boosts growth for a few years until things settle down at basically the same level of growth?
Slashdot Mirror
Just bag TV altogether and work out, write free software, or do something otherwise active in that time.
About 5 years ago I received a newsletter that was bulk mailed; the person doing the mailing was under that impression, too. However, he asked the post office about it, and apparently that wasn't quite correct. What he wanted (and was allowed) to do was put some check boxes on the newsletter with the recipient's subscription status, and checked off various boxes in red marker.
The examples given here:
1) JD, who (at least claimed to) knew of no debts that he owed (the information may or may not have been in error).
2) Someone ordered comics by mail, thought he had stopped ordering them, moved, went off to college, had no reason to believe that he was still being billed.
These don't sound like profiles of people who "rip off" other people to me.
Being followed around for life by a minor misdeed from years ago is a bit too much; the punishment should fit the crime. At some point, one has paid one's debt to society and should be free to move on.
I trust that the next time a significant source release of this kind is done that you, personally, will download the source and study it exhaustively in this fashion.
When I was at Thinking Machines, they took the entire company to see Jurassic Park. What was more interesting to us was when the ubergeek bragged about networking together 8 Connection Machines (actually, they were just the cabinets, no processors; I don't remember, but they were probably running the random & pleasing blinkenlights hack that was floating around).
The C-300A was known to overclock extremely well to 450 MHz; I've been running mine that way pretty much 24x7 for over 18 months without a glitch. The overclock, of course, was to run the FSB at 100 MHz, since the chip is multiplier locked.
Certainly, and as usual there will be winners and losers. Seems to me that Amazon is doing the book purchasing community a great service (for once).
When I buy a good technical book I'm not likely to want to sell it all that quickly; it's a good reference to turn to when I need it. If it's not a useful reference, and it's not well written in the first place, I'm going to want to dump it and get at least a few pennies on the dollar for it. So what's so bad about that?
In which case a new equilibrium will (at least temporarily) be reached which may or may not result in more books being written. It might result in the distribution of books becoming more efficient.
So it's to be a one-way street, then? Companies that wish to sell proprietary software should be able to benefit from the efforts of the free software community without giving anything back in return? That's a distinctly one-sided kind of "freedom".
The GPL isn't forcing anyone to do anything. It's simply saying "If you want to use my code, you have use it under the same conditions I am".
Let me ask the inverse, since the ostensible purpose of patents is to encourage innovation: how are patents good for this industry?
I am opposed to patents in general, but it would be less of an issue if people were more honest about what patents are for. Cloaking patents in terms such as "property" confuses the issue. The goal of patents is to promote innovation by giving inventors exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited amount of time. If it's admitted that patents are an attempt to increase innovation, we can discuss them on pragmatic grounds: where are they needed, what qualifies as sufficiently novel, what the terms should be in particular instances, and so forth. Instead, because of the word "property" a lot of people are convinced to believe that there's somehow an inherent right to a patent of the same degree as the right to own personal property.
If there are going to be patents at all, I don't see any particular reason why a patent couldn't apply to a particularly innovative software-based mechanism if it's determined that that's what's needed to encourage innovation. But the rules should be analogous to those for hardware inventions; software patents as they exist today undoubtedly have the opposite effect. Part of that is because of the incremental innovation that's so common in software, where using components as building blocks for other components is a common method of construction, and part of it is due to the proliferation of really trivial patents that just create barriers.
However, even if the goal is to be stimulation of innovation, we should look at it more closely; merely stimulating innovation doesn't necessarily result in progress. If people are stimulated to merely seek slight variations on the same theme in order to grab a patent, it isn't terribly productive, and likewise if people have to spend a lot of time working around existing patents.
Patents are what are socialistic; they're about as blatant a form of industrial policy as exists. In a true free market, people would be free to copy someone else's invention and undercut their price.
I wonder how it got as far as it did. How would said fan even have standing to sue? Were these copies of bootlegs that he himself made?
That's not true. Aggregation does not trigger the GPL. Please read section 2 of the GPL.
Readline is an enhanced facility that's not a standard part of POSIX. Everything you need to develop for any other POSIX-compatible operating system (libc and the like) is LGPL. So if you can develop for any other POSIX-compatible system, you can develop for Linux just as well.
The thing that really gets me about most of the anti-GPL rants is that the basic attitude is "I really want to use all this good stuff, but since I want to make money, I should be entitled to use this without giving anything back," as though making money is somehow the highest calling in life and other people should respect that desire and allow you to use their sweat for your proprietary program. That's precisely what the GPL is all about; if you want to use GPL'ed code, you have to play by the same rules.
I would be willing to give up the GPL and copyleft if it also meant losing copyright altogether. In that case, I couldn't copyleft my code, but someone else also couldn't forbid me from using their code, they could only make it harder.
One pattern that is a pure random guess (I hate it when I reach the end of the game and have this. If I see it, or a related pattern, I take the guess on the spot to save time):
X X X
3 ? 3
1 ? 1
-----
You have absolutely no information about which of the two ? points is the mine and which is clear.
I like to start in the corner. My reasoning is that there are only three surrounding cells, and thus there is a better chance that there will be no adjacent mines. Having no adjacent mines clears additional territory and gives me more known points of attack. When the corners are exhausted, and there are no more provable clear points, I try edge points for the same reason (only five surrounding points). The idea's not to change the risk of hitting a mine (this has no effect on that), but rather to improve the chance of hitting a clear region that allows me more points of attack. I haven't kept track (and I always make sure to remove minesweeper after I install a new version of Gnome or KDE after playing a game or two, or else I'd never have any spare time), but I'd SWAG that I win on the order of 15-20% of the time at expert level.
I don't believe 30 is enough to see really fluid motion. Motion on a TV never really looks fluid, and I believe that a lot of the disorientation that accompanies some Imax films is less from the very large screen than from the refresh rate being too low to permit really smooth motion.
I've found even a very simple scene, such as watching a wheeled vehicle move, in an Imax movie to be disorienting. The part of the view that seemed to cause me particular trouble was the wheels turning.
I think it also depends on the "velocity" of an object in motion on the screen. Very fast moving objects require faster update than slower moving objects. The test (which is admittedly imperfect) that I use is to turn my head rapidly from side to side. Even at 80 Hz refresh rate I can see the discrete frames. Again, this particular test has a lot of problems, and I may be testing the wrong thing, but I suspect that the reality lies somewhere between the 72-80'ish fps of the article and the 200 fps that some people are trying for.
Putting aside the fact that some of these people don't even have families, what's the difference between this and the example I gave of mountaineering? Mountaineering has a much higher fatality rate than drug use.
That's strictly between the person and his or her employer. Plenty of people who are cold sober sandbag, too. Sandbagging at work isn't (in most cases) illegal, but it's grounds for disciplinary action. Why problems caused by drug use should be treated differently than other such problems is unclear to me, and why someone who is functioning well despite drug use should be read out of society is even more bizarre.
I'm actually rather less inclined to entirely dismiss this than one might think; there's plenty of evidence that gambling (legal as well as illegal) leads people to do many of the same things, and a lot of alcoholics are very good at covering up their problem, too. Nonetheless, if drugs were legally available at reasonable prices there would certainly be much less incentive -- or need -- to cover things up. It would also be a lot easier for people to seek treatment.
However, what is clear from the European experience is that a lot of these highly addictive drugs (specifically, opiates) have valid medical uses. Heroin is one of the strongest anti-pain agents known, and for people with terminal cancer such palliatives are their only hope for comfort in many cases. Yet it's illegal to prescribe them for this purpose in the US, because politicians are scared that it will send the wrong message to children (there's also fear of addiction, which seems somewhat beside the point, but it has also been demonstrated that people taking these drugs for intense pain rarely if ever develop addiction. Maybe only certain people can ever become addicted, or maybe only under certain circumstances). How that would be the case is beyond me; the message it sends is that there's a clear and very specific purpose for these agents, and that their use should be reserved for that purpose.
There is a class of drugs that I believe should be illegal to use and kept under tight control without a prescription: antibiotics. Yes, they are prescription-only, but they're also very easy to get in practice; just ask many doctors. The problem with antibiotics is that they do have effects on other people's health; they encourage the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can cause hard to treat illnesses in others. Antiviral agents may fall under the same category. In particular, the use of antibiotics in animal feed to promote growth is IMHO reprehensible.
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of people's lives affected by my decision to become a software engineer. Other people's lives may be affected because I'm shy, or what not. Rob Hall's and Scott Fischer's families were deeply hurt by their choice to climb Mt. Everest (read Into Thin Air). Your point precisely is?
Everyone's choice of living ultimately affects everyone else, indirectly or otherwise. It isn't mandated that everyone has to live their lives in ways that are most beneficial to everyone else.
Is that really a matter for the legal system, or would that best be handled by the people in question? What precisely is your point here?
Well, I think the very fact that he uses the word "please" should make clear the difference between RMS and any proprietary software vendor out there. I would be quite surprised to see any Microsoft EULA with the word "please" in it.
As far as Debian is concerned, the proper name for the Debian distribution is "Debian GNU/Linux".
Read the exchange more carefully -- RMS clearly noted the difference between Microsoft keeping something secret and a putative free software author keeping something secret.
Yes, you can buy the CD with precompiled binaries, but you will also get source. You can also download the source and compile it yourself. You could do so and then offer other people the precompiled binaries (with source) at zero charge and you'll hear nary a peep from the FSF. There's no hypocrisy at all here.
When will people learn that RMS means precisely what he says, nothing more and nothing less? He has made it abundantly clear that "free software" does not mean "zero price", but rather "liberty", and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with selling GPL'ed software for any price as long as the terms of the GPL are upheld. For years, Cygnus charged as much as $50,000 for support contracts on GNU software; the more you paid, the more service you got, but all changes went right back into the common pool. If you purchased a top tier support contract you went straight to the head of the queue if you had a problem. All of this happened in plain view, and with no assault whatsoever on the principles of the FSF. Yet people persist in misinterpreting what RMS means by "free" and use this misunderstanding to accuse him of hypocrisy for selling CD's.
I think it has been drummed into us constantly that the only way to make money from software is to sell it under proprietary terms, to the point that it is assumed that the only way that it is possible to make money from software is to keep it proprietary. Therefore, anyone claiming to sell free software must be guilty of GPL violation or of hypocrisy. This is one place where the Open Source movement has been more effective than the Free Software movement; it's a fundamental principle of Open Source that it is possible to build business models around what I'll call "free source" software. From an Open Source perspective, there's no particular difficulty here; ESR and friends have been proclaiming that it is possible to make money from "free source", and the FSF selling CD's is nothing more than an instance of this. It's not really an issue from a Free Software perspective either; it simply isn't addressed within that framework. However, since people don't (or won't) recognize this, RMS takes an undeserved thrashing over it.
Back to the parent comment, RMS has no objection to porting the API to the PS2. What RMS does object to is the means by which this is proposed: signing an NDA with Sony.
NO! The GPL is not a contract. It is a unilateral grant of rights above and beyond what copyright law allows, and it states precisely this. If you choose not to agree to the GPL, you possess the rights you would otherwise possess under copyright law in any case. Please see section 5 of the GPL.
UCITA is not a federal law. Blaming Clinton and Gore for that seems a bit much. As for the more people in prison, the vast majority of *those* are in state prisons; the number of federal prisoners is tiny compared to the number of state prisoners.
(And note that Texas has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.)
And a 1.8 MB .h file:
.c file is actually remarkably, er, compact, in that all of the actual code is macros. I tend to actually rather like macros more than is considered healthy in C (much less C++, but there are things that templates just can't do, or at least couldn't a few years ago), and I'm a big fan of metaprogramming, but this is seriously over the top even by my standards.
$ ls -l
total 15758
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 rlk bin 1835540 Sep 22 08:31 icvmjunk.h
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 rlk bin 13958826 Sep 23 21:42 icvmsup.c
...
There are about 25 files total. What's more, that big
Don't forget that most of that debt is owed to ourselves (in the form of Treasury notes and other bonds).
This is the accepted Trvth, but is it actually true, or is it simply what's been repeated so many times that people just assume that it's true? Note that the following might work against this:
It assumes that the marginal value of an extra dollar's income is the same at all levels of income. If the marginal value of income decreases greatly above a certain level, then a tax cut that puts someone above this line (for that particular individual) might not encourage that person to work harder at all; it might encourage that person to work less, to put his or her income closer to that knee.
It is clearly true that the marginal value of income is less for wealthy people than for poor people. Wealthy people are not likely to spend their off hours flipping burgers for an extra $3-4/hour (net). The issue is whether someone receiving additional income because of a tax cut chooses to spend some of that income purchasing extra leisure time (people talk about working harder to pay the taxman -- that's exactly what I mean).
Income level is not necessarily proportional to level of effort, particularly at high levels. For someone performing piece work, it quite clearly is; for an executive or professional, it often isn't.
There is a fairly clear region where a high tax rate does discourage productivity, but it's not one that people like to talk about -- it's the fact that welfare (and other) benefits are withdrawn quite abruptly at certain levels of income. This acts as an extremely high marginal tax rate, which I suspect is well in excess of 100% in some cases (certainly when there's a hard wall it is). In that situation, there's a very clear lack of incentive (and if the marginal rate exceeds 100%, an outright disincentive) to produce. But this isn't the situation people usually think of when they talk about reducing the tax rate.
Will the (hypothetical) extra growth really be sustained, or will it simply be a one-off effect that boosts growth for a few years until things settle down at basically the same level of growth?