The price of corn (to use the most inefficient and expensive example) may go up from momentary demand, but that doesn't mean that the cost of other foods also goes up. I don't see any plans to make ethanol from legumes, food-grade grains and many other dietary staples. If people starve, it will be because they've been subsisting only on corn grown in the midwest U.S. and I don't believe that.
Even corn ethanol can be produced for less than half the cost of gasoline. Thus, over time, the cost of producing all foods other than corn goes *down* because the energy costs for those (production & transportation) are chopped in half.
It's even possible that it may cost less to bring corn itself to the table thanks to cheaper fuel, so I just don't buy the starvation argument. It looks to me like it would be the opposite, that economic opportunities everywhere would increase, and the result would be more food and more food transportation, not less.
I'm sure someone will point out that corn-based ethanol, if not grown using sustainable agriculture will destroy topsoil and use up valuable water, but don't diss ethanol in general, there's plenty of possible improvements that are on their way that will improve full-cycle efficiency, reduce topsoil impact, improve genetic diversity, improve soil quality... but I won't go into them all right now.
I think one of the most valuable results of corn ethanol production has been the raising of the awareness level to the point where people understand that, yes, there is another way besides petroleum. They have witnessed at least some ethanol going into their fuel tanks and so Joe Public doesn't think ethanol or alternative energy is some sort of fringe idea.
Now we just have to find the best solution or solutions and switch (rotate?) as necessary to what currently makes the most sense and improve, improve, improve.
Time is of the essence because billions of people in the developing world are growing wealthy and will be trying to drive a car for the first time whether the planet likes it or not, and of course it's going to be much better if we have those choices worked out by that time.
Does this include dropping packets, dropping connections, or what? Wasn't traffic shaping originally supposed to only *delay* some packets in favor of others?
Looks like they can call something "traffic shaping" and then do whatever they want with the traffic, including not meet any of their other commitments.
I don't know which is worse, some years of jail time (and getting off for good behavior), or being charged $222,000 for 24 lousy song files. The Thomas case makes being the #1 world pirate look glamorous by comparison.
Of course, due to the huge drop in piracy that this represents (-90%!), I can only wonder about what a +90% upsurge in global warming is going to do to this planet. Yikes.
Some say the world evolved in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
To be sure, some sparks were still needed for the ice theory but there you have it.
Sure, there are other targets that could have impressed people somewhat, but in terms of scientific street-cred, I think it is hard to beat Sputnik and the moon shot.
Launching a satellite for the first time not only captured the public's imagination, a scientist in 1957 would look at this Sputnik phenomenon and conclude that it presented a pretty airtight proof that the Soviets could build an ICBM to reach any spot on earth.
A moon shot implies that too, but because it is so exacting, it further implies that the U.S. ICBMs would have enough control to hit accurately (accurately enough to hit the enemy and not the ally - very important). If you can land on the moon and return then presumably you can control your orbits well enough.
A moon base and a space station prove other things, but I suppose in terms of raw security implications they won't be as critical for a while.
"going to the moon in the 1960s was more about politics than it was about science"
Right, but to be precise it was a political chess move that cornered the Soviets into a position where they didn't have any easy responses. That's why Kennedy wanted something that was "hard" to do. At the time, Mars would have been impossible, and Venus is still impossible (to land on). So the Soviets were basically trapped as far as taking any larger "leap" for mankind. The largest possible leap had already been taken.
There were bigger reasons that just putting one over their nemesis. The 1957 Sputnik launch had sucked off a lot of prestige. Arms sales, alliances and whatnot flow your way when you can prove you have the right stuff. If you appear to fall behind on something like intercontinental ballistics (as it was at the time) people could switch alliances or arms purchase decisions since they'll doubt you can deliver security. Even if leaders didn't like the Soviets, they might still make deals with them. The whole ball of wax could unravel...
Was it really a conscious decision by one demonizable person, or a prevalent attitude?
To have abandoned a heavy-lift capability like Saturn V, to have dumped such precious knowledge into the equivalent of a junkyard... I think it betrays the attitude that scientific knowledge, however amazing its accomplishments may have been, was considered disposable! And it goes without saying that the people who sweated it out, most visibly the test pilots and astronauts that helped test and prove those technologies (even if at one time they were hailed as the heroes of the whole thing) even their contributions were practically thrown away. Someone who would throw this away would have to be thinking that the effort that was put in by everyone involved was not heroic but ordinary.
I don't think one person could have made such a decision by himself without that prevalent attitude to support it. It would be too... inhuman.
"...seems to actually be a mouth piece for one vendors line of products, regardless of their suitability or how they compare to the competition."
I've read their 2008 buying guide, the one that keeps pestering Mac users that the best thing about their Mac is that it can also run Vishta (that takes some nerve). If you can keep reading you then see that they go out on a limb to recommend a specific version of Vishta as "the best". That is, they want you to actually pay to upgrade Home Basic, not to XP, but to another, equally baleful version of Vishta. What kind of advice is that? It's not expert, objective or independent in any sense of those words, and I concluded it wasn't worth a subscription price. Go ahead and read it if you can find a copy that hasn't been burnt already. Very illuminating.
So it's far, far gone and beyond what even you have said. In the past I tried buying some of their recommended products, but in general their picks never impressed me with any sort of amazing quality or value. I would say that they're not just a mouthpiece for the biggest brand names, they're down to just being a sneaky form of advertising.
The volt is just being shown around as a concept car at this point (see the wikipedia article Chevrolet_volt). How long does it take a concept car to actually get built and sold? They say 2010, but I'll be surprised if they can move that quickly on a concept car. In the meantime, hybrids are here already, and they have the sales figures to prove that the public likes them.
Domestic automakers dropped the ball on hybrid/EV research and toyota and honda ate their lunch. I guess this is a sign they want their marketing people to get a better pulse of what people will actually be willing to buy.
It's a relatively healthy sign, because if it had been up to them, they would have continued to bet that most people would ignore environmental realities and just keep happily buying view-blocking lane-filling massive-accident-causing CO2-belching 6 mpg monster SUV dreadnaughts.
"If we don't find a transmission in my lifetime I will have to come to the conclusion that life is in fact rare in the universe."
Your argument seems to depend on finding a civilization that has developed radio but which has not yet developed the good sense to keep its radio beams from escaping into space. That provides a very tiny window of opportunity in which to get a signal, and as late bloomers in this universe, that window may already be past us by a billion years and all of the aliens so advanced that they are invisible for all intents and purposes.
Also, what makes you think that all intelligent life has to have developed long-distance broadcast radio technology? We may be the only ones that wanted or needed to invent it, for cultural or physiological reasons. Even supposing that there are enough aliens physiologically similar to us (thereby needing some understandable sort of audio communication), it could easily be the case that everywhere else the telephone was invented first, lessening the need for radio to be developed, or only developing much later in a very different format. If the phone system were not culturally top-down and profit-driven, the ability to make one-to-many broadcasts could have developed long before radio, and radio might only be used for mindless things (like garage door openers, presidential debates, that sort of thing). Technology doesn't have to develop everywhere else the same way.
That's why, if nothing is detected for 100 years, I won't be surprised.
It's fully possible that life is abundant, but intelligent life rare, and intelligent life with radio tech rarer, and intelligent life with radio and willing to let it reach us rarer still. (You have to factor in that if they are smart, they may not be willing to be detected by psychotic warmongers.) Rarest is if they *want* to reach us, are not especially afraid of the consequences and are actively trying with focused beams. Even in such a case, we would have to be listening on all frequencies, in all directions, all of the time and be able to distinguish it as something non-random. That's a tall order.
Then you may want to take signal blockage into account, as there may be sporadic clouds or outbursts from natural radio sources in the foreground, orbiting asteroid belts, gravitational bending, etc.
Yes, there are a lot of stars out there, but we're kind of dependent on a very specific radio standard that may not be as universal as people think...
I hope this does not rattle the windmill lobby's cage, but if a structure is going to be built either way, and if it constantly vibrates due to wind movements, putting a windmill on top of it might not be as great a solution as adding strands of this stuff to it.
Efficiency might not be the only consideration, as you may not be interested in maximizing energy output necessarily. You might be more interested in getting enough energy for the MFC to pay for itself, and that the structure doesn't fall over while you're doing it:/
"By applying voltage to the MFC, the ceramic fibers change shape to expand or contract and turn the resulting force into a bending or twisting action on the material. Likewise, voltage is generated in proportion to the force applied to the MFC material"
That means that you could attach these to trees, swaying skyscrapers, radio towers, etc., and these things would start generating energy just from their natural motion.
The other way to look at this is that it would take 100 years for signals emitted from within this (mostly empty) 100 light-year sphere to get here.
If we extend it to 1000 LY in order to increase our chances, that means that any signal we get now is from a civilization 1000 years ago -- which is now 1000 years more advanced than when they sent that signal. Assuming they will receive/our/ signals in 1000 years, that gives us about 2000 to evacuate and go mum before we would expect their 1000-year advanced disintegrator ray to hit these coordinates.:)
To sum up, either we have to be really, really lucky to find aliens "nearby" who haven't figured out how to stay quiet, or, the aliens are so far away that we might be luckiest if they don't find us.
"If you could tell me the proper way of dumbing science down so that all denominators are equally satisfied, let me know so I can forward your request to those scientists."
Maybe they could learn a lesson from Wikipedia on that point? Their article on the subject (Aurora_borealis) is pretty readable, has collected some nice images, but it includes plenty of links to more tedious (but informative) reading material at the bottom. The CNN blurb is so dumbed down that it's impossible to figure out what exactly is NEW about this experiment, seeing as most of us already knew that the Lights had something to do with charged particles from the solar wind flowing across the magnetosphere in the polar regions. As far as I could tell, no scientific progress was made here because we haven't discovered anything we didn't already know.
When that happens, the dumbing down passed the mark.
Hi honey this is your wife. I'm sorry I just uploaded the most incredibly embarrasing pictures of when you were flapping around in your underwear during our vacation to Picasa, YouTube, Gdrive, and any other place that I could find. I hope you don't mind. All of your relatives are laughing their asses off. I accidentally uploaded our tax documents too using some toolbar thingy. You'll just go up there and delete them right? OK I thought that would be possible, thx, bye.
Suddenly privacy is important again?
on
SCO Layoffs Begin
·
· Score: 1
"has asked a federal bankruptcy court to keep their identities secret because it fears they could be harassed."
That's great. At least/somebody/ can get some privacy.
Actually boss, never mind that pay raise I wanted, just make my salary exactly $65535 and I'll forget about the whole thing.
You are using excel 2007, right?
How many members of the public have actually done so, on a powerful telescope? And if they could, would they distinguish the footprints as that of an astronaut versus some other countrynaut? Even if an expert could, would you believe their snapshots?
Remember, they don't have to convince YOU, only their public.
Even so, I doubt they would go to the trouble. Already being there would be a great honor, so they probably wouldn't find a need to claim the extra glory of being first. However, in theory, if you let enough automated rovers loose on the lunar surface, quite a bit of a dress-up job could be done: flags could be taken down, footprints and mirrors brushed over with moondirt, landers reflagged and redecorated to look like other equipment, basically they could say they landed there looking for Apollo and searched all over the place (thus the vehicle tracks) but, to their own surprise and embarrassment they didn't find anything. Proving otherwise without those honking big and obvious pieces of evidence would be difficult.
So should there be a permanent manned presence on the moon to prevent that? No, and it could escalate into "rover wars" or some sort of other expensive military buildup. The money would be better spent on science, history, math, etc., the antidotes to an ignorant and gullible public.
"I already explained how to "fix" the license to prevent locking it up under the GPL."
So you're saying you want the BSD license to be fixed so that it is less free than what it is now? You admit that it provides too much freedom?
"What you're suggesting is destroying the very basis of the *BSDs, and making it just another Linux distro, with all the problems and issues that entails."
"Destroy" is your own choice of words, but I don't see where the destruction comes from. One project switching isn't going to do that. Even if it's true that your prediction of destruction results, wouldn't that prove with hindsight that BSDL was a legally inadequate construction? By claiming destruction, aren't you making my point?
"Those who believe that using the GPL to force their political will on others is a good thing are incredibly naive about how the world works."
Where have I used force or politics in any of this? I just made a simple, ironic suggestion to Theo. How you are able to make that leap is beyond me. You sound like someone who violated some author's rights under the GPL and got caught.
"They, without legal counsel, decided that only one license could be valid, so they quite deliberately removed the BSD bits."
I think they were legitimately confused about how to reflect a dual license situation in code, where one of the two licenses allowed by the author was GPL and so it left the author's intent less clear than usual. If you were in their shoes, what would you have done?
"Nothing has been "fixed"."
That's not what I've read. If you want to prove it, show me the URL where they are distributing the offending copy. If you don't have that then you are accusing people based on what you think they will do, before they have actually done it. Note that the legal analysis may come back saying that it is well within their rights to do so, but that they may decide to respect the author's current wishes anyway, but they should only do that if this doesn't set a precedent that harms their future rights. Whatever happens, the code will remain open, and this is better than not getting anything back at all (which BSDL is claimed to happily tolerate), so I don't see what all the fuss is about. It seems like the text of BSDL or its variants are not really matching the intent or the desires of the authors that use it, and that the GPL is closer to what they need.
"I suggest you don't disparage the BSD license or developers."
Disparage? No, I am just telling you how to fix the license's, er... incompatibilities, and raise the popularity of the developers to near superstardom by increasing the driverset of the BSD kernel to match those available to Linux. You know, a larger installed base? However, if these small matters don't interest you, you don't have to take my advice if you don't want it, seeing as I'm not a lawyer or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
The price of corn (to use the most inefficient and expensive example) may go up from momentary demand, but that doesn't mean that the cost of other foods also goes up. I don't see any plans to make ethanol from legumes, food-grade grains and many other dietary staples. If people starve, it will be because they've been subsisting only on corn grown in the midwest U.S. and I don't believe that.
Even corn ethanol can be produced for less than half the cost of gasoline. Thus, over time, the cost of producing all foods other than corn goes *down* because the energy costs for those (production & transportation) are chopped in half.
It's even possible that it may cost less to bring corn itself to the table thanks to cheaper fuel, so I just don't buy the starvation argument. It looks to me like it would be the opposite, that economic opportunities everywhere would increase, and the result would be more food and more food transportation, not less.
I'm sure someone will point out that corn-based ethanol, if not grown using sustainable agriculture will destroy topsoil and use up valuable water, but don't diss ethanol in general, there's plenty of possible improvements that are on their way that will improve full-cycle efficiency, reduce topsoil impact, improve genetic diversity, improve soil quality... but I won't go into them all right now.
I think one of the most valuable results of corn ethanol production has been the raising of the awareness level to the point where people understand that, yes, there is another way besides petroleum. They have witnessed at least some ethanol going into their fuel tanks and so Joe Public doesn't think ethanol or alternative energy is some sort of fringe idea.
Now we just have to find the best solution or solutions and switch (rotate?) as necessary to what currently makes the most sense and improve, improve, improve.
Time is of the essence because billions of people in the developing world are growing wealthy and will be trying to drive a car for the first time whether the planet likes it or not, and of course it's going to be much better if we have those choices worked out by that time.
Does this include dropping packets, dropping connections, or what? Wasn't traffic shaping originally supposed to only *delay* some packets in favor of others?
Looks like they can call something "traffic shaping" and then do whatever they want with the traffic, including not meet any of their other commitments.
I don't know which is worse, some years of jail time (and getting off for good behavior), or being charged $222,000 for 24 lousy song files. The Thomas case makes being the #1 world pirate look glamorous by comparison.
Of course, due to the huge drop in piracy that this represents (-90%!), I can only wonder about what a +90% upsurge in global warming is going to do to this planet. Yikes.
To be sure, some sparks were still needed for the ice theory but there you have it.
Sure, there are other targets that could have impressed people somewhat, but in terms of scientific street-cred, I think it is hard to beat Sputnik and the moon shot.
Launching a satellite for the first time not only captured the public's imagination, a scientist in 1957 would look at this Sputnik phenomenon and conclude that it presented a pretty airtight proof that the Soviets could build an ICBM to reach any spot on earth.
A moon shot implies that too, but because it is so exacting, it further implies that the U.S. ICBMs would have enough control to hit accurately (accurately enough to hit the enemy and not the ally - very important). If you can land on the moon and return then presumably you can control your orbits well enough.
A moon base and a space station prove other things, but I suppose in terms of raw security implications they won't be as critical for a while.
"going to the moon in the 1960s was more about politics than it was about science"
Right, but to be precise it was a political chess move that cornered the Soviets into a position where they didn't have any easy responses. That's why Kennedy wanted something that was "hard" to do. At the time, Mars would have been impossible, and Venus is still impossible (to land on). So the Soviets were basically trapped as far as taking any larger "leap" for mankind. The largest possible leap had already been taken.
There were bigger reasons that just putting one over their nemesis. The 1957 Sputnik launch had sucked off a lot of prestige. Arms sales, alliances and whatnot flow your way when you can prove you have the right stuff. If you appear to fall behind on something like intercontinental ballistics (as it was at the time) people could switch alliances or arms purchase decisions since they'll doubt you can deliver security. Even if leaders didn't like the Soviets, they might still make deals with them. The whole ball of wax could unravel...
Was it really a conscious decision by one demonizable person, or a prevalent attitude?
To have abandoned a heavy-lift capability like Saturn V, to have dumped such precious knowledge into the equivalent of a junkyard... I think it betrays the attitude that scientific knowledge, however amazing its accomplishments may have been, was considered disposable! And it goes without saying that the people who sweated it out, most visibly the test pilots and astronauts that helped test and prove those technologies (even if at one time they were hailed as the heroes of the whole thing) even their contributions were practically thrown away. Someone who would throw this away would have to be thinking that the effort that was put in by everyone involved was not heroic but ordinary.
I don't think one person could have made such a decision by himself without that prevalent attitude to support it. It would be too... inhuman.
"...seems to actually be a mouth piece for one vendors line of products, regardless of their suitability or how they compare to the competition."
I've read their 2008 buying guide, the one that keeps pestering Mac users that the best thing about their Mac is that it can also run Vishta (that takes some nerve). If you can keep reading you then see that they go out on a limb to recommend a specific version of Vishta as "the best". That is, they want you to actually pay to upgrade Home Basic, not to XP, but to another, equally baleful version of Vishta. What kind of advice is that? It's not expert, objective or independent in any sense of those words, and I concluded it wasn't worth a subscription price. Go ahead and read it if you can find a copy that hasn't been burnt already. Very illuminating.
So it's far, far gone and beyond what even you have said. In the past I tried buying some of their recommended products, but in general their picks never impressed me with any sort of amazing quality or value. I would say that they're not just a mouthpiece for the biggest brand names, they're down to just being a sneaky form of advertising.
Maybe netcraft can confirm this?
The volt is just being shown around as a concept car at this point (see the wikipedia article Chevrolet_volt). How long does it take a concept car to actually get built and sold? They say 2010, but I'll be surprised if they can move that quickly on a concept car. In the meantime, hybrids are here already, and they have the sales figures to prove that the public likes them.
Domestic automakers dropped the ball on hybrid/EV research and toyota and honda ate their lunch. I guess this is a sign they want their marketing people to get a better pulse of what people will actually be willing to buy.
It's a relatively healthy sign, because if it had been up to them, they would have continued to bet that most people would ignore environmental realities and just keep happily buying view-blocking lane-filling massive-accident-causing CO2-belching 6 mpg monster SUV dreadnaughts.
"If we don't find a transmission in my lifetime I will have to come to the conclusion that life is in fact rare in the universe."
Your argument seems to depend on finding a civilization that has developed radio but which has not yet developed the good sense to keep its radio beams from escaping into space. That provides a very tiny window of opportunity in which to get a signal, and as late bloomers in this universe, that window may already be past us by a billion years and all of the aliens so advanced that they are invisible for all intents and purposes.
Also, what makes you think that all intelligent life has to have developed long-distance broadcast radio technology? We may be the only ones that wanted or needed to invent it, for cultural or physiological reasons. Even supposing that there are enough aliens physiologically similar to us (thereby needing some understandable sort of audio communication), it could easily be the case that everywhere else the telephone was invented first, lessening the need for radio to be developed, or only developing much later in a very different format. If the phone system were not culturally top-down and profit-driven, the ability to make one-to-many broadcasts could have developed long before radio, and radio might only be used for mindless things (like garage door openers, presidential debates, that sort of thing). Technology doesn't have to develop everywhere else the same way.
That's why, if nothing is detected for 100 years, I won't be surprised.
It's fully possible that life is abundant, but intelligent life rare, and intelligent life with radio tech rarer, and intelligent life with radio and willing to let it reach us rarer still. (You have to factor in that if they are smart, they may not be willing to be detected by psychotic warmongers.) Rarest is if they *want* to reach us, are not especially afraid of the consequences and are actively trying with focused beams. Even in such a case, we would have to be listening on all frequencies, in all directions, all of the time and be able to distinguish it as something non-random. That's a tall order.
Then you may want to take signal blockage into account, as there may be sporadic clouds or outbursts from natural radio sources in the foreground, orbiting asteroid belts, gravitational bending, etc.
Yes, there are a lot of stars out there, but we're kind of dependent on a very specific radio standard that may not be as universal as people think...
I hope this does not rattle the windmill lobby's cage, but if a structure is going to be built either way, and if it constantly vibrates due to wind movements, putting a windmill on top of it might not be as great a solution as adding strands of this stuff to it.
:/
Efficiency might not be the only consideration, as you may not be interested in maximizing energy output necessarily. You might be more interested in getting enough energy for the MFC to pay for itself, and that the structure doesn't fall over while you're doing it
"By applying voltage to the MFC, the ceramic fibers change shape to expand or contract and turn the resulting force into a bending or twisting action on the material. Likewise, voltage is generated in proportion to the force applied to the MFC material"
That means that you could attach these to trees, swaying skyscrapers, radio towers, etc., and these things would start generating energy just from their natural motion.
The other way to look at this is that it would take 100 years for signals emitted from within this (mostly empty) 100 light-year sphere to get here.
/our/ signals in 1000 years, that gives us about 2000 to evacuate and go mum before we would expect their 1000-year advanced disintegrator ray to hit these coordinates. :)
If we extend it to 1000 LY in order to increase our chances, that means that any signal we get now is from a civilization 1000 years ago -- which is now 1000 years more advanced than when they sent that signal. Assuming they will receive
To sum up, either we have to be really, really lucky to find aliens "nearby" who haven't figured out how to stay quiet, or, the aliens are so far away that we might be luckiest if they don't find us.
"If you could tell me the proper way of dumbing science down so that all denominators are equally satisfied, let me know so I can forward your request to those scientists."
Maybe they could learn a lesson from Wikipedia on that point? Their article on the subject (Aurora_borealis) is pretty readable, has collected some nice images, but it includes plenty of links to more tedious (but informative) reading material at the bottom. The CNN blurb is so dumbed down that it's impossible to figure out what exactly is NEW about this experiment, seeing as most of us already knew that the Lights had something to do with charged particles from the solar wind flowing across the magnetosphere in the polar regions. As far as I could tell, no scientific progress was made here because we haven't discovered anything we didn't already know.
When that happens, the dumbing down passed the mark.
Hi honey this is your wife. I'm sorry I just uploaded the most incredibly embarrasing pictures of when you were flapping around in your underwear during our vacation to Picasa, YouTube, Gdrive, and any other place that I could find. I hope you don't mind. All of your relatives are laughing their asses off. I accidentally uploaded our tax documents too using some toolbar thingy. You'll just go up there and delete them right? OK I thought that would be possible, thx, bye.
"has asked a federal bankruptcy court to keep their identities secret because it fears they could be harassed."
/somebody/ can get some privacy.
That's great. At least
Actually boss, never mind that pay raise I wanted, just make my salary exactly $65535 and I'll forget about the whole thing. You are using excel 2007, right?
How many members of the public have actually done so, on a powerful telescope? And if they could, would they distinguish the footprints as that of an astronaut versus some other countrynaut? Even if an expert could, would you believe their snapshots?
Remember, they don't have to convince YOU, only their public.
Even so, I doubt they would go to the trouble. Already being there would be a great honor, so they probably wouldn't find a need to claim the extra glory of being first. However, in theory, if you let enough automated rovers loose on the lunar surface, quite a bit of a dress-up job could be done: flags could be taken down, footprints and mirrors brushed over with moondirt, landers reflagged and redecorated to look like other equipment, basically they could say they landed there looking for Apollo and searched all over the place (thus the vehicle tracks) but, to their own surprise and embarrassment they didn't find anything. Proving otherwise without those honking big and obvious pieces of evidence would be difficult.
So should there be a permanent manned presence on the moon to prevent that? No, and it could escalate into "rover wars" or some sort of other expensive military buildup. The money would be better spent on science, history, math, etc., the antidotes to an ignorant and gullible public.
All they have to do is go up to the moon and remove the original Apollo lander, the flag, etc., then claim they found nothing there.
Then if they tell their own people they were the first ones on the moon, who could prove otherwise?
"I already explained how to "fix" the license to prevent locking it up under the GPL."
So you're saying you want the BSD license to be fixed so that it is less free than what it is now? You admit that it provides too much freedom?
"What you're suggesting is destroying the very basis of the *BSDs, and making it just another Linux distro, with all the problems and issues that entails."
"Destroy" is your own choice of words, but I don't see where the destruction comes from. One project switching isn't going to do that. Even if it's true that your prediction of destruction results,
wouldn't that prove with hindsight that BSDL was a legally inadequate construction? By claiming destruction, aren't you making my point?
"Those who believe that using the GPL to force their political will on others is a good thing are incredibly naive about how the world works."
Where have I used force or politics in any of this? I just made a simple, ironic suggestion to Theo. How you are able to make that leap is beyond me. You sound like someone who violated some author's rights under the GPL and got caught.
Darl, is that you?
"They, without legal counsel, decided that only one license could be valid, so they quite deliberately removed the BSD bits."
I think they were legitimately confused about how to reflect a dual
license situation in code, where one of the two licenses allowed by
the author was GPL and so it left the author's intent less clear than
usual. If you were in their shoes, what would you have done?
"Nothing has been "fixed"."
That's not what I've read. If you want to prove it, show me the URL
where they are distributing the offending copy. If you don't have
that then you are accusing people based on what you think they will
do, before they have actually done it. Note that the legal analysis
may come back saying that it is well within their rights to do so, but
that they may decide to respect the author's current wishes anyway,
but they should only do that if this doesn't set a precedent that
harms their future rights. Whatever happens, the code will remain
open, and this is better than not getting anything back at all (which
BSDL is claimed to happily tolerate), so I don't see what all the fuss
is about. It seems like the text of BSDL or its variants are not
really matching the intent or the desires of the authors that use it,
and that the GPL is closer to what they need.
"I suggest you don't disparage the BSD license or developers."
Disparage? No, I am just telling you how to fix the license's, er... incompatibilities, and raise the popularity of the developers to near superstardom by increasing the driverset of the BSD kernel to match those available to Linux. You know, a larger installed base? However, if these small matters don't interest you, you don't have to take my advice if you don't want it, seeing as I'm not a lawyer or anything.