It's no secret that many teachers and profs dislike WP. This is what I do when I need research:
1. Go to WP and look up the subject 2. Visit the references of the article 3. Use those references in my work, quoting directly from them 4. Cite those references in my work 5. Never cite Wikipedia
This way, I achieve:
1. Making it seem like I did an assload of research on my own, with lots of good sources cited. WP does most of the work for me in not only providing reasonably realiable sources (well, most of the time), but also due to NPOV policies I can get sources which are from different perspectives, and offer a comprehensive coverage of citations in my own work. 2. Didn't mention the Wikipedia they don't want to see 3. No plagiarism, since I didn't quote anything from WP itself but only from the sources it used. Everything I did followed the letter of academic honesty, if not the spirit.
Yes, and quite ironically, the only party with seats in the Russian parliament which doesn't oppose Putin is the Communist party. And these guys aren't neo-Gorbachevists, they are die-hard Marxists and would prefer the Stalin days back.
Kinda sucks when the only opponent of your enemy is your even bigger enemy.
And then buy a lottery ticket with it, and win a million, I'd get a much longer sentence than someone else who stole a quarter and didn't make anything out of it?
Sorry, I'm all for canning spammers, but punishing people based on profit they make from ill-gotten gains, rather than the damage they actually caused, seems to be as violating fundemantal principles of justice.
Sure, HAM operators may be saving lives, but what naive soul thinks it compensates for their digging into RIAA's pockets, erm, scratch that, I mean villaneously spreading communism by pirating songs and stealing intellectual property?
In theory, every £1 collected through fines = 1 less £ collected through taxes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making rulebreakers pay the costs associated with their offenses (total damage cost + reasonable enforcement cost + reasonable deterrent cost), as opposed to the general taxpayers.
The problem is that this never happens. Whenever there is a budget surplus, it is never, ever, ever, translated to reduced taxes. Instead, the money is immediately started to get channeled through cover programs (Personal Development programs, Outreach programs, Social Networking programs), until it is sufficiently laundered, and inevitably ends up in the pockets of those politicians for their booze & party expenses which then they write off, as grandparent noted. Then, politicians claim the credit for "improved social standing" at their next election, all while the taxpayer still has to pay every single penny of the real expenses, and cheer for the politician while laying the blame squarely on the rank-and-file cops when wondering why they aren't doing their jobs well in any capacity except those of taking their money.
The same people who bash the MP3 format in every possible reasonable and unreasonable way when it is compared to.ogg or similar "free culture" formats, also unconditionally praise it when it is pitted against the evil M$s WMA or other DRM. Which is fine when the qualities discussed are precisely freedom-related, but when people 180 their views of objective technical qualities depending on who the adversary is, that is just plain hypocritical.
So is MP3 good or evil? Make up your mind already.
Wow, so RMS is actually for once willing to put the good of the overall free software community in front of his own fundamentalist vision about good and evil? Hmm, there may be hope for the FSF after all.
Tradition states that only a manned launch is considered a "first" for gloating purposes. If you count unmanned launches, then the Soviets were first on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
This guy is trolling, he purposefully misreads the reply in question and tries to introduce the old troll that anyone questioning any aspect of GPL must be Windoze fanboy. This is offcourse complete and utter nonsense, but it is a regular troll that usually gets modded up by other fanboyz pretty quickly....
This is very unclear from the license text and only a deliberate misreading of the parent post by someone wishing to troll could result in any other explenation for a complete bs of a reply.
All debate about GPL on/. must be of admiration and awe, with not a single word of criticism or questioning. Anyone who tries to claim something else is an idiot.
It says a lot about slashdot moderation that this tired old troll was never modded up in the first place, but he's too kneejercked to actually check that before posting a flame He tries to disguise himself by saying that he is a defender against the defamation of free software but before without trying to link questioning of GPL to heresy (the gpl is far closer to God than Jesus is and without having spouted a lot of outright crap first.
Now if you excuse me, I have to use windows which (gasp) is not released under GPL for an hour as punishement for being the troll.
Nice to hear, but pardon my ignorance, why the heck does it then refer to those who modify the program as "users"?
Users are those that use the software to produce their own work. If the license doesn't apply to them, but only to those that make changes to the program, it shouldn't refer to the developers as "users" but "authors", "contributors", or "producers of derivative work".
Unless I misunderstand the word "users", isn't this a complete defiance of the spirit of the GPL?
The GPL is and has always been passed to DERIVIATIONS of an application, not work created USING the application.
Are you saying that if I, say, use an AGPL-licensed currency converting web service on my ticket reservation site, I must release the WHOLE site under the AGPL?
That's like making a GPL paint program that forces users to release pictures created with that program under GPL. Or a compiler that forces you to release any code compiled with it under the GPL. Or a free paint brush given to me by Walmart on the condition that anything I paint with that brush becomes Walmart's property for kindly letting me use the brush.
The difference between protecting modifications of the software, and forcing WORK done with the software to be released under the GPL is HUGE. Its one thing to say that if I modify a free program I must make the modification free, and a COMPLETELY different thing to say that I lose the copyright to anything I create with the software.
Not to mention that it totally kills all of the FSF's wooing of the private sector by telling them to use Free software instead of proprietary. While the private sector, producing work using free tools, is usually not really interested in modifying (or holding copyright) on the modification of the tools they use, they DAMN WELL care about the copyright to the WORK they produced using their time and money, and if you tell them that they must release the rights to their work by virtue of using Free tools, they'll just laugh at your face and move to the next vendor, Free or not.
Yes, I know it's "just" for web services, but as the old saying goes, bad things don't become better online.
I'd be very glad if it was just me misunderstanding the license, rather than an outright attempt by Stallman to impose his Communistique vision of "freedom" upon the world.
Yay, nothing like reliving the thrill of Y2K. Except that we don't have to.
One second in 600 years is about 1/18921600000 or roughly 0.000000005%. In a day, the difference between the two ways will produce an offset of 1/220000th of a second, or about 5 nanoseconds. With the possible exception of atomic clocks, no analog or digital device is this precise.
Since any "precise" timekeeping requires periodical synchronization with the world's atomic clocks and astronomical observatories, we'd only need to change them, and the rest will just pick up the new info. Any "standalone" device that does not rely on the above synchronization has a much bigger margin of error than this change would introduce, so they will not be affected.
Yes, you can argue that in 60 years a machine not running the updated time would be 1/10th of a second behind a machine that does and in a deeply hypothetical scenario it could possibly cause some problems, but if the machine is not synchronizing to begin with, its own imperfections will result in a much larger discrepancy than 1/10th of a second in 60 years caused by the time change.
In correlation, the excuses "if we don't do it to them, they'll do it to us", and "they'd do the same thing to us that we do to them, if they were in our place and we were at theirs" are the lamest ever excuses for committing atrocities, yet the national favorites since the days of Ancient Egypt.
Duress must constitute an illegal act to be considered a defense for a contract breach.
I agree that probably refusing to sign the contract as it is described here would not constitute "just cause", which would be a pretext for immediate termination. But even without "just cause", companies may fire employees subject to general law (such as paying X months of employment insurance, providing Y weeks notice, etc.) Unions often have much more strict requirements, up to pretty much inability to fire someone without just cause, except to "lay off" the person as part of personnel cuts, which usually adheres to seniority-based LIFO, but that is a private matter between employer and union, and there is no indication a union is involved here.
If the company has legitimate reasons to believe that an employee's refusal to sign an agreement would in any way hurt their (legitimate) business, then in principle they have the right to terminate employees who refuse to comply, albeit with providing the legally-mandated EI and whatnot. Heck, you can get fired from a job on a Coca-cola plant by drinking Pepsi while on the job.
Now, the NATURE of the agreement is much more interesting, and one could argue that a contract such as this one (extending past employment and interfering with private life) is illegal in principle and/or unenforcable in practice, and depending on that, firing for refusing to sign THIS PARTICULAR contract may be illegal. But you can't issue a blanket statement, because refusing to sign plenty of other agreements in such situations (such as an agreement describing new security policies, or safety procedures, or simply a new job description) would be legitimate grounds for firing under a no-just-cause provisions provided by the whatever law you live under.
So all the RCMP said is that they are not going to CRIMINALLY prosecute filesharers.
When is the last time that the US has launched a CRIMINAL trial against file sharers? Piracy IS a criminal offense both in the USA and Canada, not just a civil one, but nobody ever launches criminal trials in the US. Sure, the US cops haven't actually pledged NOT to launch criminal trials, but this doesn't change anything on practice as they haven't been actually doing it either. And given that file sharing is notoriously hard to prove in a civil court already, and a criminal court requires MUCH, MUCH higher standards of evidence, permissible police practices, and burden of proof, any criminal campaign to prosecute peer-to-peer filesharing as a criminal offense would be a disaster.
This announcement by the RCMP has absolutely NOTHING to do with the CIVIL persecution of filesharers by the *AA, which has been the real problem, and while civil action is less common in Canada than the USA, this pledge by the RCMP won't do jack squat to curtail it.
Yes, because the US OBVIOUSLY has LONG since solved it's own poverty problems, solved racial issues, introduced free and available universal healthcare, offers affordable university education, etc.
Hell, if I had to be in the poorest segment of the population, I'd rather be in Russia than the USA. Healthcare may be relatively crappy in Russia, but at least it's free, and I (or my 7 year old son) won't be left to die in the gutter from common flu if I can't afford a doctor or buy prescription drugs.
Not necessarily saying that leftist welfare-state is the best form of government, but if you choose to take that route, the US has a lot more to fix than Russia. Neither am saying that all is well in Russia (I don't deny that it's pretty much a police state, no political freedom, power come from selling oil and holding the world on the tip of an ICBM), but the US ain't a fucking utopia either, and think about fixing your own shit before you start preaching other nations what to do. If you at least were a die-hard lasseiz-faire sink-or-swim right-wing-nut, then at least you'd have some grounds to accuse Russia of being different from the US (and the rest of us can either buy or not buy your argument depending on our political standing), but attacking Russia on NOT being a welfare state compared to the US is the peak of hypocrisy.
yeah wow so the rocket is cheaper... pity it carries a fraction of the shuttles payload
Yes, and you always use a 16-wheeler to drive your kids to school, right?
The vast majority of space launches which currently use the shuttle, transport people or regular vital supplies (food, water, etc) to the ISS. The shuttle was not designed for, and cannot do any missions other than low-earth orbit (ISS, Hubble, etc).
In those cases where you really need large cargo (such as lifting components of the ISS), you can use other rockets, such as Delta V or the upcoming Ares-IV (which, by the way, intends to replace the unreliable shuttle in the first place).
The shuttle was nothing but an attempt to appease the moronic treehuggers by creating the illusion of "recycleable" craft, even though (1) the difference in price between launching a shuttle and a light rocket could pay for reducing emissions in other areas that would bring much greater net benefit to the ecology, and (2) consuming the fuckton of fuel to launch a heavy-ass shuttle that carries two people negates any "cleanliness" achieved by just throwing 75% of the shuttle (boosters go, remember?) instead of the ~95% when rocket goes, capsule comes. In an effort to appease the same treehuggers we were periodically stuck with forced solar panels on rovers instead of nuclear power, which among other things forces our Mars rovers to hibernate through the winter instead of working as usual. Thank God that with New Horizons and further nuclear-powered missions we finally got over the yoke.
Admittedly I'm not using anything requiring DX9+ and ultra-bleeding-edge graphics hardware but still
You included the problem in your own solution.
While the fact that Linux doesn't require bleeding-edge hardware is an asset, when the statement is turned around to "you don't need new hardware because Linux won't run any software that requires that hardware in the first place", then the asset becomes a liability. Why should I be restricted from the new goodies because of my OS choice?
This is a problem of "circular logic" of GPU manufacturers not making Linux drivers because there are no games for Linux, and game publishers don't make games for Linux because there are no drivers for them to run on.
The initial attempt to break the cycle is the hardest to achieve, and is least likely to bring profit. It takes some balls to be the first to challenge an existing monopoly and be open to alternatives (which EVE is doing right now), which is why as a consumer I'm willing to be part of funding that cycle-breaking, both for moral reasons and my own practical ones (I want new games for my Linux, dammit).
Yes they had to. I want to play a modern graphics-intensive game. I am neither thrilled about paying Bill & Co cash just because software companies are too lazy to compile for Linux (and let's assume I don't want to take the yarr-harr route either), so dual-booting is not an option. Oh, and another thing I don't want is a 2-FPS slideshow kindly provided by WINE. That leaves the requirement of native Linux support.
If a company is willing to take the extra time to provide Linux binaries, I'd be willing to pay THEM a bit of extra money (or just be their customer as opposed to not be) rather than pay that money for an OS I don't want.
Slashdot Mirror
http://claybennett.com/pages2/godzilla.html
By Clay Bennett.
Yes, pay triple the hardware price for the same quality (or lack thereof) you'd get on a PC. Brilliant!
It's no secret that many teachers and profs dislike WP. This is what I do when I need research:
1. Go to WP and look up the subject
2. Visit the references of the article
3. Use those references in my work, quoting directly from them
4. Cite those references in my work
5. Never cite Wikipedia
This way, I achieve:
1. Making it seem like I did an assload of research on my own, with lots of good sources cited. WP does most of the work for me in not only providing reasonably realiable sources (well, most of the time), but also due to NPOV policies I can get sources which are from different perspectives, and offer a comprehensive coverage of citations in my own work.
2. Didn't mention the Wikipedia they don't want to see
3. No plagiarism, since I didn't quote anything from WP itself but only from the sources it used. Everything I did followed the letter of academic honesty, if not the spirit.
Meant to say doesn't SUPPORT Putin, sorry.
Yes, and quite ironically, the only party with seats in the Russian parliament which doesn't oppose Putin is the Communist party. And these guys aren't neo-Gorbachevists, they are die-hard Marxists and would prefer the Stalin days back. Kinda sucks when the only opponent of your enemy is your even bigger enemy.
And then buy a lottery ticket with it, and win a million, I'd get a much longer sentence than someone else who stole a quarter and didn't make anything out of it?
Sorry, I'm all for canning spammers, but punishing people based on profit they make from ill-gotten gains, rather than the damage they actually caused, seems to be as violating fundemantal principles of justice.
Sure, HAM operators may be saving lives, but what naive soul thinks it compensates for their digging into RIAA's pockets, erm, scratch that, I mean villaneously spreading communism by pirating songs and stealing intellectual property?
In theory, every £1 collected through fines = 1 less £ collected through taxes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making rulebreakers pay the costs associated with their offenses (total damage cost + reasonable enforcement cost + reasonable deterrent cost), as opposed to the general taxpayers.
The problem is that this never happens. Whenever there is a budget surplus, it is never, ever, ever, translated to reduced taxes. Instead, the money is immediately started to get channeled through cover programs (Personal Development programs, Outreach programs, Social Networking programs), until it is sufficiently laundered, and inevitably ends up in the pockets of those politicians for their booze & party expenses which then they write off, as grandparent noted. Then, politicians claim the credit for "improved social standing" at their next election, all while the taxpayer still has to pay every single penny of the real expenses, and cheer for the politician while laying the blame squarely on the rank-and-file cops when wondering why they aren't doing their jobs well in any capacity except those of taking their money.
The same people who bash the MP3 format in every possible reasonable and unreasonable way when it is compared to .ogg or similar "free culture" formats, also unconditionally praise it when it is pitted against the evil M$s WMA or other DRM. Which is fine when the qualities discussed are precisely freedom-related, but when people 180 their views of objective technical qualities depending on who the adversary is, that is just plain hypocritical.
So is MP3 good or evil? Make up your mind already.
Wow, so RMS is actually for once willing to put the good of the overall free software community in front of his own fundamentalist vision about good and evil? Hmm, there may be hope for the FSF after all.
Tradition states that only a manned launch is considered a "first" for gloating purposes. If you count unmanned launches, then the Soviets were first on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
There, fixed it for you.
Nice to hear, but pardon my ignorance, why the heck does it then refer to those who modify the program as "users"?
Users are those that use the software to produce their own work. If the license doesn't apply to them, but only to those that make changes to the program, it shouldn't refer to the developers as "users" but "authors", "contributors", or "producers of derivative work".
Unless I misunderstand the word "users", isn't this a complete defiance of the spirit of the GPL?
The GPL is and has always been passed to DERIVIATIONS of an application, not work created USING the application.
Are you saying that if I, say, use an AGPL-licensed currency converting web service on my ticket reservation site, I must release the WHOLE site under the AGPL?
That's like making a GPL paint program that forces users to release pictures created with that program under GPL. Or a compiler that forces you to release any code compiled with it under the GPL. Or a free paint brush given to me by Walmart on the condition that anything I paint with that brush becomes Walmart's property for kindly letting me use the brush.
The difference between protecting modifications of the software, and forcing WORK done with the software to be released under the GPL is HUGE. Its one thing to say that if I modify a free program I must make the modification free, and a COMPLETELY different thing to say that I lose the copyright to anything I create with the software.
Not to mention that it totally kills all of the FSF's wooing of the private sector by telling them to use Free software instead of proprietary. While the private sector, producing work using free tools, is usually not really interested in modifying (or holding copyright) on the modification of the tools they use, they DAMN WELL care about the copyright to the WORK they produced using their time and money, and if you tell them that they must release the rights to their work by virtue of using Free tools, they'll just laugh at your face and move to the next vendor, Free or not.
Yes, I know it's "just" for web services, but as the old saying goes, bad things don't become better online.
I'd be very glad if it was just me misunderstanding the license, rather than an outright attempt by Stallman to impose his Communistique vision of "freedom" upon the world.
Yay, nothing like reliving the thrill of Y2K. Except that we don't have to.
One second in 600 years is about 1/18921600000 or roughly 0.000000005%. In a day, the difference between the two ways will produce an offset of 1/220000th of a second, or about 5 nanoseconds. With the possible exception of atomic clocks, no analog or digital device is this precise.
Since any "precise" timekeeping requires periodical synchronization with the world's atomic clocks and astronomical observatories, we'd only need to change them, and the rest will just pick up the new info. Any "standalone" device that does not rely on the above synchronization has a much bigger margin of error than this change would introduce, so they will not be affected.
Yes, you can argue that in 60 years a machine not running the updated time would be 1/10th of a second behind a machine that does and in a deeply hypothetical scenario it could possibly cause some problems, but if the machine is not synchronizing to begin with, its own imperfections will result in a much larger discrepancy than 1/10th of a second in 60 years caused by the time change.
In correlation, the excuses "if we don't do it to them, they'll do it to us", and "they'd do the same thing to us that we do to them, if they were in our place and we were at theirs" are the lamest ever excuses for committing atrocities, yet the national favorites since the days of Ancient Egypt.
Duress must constitute an illegal act to be considered a defense for a contract breach.
I agree that probably refusing to sign the contract as it is described here would not constitute "just cause", which would be a pretext for immediate termination. But even without "just cause", companies may fire employees subject to general law (such as paying X months of employment insurance, providing Y weeks notice, etc.) Unions often have much more strict requirements, up to pretty much inability to fire someone without just cause, except to "lay off" the person as part of personnel cuts, which usually adheres to seniority-based LIFO, but that is a private matter between employer and union, and there is no indication a union is involved here.
If the company has legitimate reasons to believe that an employee's refusal to sign an agreement would in any way hurt their (legitimate) business, then in principle they have the right to terminate employees who refuse to comply, albeit with providing the legally-mandated EI and whatnot. Heck, you can get fired from a job on a Coca-cola plant by drinking Pepsi while on the job.
Now, the NATURE of the agreement is much more interesting, and one could argue that a contract such as this one (extending past employment and interfering with private life) is illegal in principle and/or unenforcable in practice, and depending on that, firing for refusing to sign THIS PARTICULAR contract may be illegal. But you can't issue a blanket statement, because refusing to sign plenty of other agreements in such situations (such as an agreement describing new security policies, or safety procedures, or simply a new job description) would be legitimate grounds for firing under a no-just-cause provisions provided by the whatever law you live under.
So all the RCMP said is that they are not going to CRIMINALLY prosecute filesharers.
When is the last time that the US has launched a CRIMINAL trial against file sharers? Piracy IS a criminal offense both in the USA and Canada, not just a civil one, but nobody ever launches criminal trials in the US. Sure, the US cops haven't actually pledged NOT to launch criminal trials, but this doesn't change anything on practice as they haven't been actually doing it either. And given that file sharing is notoriously hard to prove in a civil court already, and a criminal court requires MUCH, MUCH higher standards of evidence, permissible police practices, and burden of proof, any criminal campaign to prosecute peer-to-peer filesharing as a criminal offense would be a disaster.
This announcement by the RCMP has absolutely NOTHING to do with the CIVIL persecution of filesharers by the *AA, which has been the real problem, and while civil action is less common in Canada than the USA, this pledge by the RCMP won't do jack squat to curtail it.
Yes, because the US OBVIOUSLY has LONG since solved it's own poverty problems, solved racial issues, introduced free and available universal healthcare, offers affordable university education, etc.
Hell, if I had to be in the poorest segment of the population, I'd rather be in Russia than the USA. Healthcare may be relatively crappy in Russia, but at least it's free, and I (or my 7 year old son) won't be left to die in the gutter from common flu if I can't afford a doctor or buy prescription drugs.
Not necessarily saying that leftist welfare-state is the best form of government, but if you choose to take that route, the US has a lot more to fix than Russia. Neither am saying that all is well in Russia (I don't deny that it's pretty much a police state, no political freedom, power come from selling oil and holding the world on the tip of an ICBM), but the US ain't a fucking utopia either, and think about fixing your own shit before you start preaching other nations what to do. If you at least were a die-hard lasseiz-faire sink-or-swim right-wing-nut, then at least you'd have some grounds to accuse Russia of being different from the US (and the rest of us can either buy or not buy your argument depending on our political standing), but attacking Russia on NOT being a welfare state compared to the US is the peak of hypocrisy.
Yes, and you always use a 16-wheeler to drive your kids to school, right?
The vast majority of space launches which currently use the shuttle, transport people or regular vital supplies (food, water, etc) to the ISS. The shuttle was not designed for, and cannot do any missions other than low-earth orbit (ISS, Hubble, etc).
In those cases where you really need large cargo (such as lifting components of the ISS), you can use other rockets, such as Delta V or the upcoming Ares-IV (which, by the way, intends to replace the unreliable shuttle in the first place).
The shuttle was nothing but an attempt to appease the moronic treehuggers by creating the illusion of "recycleable" craft, even though (1) the difference in price between launching a shuttle and a light rocket could pay for reducing emissions in other areas that would bring much greater net benefit to the ecology, and (2) consuming the fuckton of fuel to launch a heavy-ass shuttle that carries two people negates any "cleanliness" achieved by just throwing 75% of the shuttle (boosters go, remember?) instead of the ~95% when rocket goes, capsule comes. In an effort to appease the same treehuggers we were periodically stuck with forced solar panels on rovers instead of nuclear power, which among other things forces our Mars rovers to hibernate through the winter instead of working as usual. Thank God that with New Horizons and further nuclear-powered missions we finally got over the yoke.
The freedom of speech includes the freedom not to listen.
You included the problem in your own solution.
While the fact that Linux doesn't require bleeding-edge hardware is an asset, when the statement is turned around to "you don't need new hardware because Linux won't run any software that requires that hardware in the first place", then the asset becomes a liability. Why should I be restricted from the new goodies because of my OS choice?
This is a problem of "circular logic" of GPU manufacturers not making Linux drivers because there are no games for Linux, and game publishers don't make games for Linux because there are no drivers for them to run on.
The initial attempt to break the cycle is the hardest to achieve, and is least likely to bring profit. It takes some balls to be the first to challenge an existing monopoly and be open to alternatives (which EVE is doing right now), which is why as a consumer I'm willing to be part of funding that cycle-breaking, both for moral reasons and my own practical ones (I want new games for my Linux, dammit).
Yes they had to. I want to play a modern graphics-intensive game. I am neither thrilled about paying Bill & Co cash just because software companies are too lazy to compile for Linux (and let's assume I don't want to take the yarr-harr route either), so dual-booting is not an option. Oh, and another thing I don't want is a 2-FPS slideshow kindly provided by WINE. That leaves the requirement of native Linux support.
If a company is willing to take the extra time to provide Linux binaries, I'd be willing to pay THEM a bit of extra money (or just be their customer as opposed to not be) rather than pay that money for an OS I don't want.