The main problem with Bush-bashing is that he's such an easy target. The problem is that most folks get tired of seeing headlines like "W's Secretary of the Interior arrested for shoplifting" or "Bush establishes illegal secret prisons, spirits away prisoners to foreign lands for torture & abuse without access to lawyers" even "Bush administration illegally wiretapped millions of home telephones".
They're right off the pages of the Weekly World News, but at least those three are verifiably true (Maryland & D.C. police records as reported by the Washington Post; the Abu Ghraib scandal and many others; and the recent AT&T scandal). You might argue (and W certainly did argue) that he didn't know about the prisons, or that the wiretaps were justified -- but he did swear an oath to uphold the American constitution, and responsibility for his administration and his military rests in him alone -- that's why we have an executive branch in the first place.
With wackiness like that happening, sober truth-tellers sound like raving paranoid conspiracy freaks. Welcome to Amerika.
I pay $35/year for my subscription. It works on old-Mozilla, Safari, Camino, Galeon - even IE. Never a hitch for me.
The subscription is well worth it for me since I found I was sitting through a flash ad almost every day. They generally offer a bunch of goodies when you subscribe (mostly free magazine subscriptions), so you're not just getting Salon for that. Their reporting is mostly very good and occasionally excellent - it's refreshing to see a news magazine that actually rakes some muck once in a while, and they tend to source their articles well. Their columnists are engaging.
There're TREMENDOUS amounts of programming opportunities out there -- I leave it to other posters to bicker over which watered-down abstracted programming environment or interactive scripting code or automated-gladiator-codebot game is best, but the point is that there are zillions of them.
The Apple ][ had a nice interactive programming environment (BASIC) and, yes, I remember it fondly. Learning about Woz's Programmer's Aid ROM was like discovering that the Emerald City lurked under the hood of my beige wedge. But the mere fact that you had to use the BASIC/DOS interpreter do get anything done, doesn't mean that most people learned how to program it. Many of my Apple ][ owning friends (and my brother) chose not to learn to program, and learned only enough to play the games. At school we had a set of TRS-80s and we geeks had endless fun hacking the system and inserting patchcodes into the BASIC interpreter and generally exercising our nascent 1337 c0d0r 5ki11z -- but most of the students just played pirated copies of Infocom adventures and space-invader games.
Today's machines are more versatile and practically infinitely more powerful, but the same duality applies: some folks will look for a command interpreter and start coding, most folks will just go for the nice eye candy.
In the immortal words of Utah Phillips, "Love my country -- always. Love my government -- when it deserves it."
A prime founding principle of the U.S.A. is never to trust authority, particularly authority in governmental power. That is why we (supposedly) have a system of checks and balances in government -- the branches are supposed to squabble, and to have to work things out. Unfortunately, the current set of jackasses got enough control that they could sidestep those checks and balances, and are busy pillaging every bit of monetary, political, and social capital they can.
Unfortunately, critical thinking is passé enough that a majority seem to swallow the propaganda and lies at face value.
Many more people died in Katrina than died from terrorism in the last decade, and Katrina is just one hurricane of many. Why are we spending so much money occupying Iraq, and so little money protecting our homeland?
(For exampled, the occupation of Iraq is costing more than $15,000 per second -- more than 2.5 trillion dollars so far. By contrast, the Army Corps of Engineers is having trouble getting money to rebuild the levees around New Orleans. That project is estimated to cost $2.5 billion dollars, less than the cost of one weekend of the occupation.)
I (and others) believe the FSF is overstepping their bounds here. I fail to see how you can violate copyright on a shared library if you aren't even distributing the shared library.
Of course, I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
Nobody wants to test the courts, of course, and IANAL -- but if you aren't even distributing the GPL package, I fail to see how you can be violating its copyright.
It doesn't grant you, the developer, rights in your own code at all -- it simply makes it far, far easier for you to engage in a business transaction with potential users of your code. The language of the license offers a take-it-or-leave-it contract to potential users. (Of course, they can still contact you to try to negotiate better terms, if they want to).
There are two benefits to GPLed code: (1) you can redistribute it; (2) you can fix it if it's broke, or adapt it to work better with your code. Microsoft dynamic libraries give you (1), but not (2). There is some value-added to using the open source libraries.
The GPL is not a restriction on code use, it is a restriction on code distribution. You don't lose the rights to your code simply because it invokes or uses another library.
For example, dynamically linking to a GPLed library does not taint your code -- that is a separate piece of software that you code uses. On the other hand, if you distribute the GPLed library, you better also distribute the source code to it.
If I use any GPL code in my application, even one line, I have to release my application under the GPL license.
Actually, one line might be considered fair-use excerpting...:-)
Seriously, if you don't want to GPL your application, just don't use any GPL code in it. Why is that so hard? Nobody whines about not being able to incorporate pieces of Microsoft Office into their code. The only difference is that you gan ogle the beautiful source code of GPL applications, so that it's more of a temptation.
You're not going to lose the rights to your software if you invoke GPL code with it. You're not going to lose the rights to your software if you use GPL code to make it (e.g. gcc and emacs don't tarnish your C code). You're only going to have to GPL your code if you actually incorporate someone else's work into it.
Keeping your license clean is something you have to do anyway. That's not new to GNU. Just find the original author and buy a non-GNU license from them. Can't do that? Well, most proprietary vendors don't want to license their code to you, either -- so you're no worse off than you were before.
If you want to live in a non-open-source world, live by the non-open-source rules.
You seem to be making the mistake of thinking that GPL authors want their code to be used by anyone regardless of intention. Most GPL authors release their code under open-source license to encourage you to do the same -- so that everyone gets more software goodies to share.
If you don't intend to share your own goodies the same way, then to heck with you -- you're not a customer, you're a leech.
If you are developing your code from scratch, you are free to other versions of it under whatever license you see fit -- the GPL is a non-exclusive license, so you are free to license your creative work in other ways at the same time.
If you are trying to use someone else's GPLed code, track down that person and try to get a non-GPL license from them. Is that so hard? It's exactly what you'd have to do to get access to someone else's proprietary code, except that you get to preview the source.
If the author want to license his code to you in a non-GPL way, well, it's his creative work -- he can do what he wants. Start from scratch or find another vendor.
OK, my bad. "Something with fewer root exploits" would be enough for me. Something with lower overhead for process spawning, and with a usable scripting interface, would be nice too.
Almost forgot: Earth's Moon probably qualifies as a "dwarf planet" by definition (2). That is to say, it is (by many measures) in orbit about the Sun rather than the Earth, and it has not cleared its orbital vicinity (the Earth is nearby).
The Moon is in orbit about the Sun in the sense that the Sun exerts more force on the Moon than does the Earth. Viewed from above the solar system, the Moon's orbit is never concave out (away from the Sun), it is always concave in. The Earth just happens to be perturbing the orbit some.
(1) A "planet"1 is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape2 , (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
There are several problems with (1). In particular:
Extrasolar planets are no longer "planets" since they don't orbit the Sun.
Jupiter is not a planet, because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit - it has asteroids at the Trojan points.
Earth is not a planet, because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit -- there exist Near-Earth asteroids and Earth-crossing asteroids. (One might argue that this is getting worse, what with all the space debris we keep flinging into near-Earth solar orbit).
(2) looks OK, but the IAU folks have taken the (IMHO) insane view that a "dwarf planet" is not a subtype of "planet" at all (contrast "dwarf pine tree" or "dwarf sunflower" or "dwarf hippopotamus", all of which are subtypes of their source nown). That destroys a potential way to finesse the Pluto issue -- by calling it a dwarf planet, they could have let everyone have their semantic cake, and eat it too.
On a different note, another scientist friend of mine just told me his six-year-old daughter burst into tears when she found out Pluto isn't to be considered a planet anymore.:-(
The big question is whether SoaP will have staying power -- will it remain popular and continue to sell DVDs long after the fact.
Not to compare a dog like SoaP with a diamond like Firefly -- but Firefly was notable for its unpopularity during its run. There are lots of reasons for that, but most of 'em boil down to the fact that traditional marketing works. Major hyping of a movie through traditional channels gets a nice surge the first week at the box office. Major hyping of a TV show (and a stable slot for it) gets a nice viewership the first season.
Firefly has continued to grow in popularity as time goes on, showing that it has some staying power despite not-very-intense marketing as a TV show or as a movie.
SoaP could well turn into a long-term money maker in the mysterious college cult-movie circuit. It would likely have been DOA without the internet hype.
Can you now tell me why the common head gesture for "yes" is to shake the head up and down...
Why, yes, I can: societal training. In Bulgaria the opposite gestures apply. In Turkey, "yes" is a back-and-forth shake and "no" is a sort of head-rearing gesture. Don't trust me -- trust Cecil Adams...
Sanyo makes a consumer level microwave/grill that is currently available at Target for about $100. The interesting UI feature is the stripped down user interface that has an analog knob to set the (digital) time.
Several years ago I had the delightful privilege of talking about interface design with Jef Raskin (who designed many aspects of the Macintosh UI).
He pointed out that "the only intuitive user interface is a nipple."
Several days ago my wife and I had a new son, so of course I watched them learn (together) how to breastfeed. It was not obvious to either one of them how to make it work -- they had to explore and figure it out together.
It appears that Jef was wrong: even nipples are not an intuitive user interface.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem with Bush-bashing is that he's such an easy target. The problem is that most folks get tired of seeing headlines like "W's Secretary of the Interior arrested for shoplifting" or "Bush establishes illegal secret prisons, spirits away prisoners to foreign lands for torture & abuse without access to lawyers" even "Bush administration illegally wiretapped millions of home telephones".
They're right off the pages of the Weekly World News, but at least those three are verifiably true (Maryland & D.C. police records as reported by the Washington Post; the Abu Ghraib scandal and many others; and the recent AT&T scandal). You might argue (and W certainly did argue) that he didn't know about the prisons, or that the wiretaps were justified -- but he did swear an oath to uphold the American constitution, and responsibility for his administration and his military rests in him alone -- that's why we have an executive branch in the first place.
With wackiness like that happening, sober truth-tellers sound like raving paranoid conspiracy freaks. Welcome to Amerika.
I pay $35/year for my subscription. It works on old-Mozilla, Safari, Camino, Galeon - even IE. Never a hitch for me.
The subscription is well worth it for me since I found I was sitting through a flash ad almost every day. They generally offer a bunch of goodies when you subscribe (mostly free magazine subscriptions), so you're not just getting Salon for that. Their reporting is mostly very good and occasionally excellent - it's refreshing to see a news magazine that actually rakes some muck once in a while, and they tend to source their articles well. Their columnists are engaging.
There're TREMENDOUS amounts of programming opportunities out there -- I leave it to other posters to bicker over which watered-down abstracted programming environment or interactive scripting code or automated-gladiator-codebot game is best, but the point is that there are zillions of them.
The Apple ][ had a nice interactive programming environment (BASIC) and, yes, I remember it fondly. Learning about Woz's Programmer's Aid ROM was like discovering that the Emerald City lurked under the hood of my beige wedge. But the mere fact that you had to use the BASIC/DOS interpreter do get anything done, doesn't mean that most people learned how to program it. Many of my Apple ][ owning friends (and my brother) chose not to learn to program, and learned only enough to play the games. At school we had a set of TRS-80s and we geeks had endless fun hacking the system and inserting patchcodes into the BASIC interpreter and generally exercising our nascent 1337 c0d0r 5ki11z -- but most of the students just played pirated copies of Infocom adventures and space-invader games.
Today's machines are more versatile and practically infinitely more powerful, but the same duality applies: some folks will look for a command interpreter and start coding, most folks will just go for the nice eye candy.
In the immortal words of Utah Phillips, "Love my country -- always. Love my government -- when it deserves it."
A prime founding principle of the U.S.A. is never to trust authority, particularly authority in governmental power. That is why we (supposedly) have a system of checks and balances in government -- the branches are supposed to squabble, and to have to work things out. Unfortunately, the current set of jackasses got enough control that they could sidestep those checks and balances, and are busy pillaging every bit of monetary, political, and social capital they can.
Unfortunately, critical thinking is passé enough that a majority seem to swallow the propaganda and lies at face value.
Many more people died in Katrina than died from terrorism in the last decade, and Katrina is just one hurricane of many. Why are we spending so much money occupying Iraq, and so little money protecting our homeland?
(For exampled, the occupation of Iraq is costing more than $15,000 per second -- more than 2.5 trillion dollars so far. By contrast, the Army Corps of Engineers is having trouble getting money to rebuild the levees around New Orleans. That project is estimated to cost $2.5 billion dollars, less than the cost of one weekend of the occupation.)
Can you really? Can you distribute those bits of MS Office to your Linux-using friends?
except that, last I checked, glibc was LGPL for just that reason.
I (and others) believe the FSF is overstepping their bounds here. I fail to see how you can violate copyright on a shared library if you aren't even distributing the shared library.
Of course, I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
Nobody wants to test the courts, of course, and IANAL -- but if you aren't even distributing the GPL package, I fail to see how you can be violating its copyright.
Solution: Make your 10 million line program link dynamically to the FFTW shared library, and then don't distribute FFTW (or distribute it separately).
It doesn't grant you, the developer, rights in your own code at all -- it simply makes it far, far easier for you to engage in a business transaction with potential users of your code. The language of the license offers a take-it-or-leave-it contract to potential users. (Of course, they can still contact you to try to negotiate better terms, if they want to).
There are two benefits to GPLed code: (1) you can redistribute it; (2) you can fix it if it's broke, or adapt it to work better with your code. Microsoft dynamic libraries give you (1), but not (2). There is some value-added to using the open source libraries.
The GPL is not a restriction on code use, it is a restriction on code distribution. You don't lose the rights to your code simply because it invokes or uses another library.
For example, dynamically linking to a GPLed library does not taint your code -- that is a separate piece of software that you code uses. On the other hand, if you distribute the GPLed library, you better also distribute the source code to it.
Actually, one line might be considered fair-use excerpting...
Seriously, if you don't want to GPL your application, just don't use any GPL code in it. Why is that so hard? Nobody whines about not being able to incorporate pieces of Microsoft Office into their code. The only difference is that you gan ogle the beautiful source code of GPL applications, so that it's more of a temptation.
You're not going to lose the rights to your software if you invoke GPL code with it. You're not going to lose the rights to your software if you use GPL code to make it (e.g. gcc and emacs don't tarnish your C code). You're only going to have to GPL your code if you actually incorporate someone else's work into it.
Keeping your license clean is something you have to do anyway. That's not new to GNU. Just find the original author and buy a non-GNU license from them. Can't do that? Well, most proprietary vendors don't want to license their code to you, either -- so you're no worse off than you were before.
If you want to live in a non-open-source world, live by the non-open-source rules.
You seem to be making the mistake of thinking that GPL authors want their code to be used by anyone regardless of intention. Most GPL authors release their code under open-source license to encourage you to do the same -- so that everyone gets more software goodies to share.
If you don't intend to share your own goodies the same way, then to heck with you -- you're not a customer, you're a leech.
If you are developing your code from scratch, you are free to other versions of it under whatever license you see fit -- the GPL is a non-exclusive license, so you are free to license your creative work in other ways at the same time.
If you are trying to use someone else's GPLed code, track down that person and try to get a non-GPL license from them. Is that so hard? It's exactly what you'd have to do to get access to someone else's proprietary code, except that you get to preview the source.
If the author want to license his code to you in a non-GPL way, well, it's his creative work -- he can do what he wants. Start from scratch or find another vendor.
OK, my bad. "Something with fewer root exploits" would be enough for me. Something with lower overhead for process spawning, and with a usable scripting interface, would be nice too.
Almost forgot: Earth's Moon probably qualifies as a "dwarf planet" by definition (2). That is to say, it is (by many measures) in orbit about the Sun rather than the Earth, and it has not cleared its orbital vicinity (the Earth is nearby).
The Moon is in orbit about the Sun in the sense that the Sun exerts more force on the Moon than does the Earth. Viewed from above the solar system, the Moon's orbit is never concave out (away from the Sun), it is always concave in. The Earth just happens to be perturbing the orbit some.
(2) looks OK, but the IAU folks have taken the (IMHO) insane view that a "dwarf planet" is not a subtype of "planet" at all (contrast "dwarf pine tree" or "dwarf sunflower" or "dwarf hippopotamus", all of which are subtypes of their source nown). That destroys a potential way to finesse the Pluto issue -- by calling it a dwarf planet, they could have let everyone have their semantic cake, and eat it too.
On a different note, another scientist friend of mine just told me his six-year-old daughter burst into tears when she found out Pluto isn't to be considered a planet anymore. :-(
No, actually, to use the full power of the God Box requires something with fewer root exploits and journaling file systems...
The big question is whether SoaP will have staying power -- will it remain popular and continue to sell DVDs long after the fact.
Not to compare a dog like SoaP with a diamond like Firefly -- but Firefly was notable for its unpopularity during its run. There are lots of reasons for that, but most of 'em boil down to the fact that traditional marketing works. Major hyping of a movie through traditional channels gets a nice surge the first week at the box office. Major hyping of a TV show (and a stable slot for it) gets a nice viewership the first season.
Firefly has continued to grow in popularity as time goes on, showing that it has some staying power despite not-very-intense marketing as a TV show or as a movie.
SoaP could well turn into a long-term money maker in the mysterious college cult-movie circuit. It would likely have been DOA without the internet hype.
Why, yes, I can: societal training. In Bulgaria the opposite gestures apply. In Turkey, "yes" is a back-and-forth shake and "no" is a sort of head-rearing gesture. Don't trust me -- trust Cecil Adams...
Sanyo makes a consumer level microwave/grill that is currently available at Target for about $100. The interesting UI feature is the stripped down user interface that has an analog knob to set the (digital) time.
Thanks -- they're doing fine!
Jef was that rare jewel -- a visionary who is willing to admit mistakes. The world got a little poorer when he passed away.
Several years ago I had the delightful privilege of talking about interface design with Jef Raskin (who designed many aspects of the Macintosh UI).
He pointed out that "the only intuitive user interface is a nipple."
Several days ago my wife and I had a new son, so of course I watched them learn (together) how to breastfeed. It was not obvious to either one of them how to make it work -- they had to explore and figure it out together.
It appears that Jef was wrong: even nipples are not an intuitive user interface.
No, if someone ignores you, you should stop wasting your time talking to them.