This is basically to draw publicity to what the US and UK are doing, and I'm all for it in that respect.
I agree. I think the nature of Echelon must be made public knowledge, or there must at least be public knowledge of its existence. I don't particularly care about the outcome of the lawsuit; hopefully it will generate enough media attention to get the public aware of what's going on. I'm interested in learning more about the World Court. is it a UN body? An internation treaty somewhere?
Am I missing something here? Doesn't it seem strange that, after finding out two of their closest allies have been spying on them, France decides to sue over civil matters?
You probably are missing something. This day and age, countries don't just go to war with each other (well, not Western countries, anyway.) Unlike the political situations of a century ago, every army is not stocked with a bunch of 16 year olds with muskets. France going to war with the UK or US would be literally suicide. (Not to mention how NATO would react.) No, nowadays political matters in civilized countries can (and should IMO) be settled diplomatically. If you found out your best friend was spying on you and caused you to lose money, would you kick his ass, or sue him for the money? I'd do the latter, because a) I can kick the ass of very few people (I'm like France) and b) kicking his ass doesn't get my money back.
On a side note, does anyone know how lawsuits between governments are handled? I've never heard of one before. Is this a UN matter?
ultimedia Web sites and DVD drives are increasingly turning the computer into a new version of the television set. For picture quality, however, many computer screens are put to shame by the cheapest discount store portable TV.
Funny, I think the resolution of broadcast quality NTSC video on a 30 inch television sucks ass compared to a finely tuned, 1600x1200 21" computer monitor. Modern monitors are far superior to consumer televisions for the simple reason that you sit a lot closer to them. That, and the fact that broadcast standards (ie NTSC, PAL, etc) are a bitch to make high quality.
A similar situation recently happened in New York City with the transit workers strike. Since transit workers (bus and subway operators, mostly) provide a vital service to the city, their contract specifically disalows them from striking. In return, they are guaranteed very good job security. All the transit workers entered into this deal legitimately and signed the contract, yet they had the balls to strike anyway. That should be (and probably is) a crime. It's at least a breach of contract. Most other people who provide "vital services" are forbidden from striking as well, but that doesn't mean that they won't. Indeed, transit workers striking hurts everyone a lot more than, say, steel workers.
On Tuesday, the 18.3-foot-wide (5.6-meter-wide) spacecraft was less than 2,900 miles (4,700 miles) away from Eros, and fired its engines for the final course correction before orbital insertion.
'Nuff said.
Re:Why shuld Apple do more than this ?
on
PPCLinux.Apple.Com
·
· Score: 2
Well, there are three types of people in this world: those who can count, and those who can't.
Very true. Like I said, Apple is known for making things simple. The trouble is, you can never get at the underlying stuff and poke around.:) I love MacOS because of how easy it is to maintain, and I love Linux cause of how much I can explore and change things.
I think the idea was to see how easy it would be to set up a cluster with MacOS (MacOS is known for making things pretty simple.) I thought they were just using straight IP over Ethernet; does anybody use Appletalk anymore? That stuff was damn cool for it's time, but IP is obviously much more flexible. On another note, I'd like to see them make a LinuxPPC Beaowulf out of the same boxes and see how the results compare to doing it under MacOS.
DVDs contain motion pictures in digital form, which presents an enhanced risk of unauthorized reproduction and distribution because digital copies made from DVDs do not degrade from generation to generation. Concerned about this risk, motion picture companies, including plaintiffs, insisted upon the development of an access control and copy prevention system to inhibit the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of motion pictures before they released films in the DVD format. The means now in use, Content Scramble System or CSS, is an encryption-based security and authentication system that requires the use of appropriately configured hardware such as a DVD player or a computer DVD drive to decrypt, unscramble and play back, but not copy, motion pictures on DVDs. CSS has been licensed to hundreds of DVD player manufacturers and DVD content distributors in the United States and around the world.
This type of statement represents a problem that is far larger than the DeCSS issue as a whole. Judges and politicians simply don't understand technology. Since consumer electronics are something that is relatively "new" in the world, most people can't be expected to understand the underlying issues, be it that CSS does not prevent DVD piracy, that "one click shopping" should not be a patentable "technology," etc. I'm afraid we're going to see more and more ignorant expressions of opinion like this one until technology is so engrained in people's lives that they regularly understand how it works. Alas, I don't think that will happen in my lifetime.
while this is going on, consumer electronics manufacturers will continue to exploit the ignorance of the general public and the media in order to attain a tighter and tighter hold on the electronics market. Through this case, the members of the DVDCCA have managed to protect their collective monopolistic interest in the DVD player market. How do we convince a media brainwashed public and a buzzword brainwashed judicial system that this sort of anticapitalist behavior is really going on? The most frustrating part, it seems to me, is that this is plainly obvious to most of us, but not so for the rest of the world. It's a feeling that reinforces the minority nature of geek culture in my mind.
How do we stop multinational corporations from unethically twisting the facts and lying to the media? How do we prevent DvDCCA members from leveraging monopoly control over the means to access their media? We can't. Not right now. DeCSS mirrors won't do it. Petitions and flyers won't do it. But as we, who represent the forefront of the beginning technological revolution, can do something about it, eventually.
As more and more people who understant the issues as well as the technology enter into the technology market, there will be more room for such confrontations on a larger, corporate scale. We, the nerd culture, can be responsible for changing the way technology is marketed. But that means we have to act. Is it possible that nerds and hackers will be the driving force to stimulate the stagnant and apathetic nature that is American politics today? I think we will be, and I think that is the answer. We have the knowledge and the power to change what it is going on though our work, through our expression. We must leverage that power to fight for what's right converning our medium, The Allmighty Bit.
I think something that us nerd type people forget every now and then is that the majority of people in the world are not nerds. Some of them are enourmously stupid. Since Linux has been moving more and more into the mainstream and more and more onto the Average Joe Desktop (where, IMO, I really think it will fail) more non-sysadmins -programmer, -kernel hackers, -experimenters will be using this stuff. Now ask yourself if someone who wants pretty Gnome apps with Enlightenment is going to want to sit around for three hours using apt-get to install his distro? For you and me, we would definately see advantages to this method, but remember, Dell's only concern is selling computers, and average folks will buy these because Dell has made it easy for them.
Isn't Linux considerably cheaper than Windows? Come on - it is GPLed! I can download the same thing for free. It can't possibly cost as much as that MS cr*p! Especially now that Dell does not toe the MS line wholly, one should expect the MS stuff to increase in price!
There's a marketing strategy that Red Hat figured out long ago and Dell and others are figuring out now. If something is available for free, people will still pay for it if it comes in a shiny box. How many people do you think download RedHat? Isn't it easier to just press a button and pay $40.00 for a CD already burned for you? It is. So, suppose I have to pay $1900 Big SuperCool Laptop 10000 Millennium Edition with Windows on it, and $2000 for a Big SuperCool Laptop 10000 Millennium Edition with Debian installed, some tech support time, perhaps some nifty Linux docs using that "paper" stuff, and a Big Shiny Box. I'd gladly pay the extra $100. Why? Because downloading entire distributions is a pain, and I'm on a 100Mb Ethernet with a T3 gateway. I'd rather have someone else do it for me, and that's what the free software market is about: Hardware and services.
Really, did anybody expect MS to leave linux alone? They wrote software to run on an apple and they can do the same for linux.
Well, Microsoft also has a few hundred million dollars worth of stock in Apple, so they have a vested interest in keeping the platform alive, and that means writing software for that platform. The difference here is that if RedHat exploded one day, it wouldn't make much of a difference in Redmond. Instead of contributing to the survival of a market which directly benefits them (Apple) they are exploring a new market entirely.
::raises hand:: How exactly do you make light go slower? I thought it was the one thing that was always constant, no matter what. But then again, I never did do very well in Physics.:)
Remember the great Conservative promise of "smaller government?" Basically you fire all the people who do this sort of work, and guess what? It takes longer.
No, the conservative promise of smaller government is that you fire all the incompotent nitwits who do this and privatize the data collection process. There are entire corporations who specialize in streamlining mass data processing, and they do a mighty fine job. There's no reason other agencies like the IRS couldn't do the same thing. You save time and money, and you put some cash into the hands of corporations instead of the government.
I think part of the idea might be to make money on the players, and not worry so much about the data itself.
Yes, that's exactly the idea. An "association" like DVDCCA, is really no different than a corporation, IMO. Anyone could theoretically make a DVD player, but only members of the DVDCCA will have their keys printed on the discs. Result? DVDCCA members have a collective monopolistic control over the DVD player market. Do any lawyers out there know if there is any precedent about such "collective monopolies" as I call them?
i believe Dialpad uses Windows-specific java extensions; thus making it incompatible with anything else and defeating the whole purpose of Java. Oh well.:)
For a young reader I would definately reccomend Asimov's Robot series. These really explore the funadamentals of science fiction very well and are also great introductions to logic problems, too. I, Robot is a set of short stories that explore the theme of the Asimov's rules of robotics. The Foundation series is a must, but is probably a little more advanced than the Robot stuff. Those are more politically oriented, IMO, but still excellent novels. Finally, The Gods Themselves is a little-known Asimov favorite of mine. It's about scientists discovering an unlimited energy source. It also teaches a little about atomic physics (though there is a reason why it's called science fiction:) )It has some mature-ish themes though (sex and stuff) so you might want to read it before your daughter.
NASA does have some problems. In Richard Feynman's book, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", he points out a serious lack of communication between the engineering staff and the management with regards to the shuttle(s).
Well, I haven't read that book, but of course NASA has problems. Every group of people has problems because, after all, we're only human. But shunning something because it is flawed most certainly will not fix it. Agreed, many things within NASA need to be addressed. I wouldn't even know where to begin, but I think your post conveys a similar attitude to what I was originally ranting about. Instead of the American Public whining about the fact that NASA has problems, we should demand that something be done about it. It's our taxes, so it is our agency; it annoys me how many people seem to forget that.
The vague hope that someday humans will set foot upon the soil of a foreign planet seems rather unimportant when the insane guy in the next cardbox box keeps trying to steal your blanket.
LOL! Yes, you're definately right on that account. I wasn't trying to really make an economical or political argument, but, rather, an observation of an attitude prevailent in the US. You do make a good point, though. Obviously, no society is or ever has been (or, IMO, will ever be) without problems. So how do we decide what's "necessary" for the government to address, i.e., poverty, crime, etc., and what's "extraneous, but useful and important" i.e. NASA.
I'm sorry, you are about to be the victim of a rant.
<rant>
It pisses me off to the extreme when the United States media, the government, and people like you state with some sort of authority that NASA has some sort of bad "track record." Let's look at what's going on here. NASA launched over a dozen missions last year. How many failed? I can think of two. But the prevailing attitude towards the pursuit of science in this country is one of apathy. New discoveries? Blah. New planets found? don't waste my time. Cure for cancer? Good for them. Multi-million dollar space missions fails? Now that is news! Because of this attitude exhibited by the likes of people like you, the media has made NASA look like a bunch of fools. Do you have any idea what goes into sending something to Mars? How could you possibly think these missions would be 100% successful? They can't be. What this leads to is a general malaise concerning NASA when it comes to the American public. So we end up with less funding for them and more funding for useless liberal fedbloat. I pray for the day when the Average Joe will be aware of the technical sophistication and sheer American Ingenuity(tm) that goes into NASA projects, and exactly how beneficial these have been to the United States, nay, the World as a whole. You are a victim of the media; or your own foolishness; or both.
Quantum computers will make processor a helluva lot more than 10-50 times as fast as electrical ones. You'll be able to do near-infinate calculations simultaneously. There will be no more Moore's law, no more bottlenecks, and certainly no more cryptography as we know it. Theoretically, a quantum particle can exist in an infinite number of states simultaneously as long as the effects of those states aren't being directly observed. Therefor, your quantum logic gates can do as many instructions as you want at the same time.
I attended a lecture several years ago on photonic research. It was mostly conceptual, but here's how it works, from what I remember. Quantum physicists have found that certain quantum particles, such as photons, can be "linked" to other photons, regardless of physical distance (relative to three dimensions, anyway.) A change in state in one photon results in the same change of state in the other photon, instantaneously, even if they are light-years apart. I believe this ability has to do with higher spatial dimensions, i.e., although they are far apart in three-dimensional perception, if a three dimensional universe is curved in the direction of another dimension, the two photons may be right next to each other. Anyhoo, if you want to set up a communications link, get a photon and monitor its state. The person on the other end can change the state of his photon, thus sending you a message. Pretty nifty stuff....I hope I got it right. Please tell me if I got a part of it wrong, as IANAQP and it's been a while since that lecture.
I'm not sure where you heard that. It might have been part of what happened, but Mitnick was arrested for breaking into several systems not owned by him or his employer, and running from the feds for some time. He is most certainly a criminal, but I don't believe he was treated fairly by the justice system.
MacOS has had "virtual memory" since System 7, but it blows. It basically spills over to disk when you run out of physical RAM, though it's been improving very much with each OS release. OS X of course, is based on BSD, and will have real VM.
Re:The GPL has much bigger problems than this.
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 3
The story of the GPL is a sad one, and I would like to see it draw to a close. Hopefully, this will happen as programmers recognize the true intent of the GPL: to pit colleague agaisnt colleague, and to transform open source from a public good into a weapon directed against those who engage in activities of which Richard Stallman personally does not approve.
I was appreciating your reply up until this point. I was not aware of the history of the GPL, and will have to do some research myself, but regardless of its intentions, it is, IMO, still a Good Thing. I reiterate my point above: programmers choose to use the GPL. If you want to make money on your programs, you can, and there really is nothing RMS or anyone can do about it. I believe the purpose of the GPL is to protect code from proprietership(word?) and foster a community of open and shared innovation. How does this pit colleague against colleague? In the Real World is does anything but that. In RMS's mind, perhaps he accomplished that with Symbolics. Perhaps this whole idea was sparked by a vendetta, but there's no reason for RMS to put forth a liscense that would harm the very people central to his agenda! Perhaps he was spiteful towards Symbolics, I suppose he has a right to be. Perhaps his actions were not justifiable (if what you say is true, I don't think they were) but you can't overlook everything that GPL'ed code has accomplished just because of the sketchy nature of its origin.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I think the nature of Echelon must be made public knowledge, or there must at least be public knowledge of its existence. I don't particularly care about the outcome of the lawsuit; hopefully it will generate enough media attention to get the public aware of what's going on. I'm interested in learning more about the World Court. is it a UN body? An internation treaty somewhere?
You probably are missing something. This day and age, countries don't just go to war with each other (well, not Western countries, anyway.) Unlike the political situations of a century ago, every army is not stocked with a bunch of 16 year olds with muskets. France going to war with the UK or US would be literally suicide. (Not to mention how NATO would react.) No, nowadays political matters in civilized countries can (and should IMO) be settled diplomatically. If you found out your best friend was spying on you and caused you to lose money, would you kick his ass, or sue him for the money? I'd do the latter, because a) I can kick the ass of very few people (I'm like France) and b) kicking his ass doesn't get my money back.
On a side note, does anyone know how lawsuits between governments are handled? I've never heard of one before. Is this a UN matter?
Funny, I think the resolution of broadcast quality NTSC video on a 30 inch television sucks ass compared to a finely tuned, 1600x1200 21" computer monitor. Modern monitors are far superior to consumer televisions for the simple reason that you sit a lot closer to them. That, and the fact that broadcast standards (ie NTSC, PAL, etc) are a bitch to make high quality.
A similar situation recently happened in New York City with the transit workers strike. Since transit workers (bus and subway operators, mostly) provide a vital service to the city, their contract specifically disalows them from striking. In return, they are guaranteed very good job security. All the transit workers entered into this deal legitimately and signed the contract, yet they had the balls to strike anyway. That should be (and probably is) a crime. It's at least a breach of contract. Most other people who provide "vital services" are forbidden from striking as well, but that doesn't mean that they won't. Indeed, transit workers striking hurts everyone a lot more than, say, steel workers.
'Nuff said.
^_^
Very true. Like I said, Apple is known for making things simple. The trouble is, you can never get at the underlying stuff and poke around. :) I love MacOS because of how easy it is to maintain, and I love Linux cause of how much I can explore and change things.
I think the idea was to see how easy it would be to set up a cluster with MacOS (MacOS is known for making things pretty simple.) I thought they were just using straight IP over Ethernet; does anybody use Appletalk anymore? That stuff was damn cool for it's time, but IP is obviously much more flexible. On another note, I'd like to see them make a LinuxPPC Beaowulf out of the same boxes and see how the results compare to doing it under MacOS.
This type of statement represents a problem that is far larger than the DeCSS issue as a whole. Judges and politicians simply don't understand technology. Since consumer electronics are something that is relatively "new" in the world, most people can't be expected to understand the underlying issues, be it that CSS does not prevent DVD piracy, that "one click shopping" should not be a patentable "technology," etc. I'm afraid we're going to see more and more ignorant expressions of opinion like this one until technology is so engrained in people's lives that they regularly understand how it works. Alas, I don't think that will happen in my lifetime.
while this is going on, consumer electronics manufacturers will continue to exploit the ignorance of the general public and the media in order to attain a tighter and tighter hold on the electronics market. Through this case, the members of the DVDCCA have managed to protect their collective monopolistic interest in the DVD player market. How do we convince a media brainwashed public and a buzzword brainwashed judicial system that this sort of anticapitalist behavior is really going on? The most frustrating part, it seems to me, is that this is plainly obvious to most of us, but not so for the rest of the world. It's a feeling that reinforces the minority nature of geek culture in my mind.
How do we stop multinational corporations from unethically twisting the facts and lying to the media? How do we prevent DvDCCA members from leveraging monopoly control over the means to access their media? We can't. Not right now. DeCSS mirrors won't do it. Petitions and flyers won't do it. But as we, who represent the forefront of the beginning technological revolution, can do something about it, eventually.
As more and more people who understant the issues as well as the technology enter into the technology market, there will be more room for such confrontations on a larger, corporate scale. We, the nerd culture, can be responsible for changing the way technology is marketed. But that means we have to act. Is it possible that nerds and hackers will be the driving force to stimulate the stagnant and apathetic nature that is American politics today? I think we will be, and I think that is the answer. We have the knowledge and the power to change what it is going on though our work, through our expression. We must leverage that power to fight for what's right converning our medium, The Allmighty Bit.
I think something that us nerd type people forget every now and then is that the majority of people in the world are not nerds. Some of them are enourmously stupid. Since Linux has been moving more and more into the mainstream and more and more onto the Average Joe Desktop (where, IMO, I really think it will fail) more non-sysadmins -programmer, -kernel hackers, -experimenters will be using this stuff. Now ask yourself if someone who wants pretty Gnome apps with Enlightenment is going to want to sit around for three hours using apt-get to install his distro? For you and me, we would definately see advantages to this method, but remember, Dell's only concern is selling computers, and average folks will buy these because Dell has made it easy for them.
There's a marketing strategy that Red Hat figured out long ago and Dell and others are figuring out now. If something is available for free, people will still pay for it if it comes in a shiny box. How many people do you think download RedHat? Isn't it easier to just press a button and pay $40.00 for a CD already burned for you? It is. So, suppose I have to pay $1900 Big SuperCool Laptop 10000 Millennium Edition with Windows on it, and $2000 for a Big SuperCool Laptop 10000 Millennium Edition with Debian installed, some tech support time, perhaps some nifty Linux docs using that "paper" stuff, and a Big Shiny Box. I'd gladly pay the extra $100. Why? Because downloading entire distributions is a pain, and I'm on a 100Mb Ethernet with a T3 gateway. I'd rather have someone else do it for me, and that's what the free software market is about: Hardware and services.
</mindless rambling>
Well, Microsoft also has a few hundred million dollars worth of stock in Apple, so they have a vested interest in keeping the platform alive, and that means writing software for that platform. The difference here is that if RedHat exploded one day, it wouldn't make much of a difference in Redmond. Instead of contributing to the survival of a market which directly benefits them (Apple) they are exploring a new market entirely.
::raises hand:: How exactly do you make light go slower? I thought it was the one thing that was always constant, no matter what. But then again, I never did do very well in Physics. :)
No, the conservative promise of smaller government is that you fire all the incompotent nitwits who do this and privatize the data collection process. There are entire corporations who specialize in streamlining mass data processing, and they do a mighty fine job. There's no reason other agencies like the IRS couldn't do the same thing. You save time and money, and you put some cash into the hands of corporations instead of the government.
Yes, that's exactly the idea. An "association" like DVDCCA, is really no different than a corporation, IMO. Anyone could theoretically make a DVD player, but only members of the DVDCCA will have their keys printed on the discs. Result? DVDCCA members have a collective monopolistic control over the DVD player market. Do any lawyers out there know if there is any precedent about such "collective monopolies" as I call them?
i believe Dialpad uses Windows-specific java extensions; thus making it incompatible with anything else and defeating the whole purpose of Java. Oh well. :)
For a young reader I would definately reccomend Asimov's Robot series. These really explore the funadamentals of science fiction very well and are also great introductions to logic problems, too. I, Robot is a set of short stories that explore the theme of the Asimov's rules of robotics. The Foundation series is a must, but is probably a little more advanced than the Robot stuff. Those are more politically oriented, IMO, but still excellent novels. Finally, The Gods Themselves is a little-known Asimov favorite of mine. It's about scientists discovering an unlimited energy source. It also teaches a little about atomic physics (though there is a reason why it's called science fiction :) )It has some mature-ish themes though (sex and stuff) so you might want to read it before your daughter.
Well, I haven't read that book, but of course NASA has problems. Every group of people has problems because, after all, we're only human. But shunning something because it is flawed most certainly will not fix it. Agreed, many things within NASA need to be addressed. I wouldn't even know where to begin, but I think your post conveys a similar attitude to what I was originally ranting about. Instead of the American Public whining about the fact that NASA has problems, we should demand that something be done about it. It's our taxes, so it is our agency; it annoys me how many people seem to forget that.
LOL! Yes, you're definately right on that account. I wasn't trying to really make an economical or political argument, but, rather, an observation of an attitude prevailent in the US. You do make a good point, though. Obviously, no society is or ever has been (or, IMO, will ever be) without problems. So how do we decide what's "necessary" for the government to address, i.e., poverty, crime, etc., and what's "extraneous, but useful and important" i.e. NASA.
<rant>
It pisses me off to the extreme when the United States media, the government, and people like you state with some sort of authority that NASA has some sort of bad "track record." Let's look at what's going on here. NASA launched over a dozen missions last year. How many failed? I can think of two. But the prevailing attitude towards the pursuit of science in this country is one of apathy. New discoveries? Blah. New planets found? don't waste my time. Cure for cancer? Good for them. Multi-million dollar space missions fails? Now that is news! Because of this attitude exhibited by the likes of people like you, the media has made NASA look like a bunch of fools. Do you have any idea what goes into sending something to Mars? How could you possibly think these missions would be 100% successful? They can't be. What this leads to is a general malaise concerning NASA when it comes to the American public. So we end up with less funding for them and more funding for useless liberal fedbloat. I pray for the day when the Average Joe will be aware of the technical sophistication and sheer American Ingenuity(tm) that goes into NASA projects, and exactly how beneficial these have been to the United States, nay, the World as a whole. You are a victim of the media; or your own foolishness; or both.
</rant>
Quantum computers will make processor a helluva lot more than 10-50 times as fast as electrical ones. You'll be able to do near-infinate calculations simultaneously. There will be no more Moore's law, no more bottlenecks, and certainly no more cryptography as we know it. Theoretically, a quantum particle can exist in an infinite number of states simultaneously as long as the effects of those states aren't being directly observed. Therefor, your quantum logic gates can do as many instructions as you want at the same time.
I attended a lecture several years ago on photonic research. It was mostly conceptual, but here's how it works, from what I remember. Quantum physicists have found that certain quantum particles, such as photons, can be "linked" to other photons, regardless of physical distance (relative to three dimensions, anyway.) A change in state in one photon results in the same change of state in the other photon, instantaneously, even if they are light-years apart. I believe this ability has to do with higher spatial dimensions, i.e., although they are far apart in three-dimensional perception, if a three dimensional universe is curved in the direction of another dimension, the two photons may be right next to each other. Anyhoo, if you want to set up a communications link, get a photon and monitor its state. The person on the other end can change the state of his photon, thus sending you a message. Pretty nifty stuff....I hope I got it right. Please tell me if I got a part of it wrong, as IANAQP and it's been a while since that lecture.
I'm not sure where you heard that. It might have been part of what happened, but Mitnick was arrested for breaking into several systems not owned by him or his employer, and running from the feds for some time. He is most certainly a criminal, but I don't believe he was treated fairly by the justice system.
MacOS has had "virtual memory" since System 7, but it blows. It basically spills over to disk when you run out of physical RAM, though it's been improving very much with each OS release. OS X of course, is based on BSD, and will have real VM.
I was appreciating your reply up until this point. I was not aware of the history of the GPL, and will have to do some research myself, but regardless of its intentions, it is, IMO, still a Good Thing. I reiterate my point above: programmers choose to use the GPL. If you want to make money on your programs, you can, and there really is nothing RMS or anyone can do about it. I believe the purpose of the GPL is to protect code from proprietership(word?) and foster a community of open and shared innovation. How does this pit colleague against colleague? In the Real World is does anything but that. In RMS's mind, perhaps he accomplished that with Symbolics. Perhaps this whole idea was sparked by a vendetta, but there's no reason for RMS to put forth a liscense that would harm the very people central to his agenda! Perhaps he was spiteful towards Symbolics, I suppose he has a right to be. Perhaps his actions were not justifiable (if what you say is true, I don't think they were) but you can't overlook everything that GPL'ed code has accomplished just because of the sketchy nature of its origin.