Actually, Europe (probably with the exception of France) is very unsure of itself and thus prefers to model themselves after the US. Thus, Europe became more and more totalitarian since 11-9. For example, the German ID card (and passports etc.) now received additional measures to make it harder to fake (though the attackers of 11-9 did have valid ID) and is scheduled to receive additional biometric information (starting with fingerprints, which of course will not be used by law enforcement like the truck road toll enforcement measures weren't used by law enforcement).
When something is proposed, we can't just deny it because someone claims that it might be used for oppression or because someone claims it might be used to prosecute criminals: We need to weigh it against each other, to see whether the prospects of catching someone guilty outweighs the probability of convicting an innocent. As with any actionism, all laws made since 11-9 don't do anything to protect the innocent or catch the guilty but rather are a tool of oppression, justified by an act of violence which, compared to nearly any other cause of death, was of miniscule consequence.
For example, I can understand why the government wants to know when I was born and where I live and how much money I make, because it needs that for taxes and voting. But why should government be allowed anything else if it doesn't presume that everyone is guilty? And if everyone is guilty and thus not deserving of human rights, who exactly is it protecting? Not the people, that's for sure.
The question is not whether the government can use the tools it has to opress us - it most certainly can. We just can't allow it to collect more, because at some point there are enough laws and databases that the question isn't anymore whether they can oppress you but how exactly they are going about choosing from the thousands of ways they have created: Instead of looking at the law and deciding whether you are guilty of something (which already reverses the concept of "innocent until proven guilty"), they just need to chose an accusation they think is most likely to stick, because everyone has violated some law; only then the government is truly totalitarian and when this becomes obvious to you (often, citizens don't realize that their government is totalitarian, just remember the Germany under Hitler), you've hesistated too long to fight it.
It's a common fallacy to believe that totalitarian governments always need to be build and structured in the one true way. But we had many different kinds of totalitarianism: Be it the 3rd Reich, the pseudosocialism of the communist block or dictators propped up by the US - they all had a different style, only having in common that they oppressed their people.
This is especially bad as people only remember Hitler's attempt at fascism, which was painfully inept and obvious, and thus assume it needs to play out exact the same way. But nobody is going to clone Hitler. Each dictator, be he communistic or fascistic, be he islamic or christian or even believe himself god, or whatever, has its own unique style. And, indeed, the corporations and conservatives learned from their failure to contain Hitler: you're getting a much more subtle and corporate fascism in the US than Germany could ever have dreamt of, your scapegoats being not jews but muslims, this being made easier by the muslims actually having blood on their hands due to 11-9 (at least by the concept of collective responsibility totalitarian governments are so fond of).
It'd be trivially simple to refactor that line to accomodate 80 columns, though.
While I myself usually use 110, too (especially when doing XML-related stuff or Java due to lots of indentation and long names, respectively), I actually prefer 80, because otherwise one gets quickly into scroll-right-or-word-wrap territory which makes a unreadable mess out of the code (though some editors, like KDE's kate, get that right).
If your code goes to hell when someone sets the tabs to another value than you had, you did something wrong.
However, while some may assert that people are to stupid to readjust tab width, you cannot readjust space width: if someone uses two spaces, you're stuck with it, even if you prefer four.
I really don't think that stupidity of others justifies making life all the more difficult for those who have at least a little bit of brains. I mean, if they can't even find the option, what harm of it being there?
Indeed, the rule to be used is simple: Tabs are for indentation. Spaces are for alignment.
Just look up those four words with google (because I'm to lazy to type up an example here) and read some of the results, you'll quickly realize why it's a good idea.
I think the whole copyprivilege discussion gets it completely wrong.
Of course, there is that thing about copyprivilege terms - which was discussed enough in this thread.
But the real problem is:
If we haven't any copyprivileges, the artist gets no money. Maybe the "consumers" just don't pay money or all the money goes to the distributor, but the artist doesn't get it (except for stuff like giving concerts or reading out of your books etc., but the MAFIAA would surely adapt to leech of that if there weren't any copyprivilege).
But as we have copyprivileges, the artist gets no money. It all goes to the copyprivilegeholder, which usually is the MAFIAA, not the artist.
Therefore the artist is screwed no matter what, copyprivileges or not.
Thus, if you really want the artist to get the money, as a first step in reform you should abolish the concept of copyprivilege and instead copy (no pun intended) the continental european concept of creator's privilege where one can't sell his soul to companies but instead the privileges stay attached to the natural person creating the work and only gets licensed to the distributors.
This also would make such insanely long copyright terms meaningless, because while a company wants to live of their stuff forever, a natural person can't really do anything with their money after they died. Thus copyright for life would be the greatest possible duration and they'd rather to settle for fixed durations as soon as some Public Domain zealots decide to actively make the work public domain.
That said, I know of a much better model which enables artists to survive to create a work and be rewarded for it afterwards without creating fucking artificial monopolies. But it's unUSian, unchristian (though Jesus would have loved it), anticapitalistic and communistic and whatever insults you have to throw at it, so I'd better not point it out.
To say that 'this is the year' we might as well say 'this is the century'.
We really should do that.
Repeat after me:
"This is the century of the Linux Desktop."
Really, why should I care who uses what OS?
Apart, of course, from hardware being designed exclusively for Windows, applications being designed exclusively for Windows, Microsoft Office.doc being the de facto standard of document exchange, Microsoft Internet Explorer being the de facto standard browser etc.
But, just looking at MSIE, one can see how it can change. It just isn't instantaneous but a drawn out process, hindered by those who claim that because it isn't instantaneous, it will never happen, thus they needn't consider anything besides Microsoft advertising tokens.
For me, for instance, 2004 was "the year of Linux on the desktop": Since then, I haven't really had to use Windows anymore - except that one time... man, was that painful.
It's really not that Linux isn't ready for the average user, its the average user who isn't ready for Linux.
GPL is problematic for BSD users, because while GPL projects can use BSD software, it doesn't work the other way around. But, as other posters already pointed out, there is no problem at all with using BSD-licensed software in GPL'd projects.
I'm not yet as cynical as the GP to accuse you of wanting to close the sources, but I still think that there are people who aren't always respectful of what you do.
Before I start ranting incoherently about freedom and the merits of GPL vs. BSD, I'd like to point out that it is Nintendo deprieving themselves of GPL'd software by forcing you to sign an NDA: GPL isn't ridiculously paranoid, Nintendo is by attempting to keep their API secret. GPL grants you additional freedoms, but if you have other obligations, like an NDA, this will prevent you from granting those freedoms to others, thus making GPL useless.
Freedom is always a concept of balance: The idea of a free society (in contrast to the kind of society we live in in practice) is that you can do what you want, except infringing on other people's freedom (which also requires that people have enough to live to make use of their freedom - but that's an completely different rant).
Now, BSD does grant others additional freedom by allowing to redistribute and modify. By doing this, it gives freedom to others by allowing them to do things they couldn't do according to law. However, it doesn't make the other to give this freedom, too: Thus companies like Microsoft or Apple can come along and close the source: You give them additional freedom, but they don't give it back, thus denying you the very freedom you granted them, putting themselves into a position "above" you, consuming, but not producing.
Now, GPL does grant others additional freedom by allowing to redistribute and modify. By doing this, it gives freedom to others by allowing them to do things they couldn't do according to law. However, it also makes the other to give this freedom, too: Thus companies like Microsoft or Apple can't come along and close the source: You give them additional freedom, but require them to give it back, thus sharing with you the freedom you granted them, putting you in a position of equality: freedom is not lost, but preserved. Indeed - uniquely to the realm of intellectual creation - freedom is actually created by using GPL, because you can both share the same freedom.
GPL is not "fundamentally broken" because of that, it's just that GPL simply puts the protection of freedom over pleasing everyone. Indeed, if you complain about this "problem" with regards to the GPL, why aren't you complaining about the restrictions of proprietary licenses?
I think BSD developers actually share that sentiment: Otherwise, the first thing they'd do when they receive BSD-licensed code would be closing it. Many probably naively conclude from this that those who use the BSD license only do because of this difference allowing them to close the code. I, however, think it is more either out of short-sighted "pragmatism" or a misguided understanding of the concept of freedom, incorrectly believing the libertarian credo that being free means having the right to deprieve others of their liberty or because, like in your situation, there are other, external conditions prohibiting use of the GPL.
Thus, all you are doing by choosing BSD over GPL is deprieving yourself of the very freedom you offer to others!
Indeed, if we were to accept the terminology of intellectual property, transferring properties of the physical realm into the intellectual one, we'd also be forced to accept the fundamental principle of the physical world that freedom cannot be shared but what one gains the other must lose: thus, in terms of intellectual property, BSD is loved so much because by giving them freedom, you lose it, thus it means that, in the context of intellectual property, you sold yourself into slavery for less than a necklace of glass pearls.
But surely outsourcing isn't a valid way to side-step the law.
Hate to break this to you, but it surely is. It shouldn't be, yes, but in practice it is.
If you don't see the cases where the very scenario you described plays out again and again right under your nose, then just look at offshoring, which is just an extreme case of outsourcing: They can't have sweat shops here, so they just set them up someplace in Asia where hardly anyone ever has heard of human rights or workplace safety laws.
Microsoft's patent portfolio wouldn't pass into the public domain in any case: The GPL3 only stipulates that those you distribute the code to get an implicit license which means you can't sue them for patent violation for using or modifying GPL3ed software, but it doesn't offer protection in any other situation.
Also, while it may be questioned whether or not Microsoft is right to claim that future vouchers are no good for GPL3 software, it cannot make vouchers already handed out retroactively invalid for GPL3: If Novell decides to redistribute GPL3 software, at least the old vouchers are valid for GPL3.
Unfortunately, it doesn't "leave the door open". It's only that the most "popular" interpretation of quantum mechanics requires "true" indeterminism (i.e. no hidden variables) and the concept of free will "requires" indeterminism (whereas free will is only required to "solve" the Theodicee without weakening the original conditions - which, of course, is impossible, because the introduction of additional axioms doesn't cause the old ones to not be contradictory anymore), this doesn't mean that quantum mechanics enables free will.
Also, the very problem of intelligence (with which, for example, artificial intelligence research has to struggle) is that there is no well accepted definition of it: It's really like your example of zero: we know there is something, but we don't really can put it into words (at least in a way generally accepted). Still, I would not include non-determinism in the definition of intelligence, I'd rather to look for an definition which describes the phenomenon (of course, for my purposes I have one) and only then have a look whether this requires non-determinism or not (which it doesn't seem to need as far as I can see but then, I'm not really an expert in intelligence, be it natural or otherwise).
However, my point is that we cannot allow ourselves to even assume the possibility of indeterminism, for then progress becomes impossible. Thus, we need to assume that mind is non-deterministic. Indeed, I'd really like you (or someone else) to explain to me how one can come to the conclusion that non-determinism might be necessary, because I seem unable to introduce it in any other way than an arbitrary axiom instead of a conclusion from perception (at least none which doesn't immediately break down).
Furthermore, I'd like to ask how you can tell complexity from non-determinism? While there are some cases of complexity where I can (though I tend to think of those cases as simple), in most I can't. As an example, remember chaos theory: It is completely deterministic, yet it is so complex that you can't possibly determine how the pattern you see came to be unless you knew the equations in the first place.
This is very much the point I want to make: There may be a "master algorithm", but it is impossible to know: thus we do not need indeterminism or free will, for this is only "required" to fake a solution to the Theodicee. Even if that master algorithm were knowable, we'd not need the starting state to predict the future - we can do that if we knew the current state of the universe. We'd only need the starting state if we wanted to know everything what happened in the past. But we definitely can't even know the current state: Because either the universe is infinite, in which case we can't know it because we always only have access to a finite part of it. Or it is finite, but then the memory needed would at least be equal to the universe itself (and then it would be the universe itself): This is pretty much why we need really big supercomputers with billions of transistors to calculate the movements of a handful of molecules, not even enough to simulate an actual, individual transistor atom for atom, electron for electron.
Thus, I don't think it matters whether something seems random or truly is random - we can't tell either way. Therefore, the only possible path of action is to assume it is not random and thus set out to find out how it is determined: because if we assume it is deterministic, our attempts will either after some (sometimes very long) time tell us that it is deterministic if it is (though we still have to ask whether we have the right function - that's why science can only get more and more exact, but never perfectly so) while our efforts will never terminate when it actually is indeterministic. But if we were to assume it to be non-deterministic, then our search stops immediately because there is no explaining possible of something which is not explainable by definition (which is why religion pushes such concepts: God lives in the gaps, and while t
That won't suffice. After all, they're going to see food, children, old people, women, men, etc in real life. We've got to ban them in real life, too. We really should learn from the muslims and make everyone wear clothes until we look like a big ball of wool instead of a human. Then we only have got to set fire to it (or just wait for starvation to set in due to the banning of food and they'll set fire to themselves) and all problems are solved, as Stalin knew.
---
And a comment to the sibling (because I want to go to sleep and don't have the time to wait another hour for posting another comment - why is that enforced delay between posts so long?):
Go read some news or police reports. There indeed are female rapists. The difficulty in raping is not so much in putting it in (even though an involuntary stiff is already common, viagra makes it easier than ever) than in making the victim feel as a victim, thus weakening the defenses, which works with the oh so strong men, too.
Really, it's more a thing of scale. More quantity than of quality. All they do is eat, fuck and die.
Strength in numbers just means that the whale who gets the munchies can fill his stomach with one bite instead of having to hunt each fish down individually.
Another poster noted that there is a "bad" kind of reductionism; of this kind is your underlying assumption that if our behaviour could be explained in terms of individual neurons, there could be no consciousness, because after all, neurons obviously don't think.
I mean, the very topic of TFA are emergent phenomena of behaviour: An ant hill might be intelligent while individual ants aren't. In the same way, the interactions of neurons create intelligence but do not require every neuron to be intelligent. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but it can still be explained in terms of its parts; there is no such thing as "irreducible complexity" or a least element carrying a specific property: no part of your computer "is" the image you see on the screen, but it still gets created.
If deterministic reductionism actually proved, as is your assertion, that intelligence cannot exist because neurons don't think, we'd have thrown it out long ago, because intelligence obviously does exist. (Actually I think that there actually are some people who actually believe that if we could explain the human mind scientifically, then we'd actually destroy the soul, because in their eyes it existed, but we proved that it doesn't, so we must have turned everyone into soulless zombies just so science could be right...)
Indeed, the requirement of non-determinism with respect to "free will" was caused by the Theodicee, i.e. the proof that a god cannot be simultaneously good, omniscient and omnipotent. However, as we cannot know everything, we don't run into this dilemma in practice: there always are things we don't know, thus there is something seeming non-deterministic to us. Still, we cannot ever allow ourselves to accept something as non-deterministic: Maybe quantum theory means that there is a fundamental break with determinism - not just that we don't know but that we can't know, no matter how we try. However, if we accepted that, we need to ask the question: Why stop with quantum theory? Why not much earlier with having god doing everything? In the end, we need to realize that we cannot just assume indeterminism, thus we have to assume that quantum theory is deterministic in a way we didn't imagine before.
To summarize: quantum mechanics doesn't "leave open" the door for intelligence (it's the wrong scale for that, anyway), but you don't need it to, anyway, because intelligence probably is fully deterministic.
At least we need to assume that and nothing to the countrary has ever been shown: Who says "there is indeterminism" just says "I don't know how it works", but if you look at everything, it at least seems deterministic (realizing, of course, that you can't look in anyones head and see what exactly determines him - which, however, doesn't mean that he isn't determined).
And even if it were non-deterministic: this would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof because it would break down the whole house of human knowledge.
As I'm realizing that I'm running in circles and blubbering aimlessly (well, excuse me, but it's deep night over here and I should be sleeping), one final thought: Something often not realized is that the human mind is not something seperate from reality (which, in extremo, leads to such theorizing of a inseperable soul), but instead in interaction with it: experiences from the environment always reform the patterns constituting the consciousness, which then feeds back into the environment by actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Europe (probably with the exception of France) is very unsure of itself and thus prefers to model themselves after the US. Thus, Europe became more and more totalitarian since 11-9. For example, the German ID card (and passports etc.) now received additional measures to make it harder to fake (though the attackers of 11-9 did have valid ID) and is scheduled to receive additional biometric information (starting with fingerprints, which of course will not be used by law enforcement like the truck road toll enforcement measures weren't used by law enforcement).
When something is proposed, we can't just deny it because someone claims that it might be used for oppression or because someone claims it might be used to prosecute criminals: We need to weigh it against each other, to see whether the prospects of catching someone guilty outweighs the probability of convicting an innocent. As with any actionism, all laws made since 11-9 don't do anything to protect the innocent or catch the guilty but rather are a tool of oppression, justified by an act of violence which, compared to nearly any other cause of death, was of miniscule consequence.
For example, I can understand why the government wants to know when I was born and where I live and how much money I make, because it needs that for taxes and voting. But why should government be allowed anything else if it doesn't presume that everyone is guilty? And if everyone is guilty and thus not deserving of human rights, who exactly is it protecting? Not the people, that's for sure.
The question is not whether the government can use the tools it has to opress us - it most certainly can. We just can't allow it to collect more, because at some point there are enough laws and databases that the question isn't anymore whether they can oppress you but how exactly they are going about choosing from the thousands of ways they have created: Instead of looking at the law and deciding whether you are guilty of something (which already reverses the concept of "innocent until proven guilty"), they just need to chose an accusation they think is most likely to stick, because everyone has violated some law; only then the government is truly totalitarian and when this becomes obvious to you (often, citizens don't realize that their government is totalitarian, just remember the Germany under Hitler), you've hesistated too long to fight it.
It's a common fallacy to believe that totalitarian governments always need to be build and structured in the one true way. But we had many different kinds of totalitarianism: Be it the 3rd Reich, the pseudosocialism of the communist block or dictators propped up by the US - they all had a different style, only having in common that they oppressed their people.
This is especially bad as people only remember Hitler's attempt at fascism, which was painfully inept and obvious, and thus assume it needs to play out exact the same way. But nobody is going to clone Hitler. Each dictator, be he communistic or fascistic, be he islamic or christian or even believe himself god, or whatever, has its own unique style. And, indeed, the corporations and conservatives learned from their failure to contain Hitler: you're getting a much more subtle and corporate fascism in the US than Germany could ever have dreamt of, your scapegoats being not jews but muslims, this being made easier by the muslims actually having blood on their hands due to 11-9 (at least by the concept of collective responsibility totalitarian governments are so fond of).
5 is a power of 2. Not an integer one, granted, but a power nonetheless.
Also, why don't you set your editor to have the tabs be four spaces wide and let him set his editor to have tabs to be two spaces wide?
It'd be trivially simple to refactor that line to accomodate 80 columns, though.
While I myself usually use 110, too (especially when doing XML-related stuff or Java due to lots of indentation and long names, respectively), I actually prefer 80, because otherwise one gets quickly into scroll-right-or-word-wrap territory which makes a unreadable mess out of the code (though some editors, like KDE's kate, get that right).
If your code goes to hell when someone sets the tabs to another value than you had, you did something wrong.
However, while some may assert that people are to stupid to readjust tab width, you cannot readjust space width: if someone uses two spaces, you're stuck with it, even if you prefer four.
I really don't think that stupidity of others justifies making life all the more difficult for those who have at least a little bit of brains. I mean, if they can't even find the option, what harm of it being there?
Indeed, the rule to be used is simple:
Tabs are for indentation.
Spaces are for alignment.
Just look up those four words with google (because I'm to lazy to type up an example here) and read some of the results, you'll quickly realize why it's a good idea.
I think the whole copyprivilege discussion gets it completely wrong.
Of course, there is that thing about copyprivilege terms - which was discussed enough in this thread.
But the real problem is:
If we haven't any copyprivileges, the artist gets no money. Maybe the "consumers" just don't pay money or all the money goes to the distributor, but the artist doesn't get it (except for stuff like giving concerts or reading out of your books etc., but the MAFIAA would surely adapt to leech of that if there weren't any copyprivilege).
But as we have copyprivileges, the artist gets no money. It all goes to the copyprivilegeholder, which usually is the MAFIAA, not the artist.
Therefore the artist is screwed no matter what, copyprivileges or not.
Thus, if you really want the artist to get the money, as a first step in reform you should abolish the concept of copyprivilege and instead copy (no pun intended) the continental european concept of creator's privilege where one can't sell his soul to companies but instead the privileges stay attached to the natural person creating the work and only gets licensed to the distributors.
This also would make such insanely long copyright terms meaningless, because while a company wants to live of their stuff forever, a natural person can't really do anything with their money after they died. Thus copyright for life would be the greatest possible duration and they'd rather to settle for fixed durations as soon as some Public Domain zealots decide to actively make the work public domain.
That said, I know of a much better model which enables artists to survive to create a work and be rewarded for it afterwards without creating fucking artificial monopolies. But it's unUSian, unchristian (though Jesus would have loved it), anticapitalistic and communistic and whatever insults you have to throw at it, so I'd better not point it out.
You not only violated the copyright on that song by posting the chords, but you even created a derivative work by altering them.
We really should do that.
Repeat after me:
"This is the century of the Linux Desktop."
Really, why should I care who uses what OS?
Apart, of course, from hardware being designed exclusively for Windows, applications being designed exclusively for Windows, Microsoft Office
But, just looking at MSIE, one can see how it can change. It just isn't instantaneous but a drawn out process, hindered by those who claim that because it isn't instantaneous, it will never happen, thus they needn't consider anything besides Microsoft advertising tokens.
For me, for instance, 2004 was "the year of Linux on the desktop": Since then, I haven't really had to use Windows anymore - except that one time... man, was that painful.
It's really not that Linux isn't ready for the average user, its the average user who isn't ready for Linux.
There. Fixed it for you.
GPL is problematic for BSD users, because while GPL projects can use BSD software, it doesn't work the other way around. But, as other posters already pointed out, there is no problem at all with using BSD-licensed software in GPL'd projects.
I'm not yet as cynical as the GP to accuse you of wanting to close the sources, but I still think that there are people who aren't always respectful of what you do.
Before I start ranting incoherently about freedom and the merits of GPL vs. BSD, I'd like to point out that it is Nintendo deprieving themselves of GPL'd software by forcing you to sign an NDA: GPL isn't ridiculously paranoid, Nintendo is by attempting to keep their API secret. GPL grants you additional freedoms, but if you have other obligations, like an NDA, this will prevent you from granting those freedoms to others, thus making GPL useless.
Freedom is always a concept of balance: The idea of a free society (in contrast to the kind of society we live in in practice) is that you can do what you want, except infringing on other people's freedom (which also requires that people have enough to live to make use of their freedom - but that's an completely different rant).
Now, BSD does grant others additional freedom by allowing to redistribute and modify. By doing this, it gives freedom to others by allowing them to do things they couldn't do according to law. However, it doesn't make the other to give this freedom, too: Thus companies like Microsoft or Apple can come along and close the source: You give them additional freedom, but they don't give it back, thus denying you the very freedom you granted them, putting themselves into a position "above" you, consuming, but not producing.
Now, GPL does grant others additional freedom by allowing to redistribute and modify. By doing this, it gives freedom to others by allowing them to do things they couldn't do according to law. However, it also makes the other to give this freedom, too: Thus companies like Microsoft or Apple can't come along and close the source: You give them additional freedom, but require them to give it back, thus sharing with you the freedom you granted them, putting you in a position of equality: freedom is not lost, but preserved. Indeed - uniquely to the realm of intellectual creation - freedom is actually created by using GPL, because you can both share the same freedom.
GPL is not "fundamentally broken" because of that, it's just that GPL simply puts the protection of freedom over pleasing everyone. Indeed, if you complain about this "problem" with regards to the GPL, why aren't you complaining about the restrictions of proprietary licenses?
I think BSD developers actually share that sentiment: Otherwise, the first thing they'd do when they receive BSD-licensed code would be closing it. Many probably naively conclude from this that those who use the BSD license only do because of this difference allowing them to close the code. I, however, think it is more either out of short-sighted "pragmatism" or a misguided understanding of the concept of freedom, incorrectly believing the libertarian credo that being free means having the right to deprieve others of their liberty or because, like in your situation, there are other, external conditions prohibiting use of the GPL.
Thus, all you are doing by choosing BSD over GPL is deprieving yourself of the very freedom you offer to others!
Indeed, if we were to accept the terminology of intellectual property, transferring properties of the physical realm into the intellectual one, we'd also be forced to accept the fundamental principle of the physical world that freedom cannot be shared but what one gains the other must lose: thus, in terms of intellectual property, BSD is loved so much because by giving them freedom, you lose it, thus it means that, in the context of intellectual property, you sold yourself into slavery for less than a necklace of glass pearls.
Hate to break this to you, but it surely is. It shouldn't be, yes, but in practice it is.
If you don't see the cases where the very scenario you described plays out again and again right under your nose, then just look at offshoring, which is just an extreme case of outsourcing: They can't have sweat shops here, so they just set them up someplace in Asia where hardly anyone ever has heard of human rights or workplace safety laws.
Microsoft's patent portfolio wouldn't pass into the public domain in any case: The GPL3 only stipulates that those you distribute the code to get an implicit license which means you can't sue them for patent violation for using or modifying GPL3ed software, but it doesn't offer protection in any other situation.
Also, while it may be questioned whether or not Microsoft is right to claim that future vouchers are no good for GPL3 software, it cannot make vouchers already handed out retroactively invalid for GPL3: If Novell decides to redistribute GPL3 software, at least the old vouchers are valid for GPL3.
IANAL, of course.
Unfortunately, it doesn't "leave the door open". It's only that the most "popular" interpretation of quantum mechanics requires "true" indeterminism (i.e. no hidden variables) and the concept of free will "requires" indeterminism (whereas free will is only required to "solve" the Theodicee without weakening the original conditions - which, of course, is impossible, because the introduction of additional axioms doesn't cause the old ones to not be contradictory anymore), this doesn't mean that quantum mechanics enables free will.
Also, the very problem of intelligence (with which, for example, artificial intelligence research has to struggle) is that there is no well accepted definition of it: It's really like your example of zero: we know there is something, but we don't really can put it into words (at least in a way generally accepted). Still, I would not include non-determinism in the definition of intelligence, I'd rather to look for an definition which describes the phenomenon (of course, for my purposes I have one) and only then have a look whether this requires non-determinism or not (which it doesn't seem to need as far as I can see but then, I'm not really an expert in intelligence, be it natural or otherwise).
However, my point is that we cannot allow ourselves to even assume the possibility of indeterminism, for then progress becomes impossible. Thus, we need to assume that mind is non-deterministic. Indeed, I'd really like you (or someone else) to explain to me how one can come to the conclusion that non-determinism might be necessary, because I seem unable to introduce it in any other way than an arbitrary axiom instead of a conclusion from perception (at least none which doesn't immediately break down).
Furthermore, I'd like to ask how you can tell complexity from non-determinism? While there are some cases of complexity where I can (though I tend to think of those cases as simple), in most I can't. As an example, remember chaos theory: It is completely deterministic, yet it is so complex that you can't possibly determine how the pattern you see came to be unless you knew the equations in the first place.
This is very much the point I want to make: There may be a "master algorithm", but it is impossible to know: thus we do not need indeterminism or free will, for this is only "required" to fake a solution to the Theodicee. Even if that master algorithm were knowable, we'd not need the starting state to predict the future - we can do that if we knew the current state of the universe. We'd only need the starting state if we wanted to know everything what happened in the past. But we definitely can't even know the current state: Because either the universe is infinite, in which case we can't know it because we always only have access to a finite part of it. Or it is finite, but then the memory needed would at least be equal to the universe itself (and then it would be the universe itself): This is pretty much why we need really big supercomputers with billions of transistors to calculate the movements of a handful of molecules, not even enough to simulate an actual, individual transistor atom for atom, electron for electron.
Thus, I don't think it matters whether something seems random or truly is random - we can't tell either way. Therefore, the only possible path of action is to assume it is not random and thus set out to find out how it is determined: because if we assume it is deterministic, our attempts will either after some (sometimes very long) time tell us that it is deterministic if it is (though we still have to ask whether we have the right function - that's why science can only get more and more exact, but never perfectly so) while our efforts will never terminate when it actually is indeterministic. But if we were to assume it to be non-deterministic, then our search stops immediately because there is no explaining possible of something which is not explainable by definition (which is why religion pushes such concepts: God lives in the gaps, and while t
That won't suffice. After all, they're going to see food, children, old people, women, men, etc in real life. We've got to ban them in real life, too. We really should learn from the muslims and make everyone wear clothes until we look like a big ball of wool instead of a human. Then we only have got to set fire to it (or just wait for starvation to set in due to the banning of food and they'll set fire to themselves) and all problems are solved, as Stalin knew.
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And a comment to the sibling (because I want to go to sleep and don't have the time to wait another hour for posting another comment - why is that enforced delay between posts so long?):
Go read some news or police reports. There indeed are female rapists. The difficulty in raping is not so much in putting it in (even though an involuntary stiff is already common, viagra makes it easier than ever) than in making the victim feel as a victim, thus weakening the defenses, which works with the oh so strong men, too.
You forgot one: Herd of people.
Really, it's more a thing of scale. More quantity than of quality. All they do is eat, fuck and die.
Strength in numbers just means that the whale who gets the munchies can fill his stomach with one bite instead of having to hunt each fish down individually.
Another poster noted that there is a "bad" kind of reductionism; of this kind is your underlying assumption that if our behaviour could be explained in terms of individual neurons, there could be no consciousness, because after all, neurons obviously don't think.
I mean, the very topic of TFA are emergent phenomena of behaviour: An ant hill might be intelligent while individual ants aren't. In the same way, the interactions of neurons create intelligence but do not require every neuron to be intelligent. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but it can still be explained in terms of its parts; there is no such thing as "irreducible complexity" or a least element carrying a specific property: no part of your computer "is" the image you see on the screen, but it still gets created.
If deterministic reductionism actually proved, as is your assertion, that intelligence cannot exist because neurons don't think, we'd have thrown it out long ago, because intelligence obviously does exist. (Actually I think that there actually are some people who actually believe that if we could explain the human mind scientifically, then we'd actually destroy the soul, because in their eyes it existed, but we proved that it doesn't, so we must have turned everyone into soulless zombies just so science could be right...)
Indeed, the requirement of non-determinism with respect to "free will" was caused by the Theodicee, i.e. the proof that a god cannot be simultaneously good, omniscient and omnipotent. However, as we cannot know everything, we don't run into this dilemma in practice: there always are things we don't know, thus there is something seeming non-deterministic to us. Still, we cannot ever allow ourselves to accept something as non-deterministic: Maybe quantum theory means that there is a fundamental break with determinism - not just that we don't know but that we can't know, no matter how we try. However, if we accepted that, we need to ask the question: Why stop with quantum theory? Why not much earlier with having god doing everything? In the end, we need to realize that we cannot just assume indeterminism, thus we have to assume that quantum theory is deterministic in a way we didn't imagine before.
To summarize: quantum mechanics doesn't "leave open" the door for intelligence (it's the wrong scale for that, anyway), but you don't need it to, anyway, because intelligence probably is fully deterministic.
At least we need to assume that and nothing to the countrary has ever been shown: Who says "there is indeterminism" just says "I don't know how it works", but if you look at everything, it at least seems deterministic (realizing, of course, that you can't look in anyones head and see what exactly determines him - which, however, doesn't mean that he isn't determined).
And even if it were non-deterministic: this would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof because it would break down the whole house of human knowledge.
As I'm realizing that I'm running in circles and blubbering aimlessly (well, excuse me, but it's deep night over here and I should be sleeping), one final thought:
Something often not realized is that the human mind is not something seperate from reality (which, in extremo, leads to such theorizing of a inseperable soul), but instead in interaction with it: experiences from the environment always reform the patterns constituting the consciousness, which then feeds back into the environment by actions.