Let's put that claim to rest right now. It's the opposite of reasonable. Instead the Ms-PL is intentionally designed to divide the open source community. See this informed discussion. [lwn.net]
Sorry, but that discussion is just about as uninformed as they get. License compatibility does not mean that you can strip off one person's license and copyright and substitute your own. Compatibility means that you can combine the two in a single piece of software. The way you do this is by including one piece of code, complete with license and copyright notice, and call functions in that piece of code from another piece of software with different licensing terms. In no case is code licensed under a different set of terms, except insofar as effectively the product as a whole is governed by the union of the restrictions.
What makes a license incompatible are clauses in one license that do not allow you to impose additional restrictions, coupled with terms in the other license that impose additional restrictions above and beyond what are allowed by the first license. Such a situation does not exist here, so the licenses are compaible.
If your definition of "compatible" requires being able to substitute the GPL's terms, then there's no such thing as a GPL-compatible license other than either a dual-licensed work, a work licensed under the same version of the GPL, or a work in the public domain (and because not all countries recognize the right of an author to place a work in the public domain, there's no such thing as a GPL-compatible license at all by that definition other than a dual-licensed work). Your definition is thus completely unreasonable and nonstandard.
Instead of "Capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income", a better step would be to have ordinary income taxed at the same rate as cap gains.I'd be happier with that compromise. Wouldn't you?
No, I wouldn't. I make a fair chunk of my income from capital gains, and even still, I think the capital gains tax rate is too low. Most first-world countries have top income tax brackets over 50%. For the United States, a significant percentage of the people who earn the most money are paying 15%. That's basically third-world territory. Governments can't usefully function with such a low income tax rate, with the possible exception of tiny nation states.
Here's a reality check for you: political stability and economic stability require that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" be kept in check. When this doesn't happen, eventually the people at the bottom get tired of being shat upon by the people at the top, and there's a violent revolution. That's reality, and there's no ecaping it. Sure, some of the people at the top can flee to other countries, but with their money becoming almost immediately worthless, their homes captured by revolutionaries, etc., even in the best case scenario, they end up as a poor shadow of what they were before.
And even if you ignore that reality, there's still the fact that the people at the top got where they are because of the support of all the people at the bottom. You can't become a billionaire in a vacuum. You either get there by hiring people to work for you or by getting lucky on the stock market, in which case you're basicaly loaning money to people in the hope that they'll give you more money later. Either way, your success is almost entirely caused by other people doing the work. And that's true at every level of the economy. I'm successful as a programmer in part because I got a good education from public universities, and in part because lots of other people got acceptable levels of education that enabled them to get jobs that produced economic output, which in turn paid them money to buy the things that my employer produces. Even a grocery store employee is only employed because there are people buying groceries. No matter how far down the economic food chain you go, we are all interconnected, and anyone who claims otherwise is either a complete fool or a liar.
What this means is that when the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" grows too big, there's nobody left to buy that MP3 player, and the economy falls apart. The economy is only capable of functioning as long as there is enough money getting poured back in. Right now, the rich are amassing fortune. They aren't pouring it back into the economy by buying things, by hiring people, etc. And as long as that is true, the economy will continue to suffer. Income taxes are not the only way to cause money to flow back into the economy, but they are one way, and more to the point, they are the only way that cannot be avoided.
Wikipedia is wrong. From opensourcelegal.org, it is compatible with the GPL, but only with GPLv3. GPLv2 is incompatible with patent retaliation clauses. GPLv3 is not.
Incidentally, GPLv2 without an "and later" clause is also incompatible with GPLv3 for the same reason.
Oh, and at a glance, I don't see anything that would be incompatible with GPL v3, which from Microsoft is pretty remarkable.... On the flip side, it is incompatible with GPL v2. This makes it absolutely bizarre and backwards as corporate open source licenses go....
It's a pretty reasonable open source license, actually. It is basically a BSD license, plus a patent grant, plus a mutually assured destruction clause regarding patent suits. I'm most impressed by the fact that it is about three fewer pages than the average open source license seems to be these days. A normal person might actually be able to comprehend it.:-)
Sure it does. That's the wing that thinks that one group of people should permanently, structurally, be taxed in order to provide social spending for the 50% of the country that pay no income taxes at all.
I think you misspelled socialist. We have neosocialists. We do not have a left wing. There's more to being liberal than socialism. It must be balanced with libertarianism in ways that make sense.
Our president just reflected on the move he made to take General Motors away from the people who owned it, and while keeping a large share of the company for the government, gave the rest to labor union supporters on the left.
For example, that. That is not left-wing. That's way, way far to the right. It is putting the desire to keep a business artificially running above the rights of the stockholders. That's a corporatist, fascist way of doing things. It means that the people who put money into the company by buying its stock lose their investment, while the big corporations that the company owes money don't lose their investment. They spin off a shell company that holds the company's debts without any of its assets, and the working class get screwed, while the rich get richer. If they had allowed the company to fold, the working class might have at least gotten back some of their investment instead of ending up with worthless stock certificates. Instead, they chose the rights of a few big companies over the rights of the majority.
... The Nanny Staters
Those people are also not on the left. Someone truly on the left is typically in favor of greater personal freedom, not bigger government for government's sake. True left-wing politics requires government to interfere in the lives of individuals only when those individuals hold undue power over others.
Note that this is not the same thing as libertarianism, where the government never interferes. Nor is it socialism, where the government always interferes. Both of those are skewed politics that don't represent the true political left.
The group that is focused on the government as the source of personal comfort, sustenance, housing, medical services, etc., using funds removed from a small group of people who will be the beasts of burden providing all of those things.
You're kidding, right? You just described the political far right, except for the "small" bit. The far right consists mostly of investors who make their money by using funds and effort removed from the masses, who are beasts of burden providing all those things. Most of those people contribute little, if anything, to society other than loaning money, and for that, we reward them with a life of luxury while almost everyone else has to work like slaves just to afford basic healthcare.
Yet even the far left does not want them to become beasts of burden. They merely want those people to pay their fair share. While the rest of us are paying 30% in taxes, they pay 15%. They do less work to earn their money, yet they get to keep more of it. By any reasonable and sane standard, they're cheating the system, and that's wrong.
Capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income. At most, there should be a one-time homeowner exemption so that people can afford to change houses once in a while. Only if we treat unearned income with the same level of taxation as earned income can we legitimately say that nobody is using anyone else, treating anyone else as beasts of burden.
Although the building as a whole might smolder for hours, a fire is unlikely to burn at peak temperature in any one spot for more than 5-10 minutes before it consumes most of the locally available flammable materials and/or oxygen. And remember that the hard drive isn't likely to move around during the fire from one spot to the next like the fire itself does.
Here is what the folks at ioSafe have to say about fire ratings and temperatures: “In a house fire, temperatures will typically be in the 800 to 1000 degree range. Spikes at around 1500 degrees may occur in the ceiling area, but on or near the floor, temperatures in the 300 to 400 degree range are more likely. We test for worst-case temperatures (1500 degrees) but, in most situations, drives will not be exposed to that. We ain’t lost a customer’s data yet:)”
No need. In the worst case, you lost your computer and all backups of your computer, so you reload all of them onto your new machine. Now, they're sorted by date. It really doesn't matter what's on each card.
Physically? Yes. Floppy discs, no, DVDs, no, but hard drives, yes. Aluminum or glass platters melt a 1200-1500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The data, on the other hand, might suffer significant damage because of the superparamagnetic effect, depending on what type of magnetic material is involved and possibly on whether the drive is based on perpendicular storage. Or it might be completely unaffected. Hard to say.
Unless you're in earthquake country. Ask anyone who lived through the 1906 San Francisco quake and fires if they would trust a backup to be safe from fire in another building just a few blocks away.
To be fair, Jaguar didn't make my list, but in my defense, I don't think I've never actually seen one on this side of the pond except on a lot or in a museum....
They evidently polled AMTrak passengers for this one.
Other way around. If my experience chatting with Amtrak passengers is any indication, about 80% of them are there because of the TSA, or at least agreed with me that they're a bunch of bozos on a power trip.
No, in reality, the people who like the TSA tend to be the people who fly, but infrequently. The people who fly frequently are fed up with it and wouldn't give them a good score even if what they are doing were useful. The people who don't fly, or fly infrequently, have very little to go on, and so they make the best call based on their limited information coupled with their limited understanding of what actually makes people safe.
That last part is key. You see, for people who do not actually understand security—your typical person, as opposed to those of us here on Slashdot, most of whom have to maintain at least some understanding of security principles as part of our jobs—anything you do under the guise of security makes them feel like you're doing a good job.
That's why if you ask your average person what they think of a screen where a company is asking you security questions, they'll tell you that because the company wants more information about you, it must mean the company is serious about security. If you ask a security researcher what they think of the screen, they'll immediately tell you that the security questions almost always weaken security, not strengthen it.
Public opinion is useless for this sort of thing. You want useful information about how good a job the TSA is doing, ask security researchers. You want information about how mad the public is, ask a random sampling of air travelers, and only air travelers. Asking the public as a whole is a worthless metric. It's like asking the public, "Does this guy look like a murderer?" without presenting any of the facts of the case. It's a great way of seeing how much the general public is paying attention and how much their confirmation bias gets in the way of them learning new information, but not much else apart from psychology research. Heck, all you really have to do is show them a picture, and you'll get answers that are heavily skewed towards yes.
Which suddenly made me realize something. Even if Google only succeeds in getting these things in luxury cars, the accident and near-miss rate is likely to plummet for everyone.:-)
Seriously. Clearly that other interpretation isn't true. Just about every time I've seen somebody driving like a complete idiot with no regard for anybody else on the road, it has been somebody in a Lexus. And when it isn't a Lexus, it's a Beamer or a Benz. Almost always. Oh, and lately, Scions. Well, and motorcycles, but they don't count.
I was cut off by a Ford SUV once. Once. And I have never been incompetently cut off by someone driving any model of VW, Toyota (unless you count the Scion or Lexus), Nissan, Honda, or just about any other non-luxury car brand. Never. Yet those make up the vast majority of cars on the roads around here.
When it comes to getting full disclosure from companies about their security practices, history has shown that nothing else works. And that's what I'm talking about here: mandating that companies disclose how they intend to use the information that they are requesting at the time that they are requesting it. It's no different from laws requiring privacy policies, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but that discussion is just about as uninformed as they get. License compatibility does not mean that you can strip off one person's license and copyright and substitute your own. Compatibility means that you can combine the two in a single piece of software. The way you do this is by including one piece of code, complete with license and copyright notice, and call functions in that piece of code from another piece of software with different licensing terms. In no case is code licensed under a different set of terms, except insofar as effectively the product as a whole is governed by the union of the restrictions.
What makes a license incompatible are clauses in one license that do not allow you to impose additional restrictions, coupled with terms in the other license that impose additional restrictions above and beyond what are allowed by the first license. Such a situation does not exist here, so the licenses are compaible.
If your definition of "compatible" requires being able to substitute the GPL's terms, then there's no such thing as a GPL-compatible license other than either a dual-licensed work, a work licensed under the same version of the GPL, or a work in the public domain (and because not all countries recognize the right of an author to place a work in the public domain, there's no such thing as a GPL-compatible license at all by that definition other than a dual-licensed work). Your definition is thus completely unreasonable and nonstandard.
My faith in humanity is restored. No, wait....
No, I wouldn't. I make a fair chunk of my income from capital gains, and even still, I think the capital gains tax rate is too low. Most first-world countries have top income tax brackets over 50%. For the United States, a significant percentage of the people who earn the most money are paying 15%. That's basically third-world territory. Governments can't usefully function with such a low income tax rate, with the possible exception of tiny nation states.
Here's a reality check for you: political stability and economic stability require that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" be kept in check. When this doesn't happen, eventually the people at the bottom get tired of being shat upon by the people at the top, and there's a violent revolution. That's reality, and there's no ecaping it. Sure, some of the people at the top can flee to other countries, but with their money becoming almost immediately worthless, their homes captured by revolutionaries, etc., even in the best case scenario, they end up as a poor shadow of what they were before.
And even if you ignore that reality, there's still the fact that the people at the top got where they are because of the support of all the people at the bottom. You can't become a billionaire in a vacuum. You either get there by hiring people to work for you or by getting lucky on the stock market, in which case you're basicaly loaning money to people in the hope that they'll give you more money later. Either way, your success is almost entirely caused by other people doing the work. And that's true at every level of the economy. I'm successful as a programmer in part because I got a good education from public universities, and in part because lots of other people got acceptable levels of education that enabled them to get jobs that produced economic output, which in turn paid them money to buy the things that my employer produces. Even a grocery store employee is only employed because there are people buying groceries. No matter how far down the economic food chain you go, we are all interconnected, and anyone who claims otherwise is either a complete fool or a liar.
What this means is that when the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" grows too big, there's nobody left to buy that MP3 player, and the economy falls apart. The economy is only capable of functioning as long as there is enough money getting poured back in. Right now, the rich are amassing fortune. They aren't pouring it back into the economy by buying things, by hiring people, etc. And as long as that is true, the economy will continue to suffer. Income taxes are not the only way to cause money to flow back into the economy, but they are one way, and more to the point, they are the only way that cannot be avoided.
Actually, in this case, it does. The Microsoft Public License has an explicit patent grant for all included technology.
Wikipedia is wrong. From opensourcelegal.org, it is compatible with the GPL, but only with GPLv3. GPLv2 is incompatible with patent retaliation clauses. GPLv3 is not.
Incidentally, GPLv2 without an "and later" clause is also incompatible with GPLv3 for the same reason.
Oh, and at a glance, I don't see anything that would be incompatible with GPL v3, which from Microsoft is pretty remarkable.... On the flip side, it is incompatible with GPL v2. This makes it absolutely bizarre and backwards as corporate open source licenses go....
It's a pretty reasonable open source license, actually. It is basically a BSD license, plus a patent grant, plus a mutually assured destruction clause regarding patent suits. I'm most impressed by the fact that it is about three fewer pages than the average open source license seems to be these days. A normal person might actually be able to comprehend it. :-)
DSL? I told them they should have gone with a cable modem.... Oh, well. I guess we should be thankful that it isn't 6.0/128k.
I think you misspelled socialist. We have neosocialists. We do not have a left wing. There's more to being liberal than socialism. It must be balanced with libertarianism in ways that make sense.
For example, that. That is not left-wing. That's way, way far to the right. It is putting the desire to keep a business artificially running above the rights of the stockholders. That's a corporatist, fascist way of doing things. It means that the people who put money into the company by buying its stock lose their investment, while the big corporations that the company owes money don't lose their investment. They spin off a shell company that holds the company's debts without any of its assets, and the working class get screwed, while the rich get richer. If they had allowed the company to fold, the working class might have at least gotten back some of their investment instead of ending up with worthless stock certificates. Instead, they chose the rights of a few big companies over the rights of the majority.
Those people are also not on the left. Someone truly on the left is typically in favor of greater personal freedom, not bigger government for government's sake. True left-wing politics requires government to interfere in the lives of individuals only when those individuals hold undue power over others.
Note that this is not the same thing as libertarianism, where the government never interferes. Nor is it socialism, where the government always interferes. Both of those are skewed politics that don't represent the true political left.
You're kidding, right? You just described the political far right, except for the "small" bit. The far right consists mostly of investors who make their money by using funds and effort removed from the masses, who are beasts of burden providing all those things. Most of those people contribute little, if anything, to society other than loaning money, and for that, we reward them with a life of luxury while almost everyone else has to work like slaves just to afford basic healthcare.
Yet even the far left does not want them to become beasts of burden. They merely want those people to pay their fair share. While the rest of us are paying 30% in taxes, they pay 15%. They do less work to earn their money, yet they get to keep more of it. By any reasonable and sane standard, they're cheating the system, and that's wrong.
Capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income. At most, there should be a one-time homeowner exemption so that people can afford to change houses once in a while. Only if we treat unearned income with the same level of taxation as earned income can we legitimately say that nobody is using anyone else, treating anyone else as beasts of burden.
Okay, I'll be the straight man and set up the joke. What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?
I knew I should have added the <sarcasm> tags.
Although the building as a whole might smolder for hours, a fire is unlikely to burn at peak temperature in any one spot for more than 5-10 minutes before it consumes most of the locally available flammable materials and/or oxygen. And remember that the hard drive isn't likely to move around during the fire from one spot to the next like the fire itself does.
From http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/06/crashplan/:
YMMV, of course.
As of February, there are only four. My comment wasn't meant to be taken literally. :-)
No need. In the worst case, you lost your computer and all backups of your computer, so you reload all of them onto your new machine. Now, they're sorted by date. It really doesn't matter what's on each card.
Physically? Yes. Floppy discs, no, DVDs, no, but hard drives, yes. Aluminum or glass platters melt a 1200-1500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The data, on the other hand, might suffer significant damage because of the superparamagnetic effect, depending on what type of magnetic material is involved and possibly on whether the drive is based on perpendicular storage. Or it might be completely unaffected. Hard to say.
Unless you're in earthquake country. Ask anyone who lived through the 1906 San Francisco quake and fires if they would trust a backup to be safe from fire in another building just a few blocks away.
It works. It really works.
http://iosafe.com
Nope. I'm just acutely observant.
To be fair, Jaguar didn't make my list, but in my defense, I don't think I've never actually seen one on this side of the pond except on a lot or in a museum....
Other way around. If my experience chatting with Amtrak passengers is any indication, about 80% of them are there because of the TSA, or at least agreed with me that they're a bunch of bozos on a power trip.
No, in reality, the people who like the TSA tend to be the people who fly, but infrequently. The people who fly frequently are fed up with it and wouldn't give them a good score even if what they are doing were useful. The people who don't fly, or fly infrequently, have very little to go on, and so they make the best call based on their limited information coupled with their limited understanding of what actually makes people safe.
That last part is key. You see, for people who do not actually understand security—your typical person, as opposed to those of us here on Slashdot, most of whom have to maintain at least some understanding of security principles as part of our jobs—anything you do under the guise of security makes them feel like you're doing a good job.
That's why if you ask your average person what they think of a screen where a company is asking you security questions, they'll tell you that because the company wants more information about you, it must mean the company is serious about security. If you ask a security researcher what they think of the screen, they'll immediately tell you that the security questions almost always weaken security, not strengthen it.
Public opinion is useless for this sort of thing. You want useful information about how good a job the TSA is doing, ask security researchers. You want information about how mad the public is, ask a random sampling of air travelers, and only air travelers. Asking the public as a whole is a worthless metric. It's like asking the public, "Does this guy look like a murderer?" without presenting any of the facts of the case. It's a great way of seeing how much the general public is paying attention and how much their confirmation bias gets in the way of them learning new information, but not much else apart from psychology research. Heck, all you really have to do is show them a picture, and you'll get answers that are heavily skewed towards yes.
Which suddenly made me realize something. Even if Google only succeeds in getting these things in luxury cars, the accident and near-miss rate is likely to plummet for everyone. :-)
Seriously. Clearly that other interpretation isn't true. Just about every time I've seen somebody driving like a complete idiot with no regard for anybody else on the road, it has been somebody in a Lexus. And when it isn't a Lexus, it's a Beamer or a Benz. Almost always. Oh, and lately, Scions. Well, and motorcycles, but they don't count.
I was cut off by a Ford SUV once. Once. And I have never been incompetently cut off by someone driving any model of VW, Toyota (unless you count the Scion or Lexus), Nissan, Honda, or just about any other non-luxury car brand. Never. Yet those make up the vast majority of cars on the roads around here.
Draw your own conclusions.
You mean my mother, née Oklahoma, or my mother né Icosahedron?
You don't mean to say that you actually give them the real information, do you? :-)
When it comes to getting full disclosure from companies about their security practices, history has shown that nothing else works. And that's what I'm talking about here: mandating that companies disclose how they intend to use the information that they are requesting at the time that they are requesting it. It's no different from laws requiring privacy policies, really.