The thing is, the giving back part isn't what makes the GPL so thorny. It's all the other baggage. The majority of companies that use open source (even BSD code) also freely give back their changes unless they are using code for which the changes are so extensive and so irrelevant to the original developer that it would be pointless (e.g. the BSD-derived networking stack inside the Windows kernel).
The things that freak out companies are all of the viral parts---the reverse engineering clauses, the software patent clauses, the inability to link closed source code to GPLed libraries, the limitations it places on hardware developers, etc. The GPL long ago ceased to be merely a "you must give back your changes" license. If you just want to require postbacks,, choose the MPL or similar.
An average wage in China is about $104 per month. At minimum wage in the U.S., the monthly wage would be about $1160. A typical factory work earns significantly more than minimum wage, though. So if an iPod brings in $150, that's about 1.5 months at an average Chinese daily wage, or a mere 20.7 hours (half a week) at U.S. minimum wage.
I think it is more likely that if it were made in the U.S., it would be made at an automated factory with two or three people overseeing the entire production line except when something breaks. China would lose thousands of jobs. The U.S. would gain single-digit jobs. The product would cost about the same, though the margins might be a bit slimmer. On the flip side, the side effect would be short-term additional jobs at the companies that made the automation equipment, which might be in the U.S., China, Germany... who knows. In the long term, though, it means fewer manufacturing jobs.
Of course, in reality, IMHO, using China as a source of cheap labor is just delaying the inevitable. Eventually, all manufacturing is going to have to move to fully automated processes because hand assembly is simply unsustainable in the long term.
First, in what possible way, shape, manner or form is accessing publicly available information and then using it to file in court for discovery "harassment"? Cite the English / Scots statute under which you'd file a civil suit.
I don't need to. It's quite irrelevant whether a harassment cases themselves would have any merit. The point is that the industry in question could not readily handle 30,000 suits coming in simultaneously, and that even sending someone down to ask for 30,000 cases to be individually dismissed would be sufficiently punitive to make them reconsider the wisdom of making such broad, sweeping legal threats in the future. It would also massively piss off the judges after seeing a hundred people in one day all complaining about the recording industry's threat letters. They would thereafter be more likely to recognize the industry's broad, sweeping legal threats as an abuse of the legal system, and would be more likely to be biased against the industry when scrutinizing future industry suits.
It's definitely a joke. It is not possible to have more editors than readers unless people are editing without looking at what they are editing, in which case WP is thoroughly screwed.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm completely with you. And I think there's some truth to the theory that corporations shunning GPL is going to hurt it. Sure, if your goal is to forever be a countercultural niche player, you can always thrive in that narrow space without corporate backing, but the GPL projects that have succeeded in a broader sense have almost invariably done so with *massive* corporate backing.
Take GCC, for example. If you've ever tried to fix bugs in GCC, it's a dauntingly large piece of code, and unless you work for a company that needs a fix, chances are you won't have the time or the inclination to delve into something that large, much less sufficient understanding of compiler concepts. As a result, I suspect if you took the statistics, you'd find that nearly every contribution to GCC in the past year came from someone fixing it as part of his/her job.
Without those contributions, the code would almost certainly stagnate; the "us versus the corporations" mentality is childish and self-destructive.
My money is on the DNA from whatever is on Mars, Europa, Titan...are all going to be the same as Earth.
I'll go one step further and say that whatever they find on Mars, Europa, TItan, etc. will probably turn out to be from Earth. Do you know how many bacteria we've put on other planets and moons over the years?:-D
Exactly. You can't get a computer to do routing that's even in the same ballpark as the standalone routers. Of course, the reason for the low power consumption is that they have toy CPUs. If I needed low power consumption and that level of NAT-based throughput, I'd probably build out a router based on an Atom CPU and boot off a CF card with an ATA to CF adapter. You should be able to get excellent performance in the 30-50W range. While that's two or three times the consumption of an off-the-shelf router, it's still a tiny fraction of the consumption of any usable box from even a few years ago.
That said, you'll always be better off getting an ISP that provides more than one IP so you don't have to put up with NAT.
Yes, which is why it is *urgent* that all 30,000 of those people, upon receiving notice, contact a lawyer and file an immediate suit for harassment, thus removing the industry's ability to pick and choose who to actually fight in court. There is strength in numbers.
Further, it is also essential that those people send letters to their MPs demanding that they fix the law to prevent these abuses. Ignoring the plight of 30,000 organized people would be career suicide.
Seriously? The total population of the entire state of Alaska is only a third that of the COUNTY where I live, and its population density is barely over one person per square mile. To put this in perspective, imagine the population of San Francisco spread out across California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, give or take. With that population density, you just aren't going to run into the sorts of serious conflicts that occur in most states. Outside of Anchorage, you probably can't see the next house even with binoculars from your roof. In that sort of environment, the government just isn't particularly important.
Put another way, if I were picking someone for Governor of Tennessee, all other things being equal, should I pick the mayor of Nashville, TN or the mayor of Bucksnort, TN (unincorporated, population 18)? Guess which one is more likely to have experienced the sorts of crises that a governor would have to deal with on an ongoing basis? Someone coming from an area that is easier to govern must demonstrate strong leadership abilities in some other way, generally through good public speaking. The burden of proof is higher for them, and that's just common sense.
I never said she was a loser. I expect better out of someone who could potentially become the President of the U.S. I expect someone who at least seems to have the potential to be able to pull off public speaking without sounding like you don't know what you are doing. If you can't even handle an interview by a journalist without coming across as incompetent, how can you possibly be expected to handle the much more stressful, important decisions that a President has to make?
I require three things in a President:
The ability to rapidly assess a situation and make decisions that, if not ideal, are at least not catastrophically bad.
The ability to communicate what's going on in the country to your constituents so that government can adequately service the changing needs of the American public.
The ability to govern with honesty and integrity.
Palin failed miserably on all three points, and particularly badly on the first two. Biden didn't do that well, either, but his gaffes seemed less absurd. McCain and Obama both scored high on #1 and #2, with some deficiencies in #3. I then considered their views on the issues facing the country and concluded that Obama was the better Presidential choice, but not by a lot. Had McCain brought along a strong VP candidate, my vote could have been swayed in the other direction because, as I said, Biden wasn't particularly Presidential, either. But he didn't.
As for your implied assertion that I should have voted for a third-party candidate because the two major parties didn't have anybody good, the problem is that all the third-party candidates I saw were significantly worse, and so basically weren't even in the running. Short of writing in "Jon Stewart of The Daily Show", I don't see how I could have done anything but vote for the least bad choice, and I fail to see how that would be likely to make any appreciable difference. We have no strong leaders running for President these days, and until we do, we're just going to see the same old crap. There's not much that we can do but run ourselves, and alas, I didn't meet the age requirements this time.:-)
You aren't even permitted to buy 100 copies of OSX and distribute them without Apple's permission.
Uh, no, the right of first sale says that you are, in fact, allowed to resell any legally purchased copy of software, period. Anyone who says otherwise probably works at Autodesk....
If you comply the EULA may give you additional rights, but it didn't give you the original right to run the software, nor can an document you have not agreed to alter the fact that you legally own the copy of the software apple sold you.
Actually, the EULA doesn't grant the original right to run a piece of software. Copyright law does.
I voted for Obama because of Palin. I figure that with the stresses of Presidency, there would have been an 85% chance of McCain having to be hospitalized while in office for an extended period of time, and a not insignificant chance of him dying from a heart attack, stroke, or other catastrophe. With Obama, the worst case is a small chance of getting shot by a white supremacist or something. So weighing a small chance of Biden as President versus an 85% chance of Palin as President, I made the only choice that didn't feel like Russian roulette.
The debt went up every year of Clinton's Presidency.
The debt went up negligibly in the last three years of his Presidency. The deficit was nearly down to zero by 1998, and IIRC, if you include Social Security's surplus, there was a budget surplus every year from 1998-2000 or possibly 2001, though this is, in effect, borrowing against Social Security's future to pay down the national debt. Either way, the $5 billion dollar deficit in FY 2000 under Clinton was only 1.1 percent of the $459 billion dollar deficit in 2008 under Bush. Just putting things in perspective, since you claim there is no significant difference in the rate of overspending between Democrats and Republicans.
Where we've seen the most responsible government spending has been in years with a Democrat in the White House setting strategy and policies, and Republicans in Congress trying to prevent the President from getting the money he needed to actually implement those policies. In other words, the best government is a gridlocked government, or at least the best of what we've seen lately.... *sigh*
In the end they all blow taxpayer's money left and right, they all increase public debt by 1 trillion every year and they all lick wall street balls whenever wall street feels like it.
Actually, no, the Democrats because they pay for what they spend, and thus generally reduce the debt slightly over time. You can remember which is which this way: the Democrats tax and spend, while the Republicans borrow and spend.
Both arguably spend too much. Both are too spineless to call the bluffs of the corporations who threaten to cut jobs in their state if they don't vote the way they want. Both completely ignore their constituents, sending letters that suggest that they care about your views, then immediately vote according to the way the big corporations have told them to vote. Neither party has any actual leaders as far as I can tell.
The result is stagnation followed by knee-jerk reactionary voting whenever something breaks. The difference between our government and a proper one is basically like the difference between software maintenance and software engineering. Our current government does maintenance on our body of law, throwing hacked patches in there when things break badly enough. They don't learn enough about the entire system to see what they are breaking, so they break stuff constantly.
What we need in our government is a software architect---someone who understands large, complex systems, can reason, and can do a major overhaul to fix all the thousands of warts before they turn into thousands of cancerous tumors (I'm mixing metaphors, I know, but you get the point.)
While it is nice to have a president whose morals and ideology matches your own, at this point I would be supremely happy to just have someone who isn't a scumbag willing sell out our rights or future for the highest dollar.
Only to a mathematician does choosing between the lesser of three evils sound like an improvement over choosing between the lesser of two. Politics should be about quality, not quantity....
With bing (and practically any search engine that doesn't have something to do with google) there's no such problem.
Just give it time and the Bing search experience will degrade similarly as soon as all those sites add appropriate IP address ranges and browser strings.
No, I'm pretty sure that with expert sex change (I'm going to call it that because it seems to have little to do with experts exchanging info unless your definition of "experts" is "non-experts" and your definition of "exchange" is "lock up behind a paywall"), you have to view source, THEN scroll down.
However, the odds of catching it are close to 100%.
So are the odds for the seasonal flu if you are in the same household as someone who has it. The stats I've read suggest that H1N1 spreads no more or less easily than seasonal flu in humans, just without the air temperature constraints. Of course, there's an endless stream of contradictory reports on this subject....:-)
Sure, body odor is unpleasant, but it doesn't generally cause constricted airways in asthmatics, cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc. It's not at all the same thing.
It's pretty laughable comparing smoking to driving. There are no jobs that you have to smoke to get to. There are no grocery stores that you can't get to without smoking. There are no schools or children's soccer games that you magically get to by lighting up. Cars are actually useful.
shit you're kidding me, right? Easy enough to put those outdoor ashtrays back in place, and your problem's solved.
Obviously you've never looked up at the ceiling of a restaurant that allows smoking. You'd be amazed at the amount of particulate output from cigarettes.
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The thing is, the giving back part isn't what makes the GPL so thorny. It's all the other baggage. The majority of companies that use open source (even BSD code) also freely give back their changes unless they are using code for which the changes are so extensive and so irrelevant to the original developer that it would be pointless (e.g. the BSD-derived networking stack inside the Windows kernel).
The things that freak out companies are all of the viral parts---the reverse engineering clauses, the software patent clauses, the inability to link closed source code to GPLed libraries, the limitations it places on hardware developers, etc. The GPL long ago ceased to be merely a "you must give back your changes" license. If you just want to require postbacks,, choose the MPL or similar.
An average wage in China is about $104 per month. At minimum wage in the U.S., the monthly wage would be about $1160. A typical factory work earns significantly more than minimum wage, though. So if an iPod brings in $150, that's about 1.5 months at an average Chinese daily wage, or a mere 20.7 hours (half a week) at U.S. minimum wage.
I think it is more likely that if it were made in the U.S., it would be made at an automated factory with two or three people overseeing the entire production line except when something breaks. China would lose thousands of jobs. The U.S. would gain single-digit jobs. The product would cost about the same, though the margins might be a bit slimmer. On the flip side, the side effect would be short-term additional jobs at the companies that made the automation equipment, which might be in the U.S., China, Germany... who knows. In the long term, though, it means fewer manufacturing jobs.
Of course, in reality, IMHO, using China as a source of cheap labor is just delaying the inevitable. Eventually, all manufacturing is going to have to move to fully automated processes because hand assembly is simply unsustainable in the long term.
Err... the harrassment cases. Too many revisions to a single sentence introduce errors.
I don't need to. It's quite irrelevant whether a harassment cases themselves would have any merit. The point is that the industry in question could not readily handle 30,000 suits coming in simultaneously, and that even sending someone down to ask for 30,000 cases to be individually dismissed would be sufficiently punitive to make them reconsider the wisdom of making such broad, sweeping legal threats in the future. It would also massively piss off the judges after seeing a hundred people in one day all complaining about the recording industry's threat letters. They would thereafter be more likely to recognize the industry's broad, sweeping legal threats as an abuse of the legal system, and would be more likely to be biased against the industry when scrutinizing future industry suits.
It's definitely a joke. It is not possible to have more editors than readers unless people are editing without looking at what they are editing, in which case WP is thoroughly screwed.
I'm completely with you. And I think there's some truth to the theory that corporations shunning GPL is going to hurt it. Sure, if your goal is to forever be a countercultural niche player, you can always thrive in that narrow space without corporate backing, but the GPL projects that have succeeded in a broader sense have almost invariably done so with *massive* corporate backing.
Take GCC, for example. If you've ever tried to fix bugs in GCC, it's a dauntingly large piece of code, and unless you work for a company that needs a fix, chances are you won't have the time or the inclination to delve into something that large, much less sufficient understanding of compiler concepts. As a result, I suspect if you took the statistics, you'd find that nearly every contribution to GCC in the past year came from someone fixing it as part of his/her job.
Without those contributions, the code would almost certainly stagnate; the "us versus the corporations" mentality is childish and self-destructive.
iTunes also lists rap in their music section. Would that fall under the "faulty or misdescribed goods" part?
I'll go one step further and say that whatever they find on Mars, Europa, TItan, etc. will probably turn out to be from Earth. Do you know how many bacteria we've put on other planets and moons over the years? :-D
Exactly. You can't get a computer to do routing that's even in the same ballpark as the standalone routers. Of course, the reason for the low power consumption is that they have toy CPUs. If I needed low power consumption and that level of NAT-based throughput, I'd probably build out a router based on an Atom CPU and boot off a CF card with an ATA to CF adapter. You should be able to get excellent performance in the 30-50W range. While that's two or three times the consumption of an off-the-shelf router, it's still a tiny fraction of the consumption of any usable box from even a few years ago.
That said, you'll always be better off getting an ISP that provides more than one IP so you don't have to put up with NAT.
Yes, which is why it is *urgent* that all 30,000 of those people, upon receiving notice, contact a lawyer and file an immediate suit for harassment, thus removing the industry's ability to pick and choose who to actually fight in court. There is strength in numbers.
Further, it is also essential that those people send letters to their MPs demanding that they fix the law to prevent these abuses. Ignoring the plight of 30,000 organized people would be career suicide.
Seriously? The total population of the entire state of Alaska is only a third that of the COUNTY where I live, and its population density is barely over one person per square mile. To put this in perspective, imagine the population of San Francisco spread out across California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, give or take. With that population density, you just aren't going to run into the sorts of serious conflicts that occur in most states. Outside of Anchorage, you probably can't see the next house even with binoculars from your roof. In that sort of environment, the government just isn't particularly important.
Put another way, if I were picking someone for Governor of Tennessee, all other things being equal, should I pick the mayor of Nashville, TN or the mayor of Bucksnort, TN (unincorporated, population 18)? Guess which one is more likely to have experienced the sorts of crises that a governor would have to deal with on an ongoing basis? Someone coming from an area that is easier to govern must demonstrate strong leadership abilities in some other way, generally through good public speaking. The burden of proof is higher for them, and that's just common sense.
I never said she was a loser. I expect better out of someone who could potentially become the President of the U.S. I expect someone who at least seems to have the potential to be able to pull off public speaking without sounding like you don't know what you are doing. If you can't even handle an interview by a journalist without coming across as incompetent, how can you possibly be expected to handle the much more stressful, important decisions that a President has to make?
I require three things in a President:
Palin failed miserably on all three points, and particularly badly on the first two. Biden didn't do that well, either, but his gaffes seemed less absurd. McCain and Obama both scored high on #1 and #2, with some deficiencies in #3. I then considered their views on the issues facing the country and concluded that Obama was the better Presidential choice, but not by a lot. Had McCain brought along a strong VP candidate, my vote could have been swayed in the other direction because, as I said, Biden wasn't particularly Presidential, either. But he didn't.
As for your implied assertion that I should have voted for a third-party candidate because the two major parties didn't have anybody good, the problem is that all the third-party candidates I saw were significantly worse, and so basically weren't even in the running. Short of writing in "Jon Stewart of The Daily Show", I don't see how I could have done anything but vote for the least bad choice, and I fail to see how that would be likely to make any appreciable difference. We have no strong leaders running for President these days, and until we do, we're just going to see the same old crap. There's not much that we can do but run ourselves, and alas, I didn't meet the age requirements this time. :-)
Uh, no, the right of first sale says that you are, in fact, allowed to resell any legally purchased copy of software, period. Anyone who says otherwise probably works at Autodesk....
Actually, the EULA doesn't grant the original right to run a piece of software. Copyright law does.
I voted for Obama because of Palin. I figure that with the stresses of Presidency, there would have been an 85% chance of McCain having to be hospitalized while in office for an extended period of time, and a not insignificant chance of him dying from a heart attack, stroke, or other catastrophe. With Obama, the worst case is a small chance of getting shot by a white supremacist or something. So weighing a small chance of Biden as President versus an 85% chance of Palin as President, I made the only choice that didn't feel like Russian roulette.
The debt went up negligibly in the last three years of his Presidency. The deficit was nearly down to zero by 1998, and IIRC, if you include Social Security's surplus, there was a budget surplus every year from 1998-2000 or possibly 2001, though this is, in effect, borrowing against Social Security's future to pay down the national debt. Either way, the $5 billion dollar deficit in FY 2000 under Clinton was only 1.1 percent of the $459 billion dollar deficit in 2008 under Bush. Just putting things in perspective, since you claim there is no significant difference in the rate of overspending between Democrats and Republicans.
Where we've seen the most responsible government spending has been in years with a Democrat in the White House setting strategy and policies, and Republicans in Congress trying to prevent the President from getting the money he needed to actually implement those policies. In other words, the best government is a gridlocked government, or at least the best of what we've seen lately.... *sigh*
And my previous post is a perfect example of what happens when you do too many nit-picky rewrites.
s/because they//
Actually, no, the Democrats because they pay for what they spend, and thus generally reduce the debt slightly over time. You can remember which is which this way: the Democrats tax and spend, while the Republicans borrow and spend.
Both arguably spend too much. Both are too spineless to call the bluffs of the corporations who threaten to cut jobs in their state if they don't vote the way they want. Both completely ignore their constituents, sending letters that suggest that they care about your views, then immediately vote according to the way the big corporations have told them to vote. Neither party has any actual leaders as far as I can tell.
The result is stagnation followed by knee-jerk reactionary voting whenever something breaks. The difference between our government and a proper one is basically like the difference between software maintenance and software engineering. Our current government does maintenance on our body of law, throwing hacked patches in there when things break badly enough. They don't learn enough about the entire system to see what they are breaking, so they break stuff constantly.
What we need in our government is a software architect---someone who understands large, complex systems, can reason, and can do a major overhaul to fix all the thousands of warts before they turn into thousands of cancerous tumors (I'm mixing metaphors, I know, but you get the point.)
Only to a mathematician does choosing between the lesser of three evils sound like an improvement over choosing between the lesser of two. Politics should be about quality, not quantity....
Just give it time and the Bing search experience will degrade similarly as soon as all those sites add appropriate IP address ranges and browser strings.
No, I'm pretty sure that with expert sex change (I'm going to call it that because it seems to have little to do with experts exchanging info unless your definition of "experts" is "non-experts" and your definition of "exchange" is "lock up behind a paywall"), you have to view source, THEN scroll down.
So are the odds for the seasonal flu if you are in the same household as someone who has it. The stats I've read suggest that H1N1 spreads no more or less easily than seasonal flu in humans, just without the air temperature constraints. Of course, there's an endless stream of contradictory reports on this subject.... :-)
Sure, body odor is unpleasant, but it doesn't generally cause constricted airways in asthmatics, cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc. It's not at all the same thing.
It's pretty laughable comparing smoking to driving. There are no jobs that you have to smoke to get to. There are no grocery stores that you can't get to without smoking. There are no schools or children's soccer games that you magically get to by lighting up. Cars are actually useful.
Obviously you've never looked up at the ceiling of a restaurant that allows smoking. You'd be amazed at the amount of particulate output from cigarettes.
Oh, and just to counter both your points with a single study, "The air pollution emitted by cigarettes is 10 times greater than diesel car exhaust". And diesel exhaust, of course, is far nastier close to the ground than normal cars. Just saying.
Analogy FAIL. People don't have an allergic reaction to food just by walking ten feet away from someone eating that food.