> "BSD is the license if someone is looking for true freedom." > > No, it forces me to attribute the work to original author, thus not free - and you know it.
What do you think of releasing the software into the public domain? Is that free?
I have seen lots of arguments, on Slashdot, claiming that PD reduces freedom, by letting MS use it without attribution or a requirement to contribute their changes back to the source (ignoring that everything is going into the public domain, eventually, unless Disney convinces the right people to extend copyright to eternity). I think that some people here are not so interested in freedom as in achieving their desired state, where they are free to do what they want, and restricted from doing what they did not want to do, in any case, and are not willing to accept that reasonable people can disagree where the divide should be.
society Bar is a truly free place. it allows anyone to beat anyone else over the head with a cast iron pipe for no reason other than they enjoy doing it.
It's not truly free because it removes one's freedom to not be beaten over the head.
No, it doesn't, as you can still be beaten over the head if you want (ala, Scorpio, in Dirty Harry) if you can find someone willing to do it, at the risk of violating the law.
Bar (the Hobbesian State Of Nature) IS freer than Foo, but in a way that most find unacceptable, at least on first description. Now, if the method for Foo preventing a beating another over the head was to exterminate anyone angry enough to even contemplate doing that (ala Charmed, either in the too-good world, or after the Avatars take over), the average person might think that too severe, and prefer something closer to Bar (say, let them use the pipe, then punish the explicit act, rather than the implicit desire).
OTOH, anyone powerful enough to prevent themselves from being clubbed will tend to prefer something a tad closer to Bar. In our Foo, even shaking the pipe can be a crime; in a more viking-ish society, the pipe might have to actually hit the victim, possibly even hard enough to be dangerous, before the assailant can be assailed.
> When will people use standard units?
Fahrenheit *is* a standard unit, just not a French one.
> I'm sorry it's a particular gripe of mine; kelvin is the universal scale.
That's OK, as the name "Celcius" is one of mine. The Celcius scale invented by the alchemist, Celcius, had water boiling at zero and freezing at 100. Such stupidity deserves obsurity, not immortality through becoming a unit. Since you wanted kelvin, you get a pass. "Centigrade" is also acceptable.
> (unless anyone else wants to convert to a base 12 system?)
Meaningless complaint, for temperature. Also meaningless, as I have a folding ruler graduated in decimal feet (tenths, then tenths of the tenths) at home in the main workbench.
Anyway, using Fahrenheit (or even Centigrade) to show how cold it was makes sense as rhetoric, even if not acceptable in an article to Nature.
> It might be easier for you to deny having sent an > email with your signature than to deny having sent > a fax that originated from your home or business > phone number.
Not with the right email setup (included as part of PGP, GPG, others). They can transfer a non-repudatable email with most of the message in clear, or encrypt it so that only is recipient can read it
OTOH, false statements over fax can be treated as fraud, whereas no such protection exists for email. Email with authenification depends on complicated algorithms that neither side can prove won't become transparent with the next Nobel Prize in Mathematics, to guarantee a transaction; snail mail and fax just depend on men with guns. Men with guns wins, usually.
> in preference to giving the said number to a machine over SSL.
1) They don't KNOW that it is via DSL; it is just that a little icon has appeared, and everyone "knows" how easy it is to spoof those.
2) They haven't had a problem with the phone, but their (some relative), fuzzyfuzzyfungus, has told them how insecure the web is. Granted, our idea of secure is that it is good enough for transferring billions of dollars between personal enemies in separate legal systems, or it is nothing, but we said it was insecure.
3) As to the security of the cell phone, in the USA, it is a felony to use any information accidentally overheard on the cell phone for any business reason, let alone to commit fraud via the phone. Therefore, they have a legal remedy available, which SSL and email doesn't.
> rather than facing the foreign dangers of a fairly > quiet and moderately obscure neutral country.
Where the police carry Uzis at inter-school soccer matches, and where the airport at the main city was described as so insecure that no terrorist would attack there, just as no one escaped from Stalag-13, because it was more useful for sending their weapons and drugs (and themselves) through unmolested. I was there in 1996, 1998, and 2000 (working for the US branch of a German company, and going to the yearly company meetings on their dime), and it is not safer than stuck in your room at home is. Especially if you cannot drink enough alcohol to kill the bugs (not bad, just different, is enough to ruin a few days) in the water, which you high schoolers couldn't (it took about one bottle of wine per day per person, and in 96, none of us were expecting that. Slightly drunk in the afternoon, or sick, your choice:-).
> Actually, faxes are only used by lawyers and realtors. Nobody else use them anymore.
I had to use one (in paralle with FedExing the real documents) for my current programming job, slightly over a year ago. It struck me as ridiculous, at the time, since all that they needed was to record the phone conversation (yeah, I'm going to object to the job offer being taped?) and sent to some secure server for the two days before the documents (with all the ink spatter to prove its reality) arrived via courier.
> > I imagine that the English protect the official copies of the Magna Carta, too. > > Yeah, there's a small sign next to it asking people not to take flash photographs.
The USS Constitution, the 200 year old wooden warship docked in Boston Harbor, is protected by a security cordon including metal detector, X-ray, and divers checking under the ship.
For the same reason that there is one around the ferry to Liberty and Ellis Islands. They are historical landmarks, and worth defending for the propaganda value in their destruction. Likewise, the official copies of the Declaration Of Independence or the Constitution. Would the USA become an English possession again if the official copies of the Declaration were all destroyed, or would we go under the Articles of Confederation if the official copies of the Constitution were all gone? No, but something would be lost. I imagine that the English protect the official copies of the Magna Carta, too.
Actually, it is still a commissioned warship, as well.
It was a fearsome weapon in 1800. However, if you smuggled sufficient gunpowder abord and fired its cannons now, the ship would probably split apart.
Both it and the USS Constellation, in Baltimore (not a commissioned warship, but still a frigate of the period), were repaired within the last decade to approximately their commissioning condition, replacing large sections with new wood (live oak not available, though, in as thick pieces as before, so sometimes they had to use multiple pieces bound together). If they just had trained crew, as well, they would be as effective as they were back when.
And it is "aboard" you land lubber, not "abord":-)
> He claimed that his grandfather told him the story > of how he helped bury one of the "white giants", > blond and fair skinned men "as tall as you could reach".
Of course, he left out "almost fresh off the boat from Oslo, he had worked at Jorganson's place the summer before". The Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas are chock full of people with mainly Norwegian and Swedish ancestry.
The universe as we know it might actually live that long and much longer, since the proton half-life (assuming that the Grand Unification Theory is correct and protons do decay after all) is currently estimated to be at least 10^35 years.
Except that The Big Rip will hit first, destroying those protons a few months after they destroy the Galaxy, and long before they can decay through GUT decay.
Assuming that Dark Energy behaves exactly as currently calculated, that is.
> in the meantime they abandon IE for who knows how long, > and made mediocre products in the field that is actually > profitable.
Because they made that profit regardless of whether the 7% of users who cared to look for something better were pleased. This is roughly like why the Boston Red Sox were able to go so long without winning the World Series; because the Boston fans kept buying tickets and memorabilia, it was not worth the Sox paying the extra money that it takes to go from good not great to great then to best of the greats.
One of the first internet portals called I'won has been paying customers to surf over ten years. They have periodic lotteries for prizes. You increase you chances by looking at more parts of the site as often as possible.
So, where is the PERL script to do this in the background, and while one is at work?
And, is there any advantage to having multiple machines behind the same NAT firewall doing it at the same time?
Because others were able to repeat the trick. My mother has multiple MasterCards, each giving a discount on different types of purchases up to so much per calendar year. As a result, her Discover gets used only when all the other cards hit their yearly limit on cash back. Of course, if the credit card equivalent of TV's Sweeps Month is December, she (and those like her) will be driving up Discover's numbers quite nicely.
I mean, seriously, do you think a country which is relaxed and rational enough to allow lolicon to be published and sold openly (BTW, Kasumi from DOA is 16) would be that bothered about an internet forum?
By that logic, Polynesians would never have developed the ideas of taboos, since they had none for sex. Letting your shadow fall on a social superior might be forbidden, yes, but you could screw your relatives or strangers in public and no one would mind so long as you didn't block the paths.
Sorry, but relaxed in one area doesn't necessarily mean relaxed in any other area. BTW, from your description it is obvious that Pachinko is technically legal, since they have found a way around the anti-gambling laws, just as designer drugs sufficiently dissimilar to any others are technically legal until a law is passed that covers them, as well.
> We might eventually reach a similar stage of culture > to what we have now, but it would hardly be identical >... and something most definitely would be lost.
> There is a fundamental difference here that nobody seems to notice: > hardware is a good, software is a service.
Software is a service only if customized to the purchaser. Given that MS stamps out more identical copies of XP than Asus makes boxes, Windows XP is goods, too. You are buying the compiled machine code version, not an English language version that someone claims can, in the right environment, produce the image after hours of recompilation.
To use the stupid car analogy, she bought a Chysler, but didn't want the Mitsubishi engine, but an after-market replacement. While you can exercise a Delete Option on the car radio, even if standard, I do not think that you can for the engine. In any case, expecting that shipping the car back to the Chysler factory and then back wouldn't cost more than the Mitsubishi Tax (especially as Chysler pays super wholesale, not retail, let alone auto-parts store prices) is a bit naive, too. She might have had a case if she insisted before taking delivery that the engine be ordered as deleted, but she seems to have taken the car then took it back to have the negine removed, and that she receive as much back as if she had bought the engine piece by piece at the local Advance Auto.
> to a Noam Chomsky kind of mind (Yes I know he's Jewish)
So? There are more Jews within 50 miles of NYC than in all of Israel, and about as many in the rest of the country. Almost like the Irish and Boston. Your "Yes I know he's Jewish" is about like "Yes, I know he's left-handed" in terms of relevance (at least here). Almost completely orthogonal.
> The French are nice,
No, the stereotype is rude (although I am told that is the Parisians giving the rest a bad name).
> They women are just neat, good food, good movies.
Nice exchange student, in my senior year of high school, but never met many others. The food is designed to give you a heart attack from the sauces (almost as bad as German, that way). Crappy movies, but all the naked chicks makes it worth watching some until you get a girl friend, who then will naturally object.
> This is what you get for being the ally of the US.
France hasn't been an ally of the US since DeGaulle. Before that, they weren't allies from the start of the Versailles Conference until Vichy territory was completely liberated. Before that, they weren't allies from mid-1917 going back all the way to the XYZ Affair, in the John Adams administration. We fought an undeclared war aginst France 1803-1805, and if the Mexicans hadn't killed kicked them out (or killed them in place) first, would have likely had another after our Civil War. We can leave aside their little misbehavior during the Suez Crisis, too.
Occasionally, we have been co-beligerents, but allies is quite an exageration.
> The irony is that I am French-Vietnamese...
Only if you were a Vietnamese student from Hanoi, now studying in Paris.
Slashdot Mirror
> "BSD is the license if someone is looking for true freedom."
>
> No, it forces me to attribute the work to original author, thus not free - and you know it.
What do you think of releasing the software into the public domain? Is that free?
I have seen lots of arguments, on Slashdot, claiming that PD reduces freedom, by letting MS use it without attribution or a requirement to contribute their changes back to the source (ignoring that everything is going into the public domain, eventually, unless Disney convinces the right people to extend copyright to eternity). I think that some people here are not so interested in freedom as in achieving their desired state, where they are free to do what they want, and restricted from doing what they did not want to do, in any case, and are not willing to accept that reasonable people can disagree where the divide should be.
No, it doesn't, as you can still be beaten over the head if you want (ala, Scorpio, in Dirty Harry) if you can find someone willing to do it, at the risk of violating the law.
Bar (the Hobbesian State Of Nature) IS freer than Foo, but in a way that most find unacceptable, at least on first description. Now, if the method for Foo preventing a beating another over the head was to exterminate anyone angry enough to even contemplate doing that (ala Charmed, either in the too-good world, or after the Avatars take over), the average person might think that too severe, and prefer something closer to Bar (say, let them use the pipe, then punish the explicit act, rather than the implicit desire).
OTOH, anyone powerful enough to prevent themselves from being clubbed will tend to prefer something a tad closer to Bar. In our Foo, even shaking the pipe can be a crime; in a more viking-ish society, the pipe might have to actually hit the victim, possibly even hard enough to be dangerous, before the assailant can be assailed.
> When will people use standard units? Fahrenheit *is* a standard unit, just not a French one. > I'm sorry it's a particular gripe of mine; kelvin is the universal scale. That's OK, as the name "Celcius" is one of mine. The Celcius scale invented by the alchemist, Celcius, had water boiling at zero and freezing at 100. Such stupidity deserves obsurity, not immortality through becoming a unit. Since you wanted kelvin, you get a pass. "Centigrade" is also acceptable. > (unless anyone else wants to convert to a base 12 system?) Meaningless complaint, for temperature. Also meaningless, as I have a folding ruler graduated in decimal feet (tenths, then tenths of the tenths) at home in the main workbench. Anyway, using Fahrenheit (or even Centigrade) to show how cold it was makes sense as rhetoric, even if not acceptable in an article to Nature.
> Also, I wonder if a fax is more auditable
No, it isn't.
> It might be easier for you to deny having sent an
> email with your signature than to deny having sent
> a fax that originated from your home or business
> phone number.
Not with the right email setup (included as part of PGP, GPG, others). They can transfer a non-repudatable email with most of the message in clear, or encrypt it so that only is recipient can read it
OTOH, false statements over fax can be treated as fraud, whereas no such protection exists for email. Email with authenification depends on complicated algorithms that neither side can prove won't become transparent with the next Nobel Prize in Mathematics, to guarantee a transaction; snail mail and fax just depend on men with guns. Men with guns wins, usually.
> in preference to giving the said number to a machine over SSL.
:-).
1) They don't KNOW that it is via DSL; it is just that a little icon has appeared, and everyone "knows" how easy it is to spoof those.
2) They haven't had a problem with the phone, but their (some relative), fuzzyfuzzyfungus, has told them how insecure the web is. Granted, our idea of secure is that it is good enough for transferring billions of dollars between personal enemies in separate legal systems, or it is nothing, but we said it was insecure.
3) As to the security of the cell phone, in the USA, it is a felony to use any information accidentally overheard on the cell phone for any business reason, let alone to commit fraud via the phone. Therefore, they have a legal remedy available, which SSL and email doesn't.
> rather than facing the foreign dangers of a fairly
> quiet and moderately obscure neutral country.
Where the police carry Uzis at inter-school soccer matches, and where the airport at the main city was described as so insecure that no terrorist would attack there, just as no one escaped from Stalag-13, because it was more useful for sending their weapons and drugs (and themselves) through unmolested. I was there in 1996, 1998, and 2000 (working for the US branch of a German company, and going to the yearly company meetings on their dime), and it is not safer than stuck in your room at home is. Especially if you cannot drink enough alcohol to kill the bugs (not bad, just different, is enough to ruin a few days) in the water, which you high schoolers couldn't (it took about one bottle of wine per day per person, and in 96, none of us were expecting that. Slightly drunk in the afternoon, or sick, your choice
> Actually, faxes are only used by lawyers and realtors. Nobody else use them anymore.
I had to use one (in paralle with FedExing the real documents) for my current programming job, slightly over a year ago. It struck me as ridiculous, at the time, since all that they needed was to record the phone conversation (yeah, I'm going to object to the job offer being taped?) and sent to some secure server for the two days before the documents (with all the ink spatter to prove its reality) arrived via courier.
Ask the Irish about Strongbow (aka, Richard deClare) sometime. 837 years, and they are still ticked off at him. And he wasn't even really English.
> > I imagine that the English protect the official copies of the Magna Carta, too.
:-)
>
> Yeah, there's a small sign next to it asking people not to take flash photographs.
But you can otherwise finger the parchment?
For the same reason that there is one around the ferry to Liberty and Ellis Islands. They are historical landmarks, and worth defending for the propaganda value in their destruction. Likewise, the official copies of the Declaration Of Independence or the Constitution. Would the USA become an English possession again if the official copies of the Declaration were all destroyed, or would we go under the Articles of Confederation if the official copies of the Constitution were all gone? No, but something would be lost. I imagine that the English protect the official copies of the Magna Carta, too.
Actually, it is still a commissioned warship, as well.
Both it and the USS Constellation, in Baltimore (not a commissioned warship, but still a frigate of the period), were repaired within the last decade to approximately their commissioning condition, replacing large sections with new wood (live oak not available, though, in as thick pieces as before, so sometimes they had to use multiple pieces bound together). If they just had trained crew, as well, they would be as effective as they were back when.
And it is "aboard" you land lubber, not "abord" :-)
> I didn't know one could fly buildings :-p
What? Of course one can. Beldar and Prymaat Conehead flew the Chrysler Building back to Remulac, on nationwide TV no less!
> He claimed that his grandfather told him the story
> of how he helped bury one of the "white giants",
> blond and fair skinned men "as tall as you could reach".
Of course, he left out "almost fresh off the boat from Oslo, he had worked at Jorganson's place the summer before". The Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas are chock full of people with mainly Norwegian and Swedish ancestry.
> Seriously, though, way back in the Stone Age when I attended the Olympics,
Gee, most people had to wait for the Bronze Age, and even the Iron Age, before they could attend an Olympics.
Except that The Big Rip will hit first, destroying those protons a few months after they destroy the Galaxy, and long before they can decay through GUT decay.
Assuming that Dark Energy behaves exactly as currently calculated, that is.
> in the meantime they abandon IE for who knows how long,
> and made mediocre products in the field that is actually
> profitable.
Because they made that profit regardless of whether the 7% of users who cared to look for something better were pleased. This is roughly like why the Boston Red Sox were able to go so long without winning the World Series; because the Boston fans kept buying tickets and memorabilia, it was not worth the Sox paying the extra money that it takes to go from good not great to great then to best of the greats.
So, where is the PERL script to do this in the background, and while one is at work?
And, is there any advantage to having multiple machines behind the same NAT firewall doing it at the same time?
This HAS to be hackable :-)
Because others were able to repeat the trick. My mother has multiple MasterCards, each giving a discount on different types of purchases up to so much per calendar year. As a result, her Discover gets used only when all the other cards hit their yearly limit on cash back. Of course, if the credit card equivalent of TV's Sweeps Month is December, she (and those like her) will be driving up Discover's numbers quite nicely.
By that logic, Polynesians would never have developed the ideas of taboos, since they had none for sex. Letting your shadow fall on a social superior might be forbidden, yes, but you could screw your relatives or strangers in public and no one would mind so long as you didn't block the paths.
Sorry, but relaxed in one area doesn't necessarily mean relaxed in any other area. BTW, from your description it is obvious that Pachinko is technically legal, since they have found a way around the anti-gambling laws, just as designer drugs sufficiently dissimilar to any others are technically legal until a law is passed that covers them, as well.
> You've obviously forgotten the whole point of a BBS:
> It's local to a specific area, usually designated by
> an area code.
So FidoNet killed the BBS, by letting them exchange messages in occasional batches?
Interesting POV. I missed that phase, I guess.
> We might eventually reach a similar stage of culture ... and something most definitely would be lost.
> to what we have now, but it would hardly be identical
>
Yes, Britney Spears would be gone forever.
There are lots of hard science fiction writers, even after Arthur C. Clarke's death. They just don't get Crichton's publicity.
> but by combining it with the DNA of modern reptiles
Frogs, not reptiles.
> they'd also notice that France actually totally
:-) And not THAT short, either. Peasant short, not Mini-me short.
> kicked the Western World's ass lead by a tiny Corsican.
Don't tell the British.
Or the Haitians, for that matter.
Anyway, Napoleone Buonoparte was Italian.
> There is a fundamental difference here that nobody seems to notice:
> hardware is a good, software is a service.
Software is a service only if customized to the purchaser. Given that MS stamps out more identical copies of XP than Asus makes boxes, Windows XP is goods, too. You are buying the compiled machine code version, not an English language version that someone claims can, in the right environment, produce the image after hours of recompilation.
To use the stupid car analogy, she bought a Chysler, but didn't want the Mitsubishi engine, but an after-market replacement. While you can exercise a Delete Option on the car radio, even if standard, I do not think that you can for the engine. In any case, expecting that shipping the car back to the Chysler factory and then back wouldn't cost more than the Mitsubishi Tax (especially as Chysler pays super wholesale, not retail, let alone auto-parts store prices) is a bit naive, too. She might have had a case if she insisted before taking delivery that the engine be ordered as deleted, but she seems to have taken the car then took it back to have the negine removed, and that she receive as much back as if she had bought the engine piece by piece at the local Advance Auto.
> to a Noam Chomsky kind of mind (Yes I know he's Jewish)
So? There are more Jews within 50 miles of NYC than in all of Israel, and about as many in the rest of the country. Almost like the Irish and Boston. Your "Yes I know he's Jewish" is about like "Yes, I know he's left-handed" in terms of relevance (at least here). Almost completely orthogonal.
> The French are nice,
No, the stereotype is rude (although I am told that is the Parisians giving the rest a bad name).
> They women are just neat, good food, good movies.
Nice exchange student, in my senior year of high school, but never met many others. The food is designed to give you a heart attack from the sauces (almost as bad as German, that way). Crappy movies, but all the naked chicks makes it worth watching some until you get a girl friend, who then will naturally object.
> This is what you get for being the ally of the US.
...
France hasn't been an ally of the US since DeGaulle. Before that, they weren't allies from the start of the Versailles Conference until Vichy territory was completely liberated. Before that, they weren't allies from mid-1917 going back all the way to the XYZ Affair, in the John Adams administration. We fought an undeclared war aginst France 1803-1805, and if the Mexicans hadn't killed kicked them out (or killed them in place) first, would have likely had another after our Civil War. We can leave aside their little misbehavior during the Suez Crisis, too.
Occasionally, we have been co-beligerents, but allies is quite an exageration.
> The irony is that I am French-Vietnamese
Only if you were a Vietnamese student from Hanoi, now studying in Paris.