The standardized tests also need to vary tremendously from year to year. A major problem with No Child Left Behind is damn near every school district in the US is "teaching to the test" the state administers. If the test format were highly unpredictable from year to year then designing curricula around it would be of little help and the tests might then actually measure something.
There's bigotry and then there is bigotry. If you were faced with a loved one with on-record wishes stated as similar to mine then what is going to happen? If it is that person's consentful wishes that are honored regardless of your own feelings and convictions then we have no real argument. It comes to down to personal respect and dignity. I could face losing limbs and maybe even sight but the thought of being forced to live with no mind or a highly damaged mind is repugnant to me. Being used as a political football the way Schiavo was disgusts me to the core; it wasn't anybody else's business. It should have been private between all the family members and the doctors. IMHO The South Park episode on the subject nailed it exactly. "If I'm ever in a vegetative state, please don't show me on television."
Yes, I know the "sanctity of life" crowd has unusual corner cases they like to trot out when this sort of thing comes up. Your Frenchman and this fellow who responded well to a pacemaker in his brain aren't what you can usually expect if the cortex and especially the frontal lobes take a good hard scrambling. Most who wind up in that state aren't even going to wake up much less wake up with any sort of consciousness. I believe people have a right to decide for themselves what constitutes "quality of life". We obviously have different ideas about that. That is OK. What is not OK is disrespecting those decisions.
BTW. You're quite wide of the mark imputing sympathy with eugenicists and forced euthanasia to me. My sympathies are for self-determination or even termination for that matter; if anything is truly yours then it is surely your life and body. I know personally what it is to have and recover from a damaged intellect (or a damaged brain if you must be pedantic). I've also watched some of the strongest and smartest people I ever knew taken away from the family piece by piece and it was hell for pretty much everybody. I also have personal and extensive experience with what goes on in nursing homes. It just isn't for me; others are quite welcome to it as I've said before. Understand that your positive experiences aren't everybody else's. There is another side to this. Don't presume to tell me what is false and what isn't.
All Schiavo had left were lower brain structures that regulate autonomous functions. The autopsy showed that her cortex was gone. This guy had interludes of consciousness even without the stimulator. It isn't even remotely the same thing. There are degrees of "serious brain injury". If I were like the guy in the story then there is legitimate reason for hope. On the other hand, if the best thing I can look forward too after years of stimulation and therapy is the intellect of end stage Alzheimer's patient then forget it. That is a "Gift Of Life" I want no truck with. Note full well that I'm not dictating the wishes of others; if others want to cling to any shadow of life no matter how lacking in thought or dignity then that is their right with no argument from me. I'm making clear what my wishes are. And I believe that my wishes as I am now fully possessed of my faculties is what should hold sway if the physical basis of them is destroyed or mostly destroyed. I am making damn sure that those family members who would disagree with me on this are explicitly named as having no authority should I lose the ability to decide for myself.
A drunk is apt to be in a state I can only describe as "loose and relaxed". When faced with high mechanical energy, the human body tends to fare better if it acts more like a ragdoll and less like a rigid board. Think about what you'd do if sober and driving at night when all of the sudden a pair of headlights is coming at you VERY quickly. More than likely, you'll tense up and this seems to magnify the injuries you are about to receive. The drunk behind those headlights on the other hand.......
I have some overly religious relatives and should I ever be in the condition Schiavo was in, I am very very very glad that she will have more power concerning my interests and wishes than they. What is tragic here is the conjunction of extreme religious beliefs and medical technology. It wasn't so long ago that someone like Schiavo wouldn't have been able to hang on for years and years. Now we can keep a heart beating long after any reason for it to beat is gone. If I have (practically) no brain, I don't want food and an education taken from my son and all assets from my wife to keep my shell of body warm for years and years.
Many here are saying the GPLv3 can't be used to ambush MS (Novell/SuSe on the other hand....) but I suspect using a patent troll as proxy won't necessarily fly in court either. MS would at least be taking a serious risk with such a tactic.
The question isn't whether Microsoft can be bound by the GPLv3; it is whether Novell can be bound. Novell cannot simultaneously honor the license on any GPLv3 code they distribute and the contract they executed with MS. The best the FSF could have hoped for was to defang a portion of MS' patent portfolio. If this lawyer says that can't happen, I tend to agree. The GPLv3 does make it impractical and of no benefit to execute any more of these deals with MS.
Under the Window menu you can "Split View Right/Left" and "Split View Top/Bottom". A single Split Right/Left gives you a two pane filemanager although you can go more panes than that if you want. Split views with particular directories loaded up can also be saved as "View Profiles". When I plug in my music player, I have a "View Profile" with my hard drive directory of music on the left pane and the player on the right pane. Just delete, drag and drop.
The one catch is that some distros disable this in the name of "usability". I'd use Gnome if I wanted that sort of "usability". It can be re-enabled (not obvious how though) and used to be a major peeve of mine with Kubuntu.
"Active Views" can be created and destroyed at will. I find it insanely handy and the combination of that with kioslaves is a level of convenience I haven't seen duplicated (well) elsewhere.
If I buy a Gamecube or whatever then it is my gamecube. Contract law IMHO is being severely abused by corporates. All they have to is put a f***** contract on EVERYTHING to see to it that nobody ever has a shred of rights again. Buy a bottle of barbecue sauce? You agreed to a contract. No rights. Period.
The grandparent isn't pirating games. He's using his own personal private property as he sees fit and under no ethical theory that I can think of does it cost Nintendo anything. If contract law can be twisted to preclude such things then I say it is our sacred duty to violate it at every opportunity.
I've been under the impression that point release Software Updates can break such installs so I'm leery of doing that. Since OS X uses the TCPA chip on real hardware to authenticate I suppose it might be possible to simply employ it with a virtualizer to start the normal OS X. Then again, one of the points of TCPA is to be resistant to that sort of thing. It doesn't enamor me of it.
Some users such as myself project Reality Assertion Fields. I have and enjoy using a MacBook Pro but this is a work machine and I don't find OS X so compelling to switch all my personal desktops from my fast, reliable, and inexpensive Linux installs (which I find more than adequately useful BTW). I could catalog complaints about Linux, Windows, aaaand OS X but that would get three sets of fanboys after me. Anyhoo, I find Parallels sufficient for my cross platform needs with the MacBook in question. Still, if I could run Linux as the primary OS on the MacBook and virtualize OS X then I would do it. I used to run my PowerPC notebook that way with Mac-On-Linux and it worked quite well.
When I was an HS, WordPerfect was the "unalterable-never-ever-change-"Business Standard". I feel soooo fortunate that I'm well schooled in the "Business Standard".
Partition and disk device handling will also cause unhappiness in this situation. OS X seems to expect external disks to either have no partitions or OS X partitions. Windows on the other hand seems to expect that any hard disk will have at least 1 partition. The rub here is that OS X doesn't like Windows partitions and Windows only understands it's own partition table format. Linux of course will easily mount filesystems from either type of partition table or a disk that has been directly formatted with no partition table. This has been my experience with IEEE1394 drives. I don't know if the behavior is different with USB external drives.
The upshot of all this is that it is easy to share an external hard disk between Windows and Linux and between OS X and Linux but it is very difficult to share one between all three operating systems. You are already in for this partition grief before having to deal with the sad reality that only FAT32 is supported equally well on all three platforms. Note: USB flash drives aren't affected by this. OS X and Windows hard coded assumptions about how drives will be setup only come into play when the device in question is an actual hard disk.
Perhaps making it illegal is not the way to handle it. I would favor ISPs losing broad swaths of legal protections the instant they filter traffic. Basically, an ISP should in no way be considered a "common carrier" once they filter for corporate advantage. So they'll have to offset extorting the likes of Google for access to their customers against increased liability for anything that crosses their network.
It is an article of faith among most fundamentalist Christians that any pornography leads to kiddy-fiddling. Fundamentalists basically have a "gateway drug" mentality on the subject and the Senator is pandering to it. Fundamentalists also tend not to distinguish among types of pornography. They make no distinction between material depicting consenting adults and kiddie porn. To them, it is all of a piece and should all be banned. At least, this has been true of the fundamentalists I've talked too.
If I needed to run a RedHat specific package on say Debian badly enough, I could accomplish it with a chroot and whatever bits from RedHat are required. I don't argue that it would be an arduous PITA but it is there as an all-else-fails measure. I have noticed though that some vendors seem to understand versioned libraries better than others. If an app has been built correctly, I can keep an old binary running for quite a long time by just providing the old versions of the needed libraries. A good for-instance is my install of Unreal Tournament. I've been running it for five years unchanged from Debian Woody clear up to Ubuntu Gutsy. I haven't even needed to bother with compatibility libraries. Whoever built those binaries had a good understanding of what it takes to make a long lasting package.
Actually, you pretty much can do the equivalent of going from 2000 to XP with Linux upgrades. I was on the same install of Debian then Ubuntu for almost 5 years. A bad hard drive was what it took to put an end to that install. I apt-got dist-upgraded with abandon, installed non-distro provided packages, and basically stomped on this thing with heavy lead boots. I spent 20 minutes a couple of times fixing borked up packages but I was basically as mean as I could possibly be to this thing software-upgrade wise and had a nicely stable desktop machine out of it. The last year I had the install, I upgraded in place from Debian to Ubuntu. You don't pull that particular stunt without being able to manually solve some dependency puzzles but it did work. I even heard of someone at the local usergroup who installed Debian over RedHat and got away with it. Yes, it is possible to launch many distro installers from a root prompt in an alien distro. He had quite the bit of cruft here and there but did wind up with an internally consistent set of packages.
Incidentally, there is even a right way to switch distros entirely and have a sane system. Back up the home directory, take a list of installed packages, and back up the/etc directory. Install the new distro, refer to the package list to fill in everything that should be installed for equivalent function, and use the old/etc as a reference in case something like Samba doesn't work like it used to. Then create a user and dump the contents of your old homedir into the directory.
If it is just security updates then I don't see Novell having any harder a time of it than say the maintainers of Debian Stable. They essentially do this with their Enterprise releases anyway. Novell can indeed maintain a GPLv2 status quo for a couple of years if they desire. The problem for them is that significant development will occur on desirable GPLv3 codebases like the packages you mention. Customers will want those features and at that point we aren't talking "maintaining" anymore. We are talking "forking". A feature parity fork of Samba alone would Novell big bucks two years down the line.
We're basically talking about the police tampering with a computer to get evidence. It'll work against Joe XP and Bob Macintosh but they would be better off just taking the machine if they have any reason to suspect technical smarts in their target. An integrity scanner like Tripwire will catch anything the police install software wise, especially if the target is extra paranoid and keeps his signatures on external media and boots from a CD to check them. As for hardware, geeks are poking around inside their computers all the time. I sure as hell know what belongs in there and what doesn't. The extra paranoid target could also just keep anything incriminating on a virtual machine stored on encrypted external media.
The fiddled BIOS is an interesting idea but that would require either multiple break ins or serious time for one. The hardware would have to be identified and the appropriate diddled BIOS obtained and installed. I suspect only the most high value targets like mob bosses would merit something like that. It would be too difficult to do routinely. Of course, such targets should operate under the most paranoid conditions possible. If nothing else, there should be physical security on the machine to preclude such shenanigans; locked rooms, tamper-revealing lock on machine, security cameras, the works....... Such targets either need practiced IT skills or should employ the best they can buy. (paid well I presume, who better to install diddly bits for the police?)
The other smart thing the cops could do is tap communications at the ISP. Everything has to be encrypted by default then and most times that isn't practical.
I'll grant you that then. But I still find that the system fights me and wants me to work it's way rather than my way. Another man's pleasure is my poison and all that. iTunes+iPod+Store is designed to be an integrated ensemble. I can understand that it is genuine and desirable for many. I simply prefer more generic and generalizable tools for my music (and data in general).
Hell, even then it's difficult, look at GIMP that *still* can't support more than 8bits/channel even though it's obviously wanted and useful.
8-bits/channel was an early design assumption of the GIMP that all subsequent code hasn't questioned. It isn't a matter of changing a few pointers and routines here and there. "8-bits" is all over the primary codebase and the most popular scripts and plugins as well. GIMP will have to be refactored from the ground up to remove that limitation. The GEGL libraries are supposed to be foundation of this refactoring and have been "coming soon" for a number of years now. If removing that limitation were easy, it would have been done long ago. Well, the Cinepaint guys did it but not much has happened with it lately. It still exists as a gtk1 fork of codebase that has been gtk2 for years now. I'd keep an eye on Krita as it has been built from the ground up not to be hardwired to 8-bit/channel color as GIMP is.
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The standardized tests also need to vary tremendously from year to year. A major problem with No Child Left Behind is damn near every school district in the US is "teaching to the test" the state administers. If the test format were highly unpredictable from year to year then designing curricula around it would be of little help and the tests might then actually measure something.
If you're paranoid, you can build a kernel with all the drivers you need and disable module loading. It isn't something I would do but .......
Max Hardcore called and wants to talk about his copyright!
There's bigotry and then there is bigotry. If you were faced with a loved one with on-record wishes stated as similar to mine then what is going to happen? If it is that person's consentful wishes that are honored regardless of your own feelings and convictions then we have no real argument. It comes to down to personal respect and dignity. I could face losing limbs and maybe even sight but the thought of being forced to live with no mind or a highly damaged mind is repugnant to me. Being used as a political football the way Schiavo was disgusts me to the core; it wasn't anybody else's business. It should have been private between all the family members and the doctors. IMHO The South Park episode on the subject nailed it exactly. "If I'm ever in a vegetative state, please don't show me on television."
Yes, I know the "sanctity of life" crowd has unusual corner cases they like to trot out when this sort of thing comes up. Your Frenchman and this fellow who responded well to a pacemaker in his brain aren't what you can usually expect if the cortex and especially the frontal lobes take a good hard scrambling. Most who wind up in that state aren't even going to wake up much less wake up with any sort of consciousness. I believe people have a right to decide for themselves what constitutes "quality of life". We obviously have different ideas about that. That is OK. What is not OK is disrespecting those decisions.
BTW. You're quite wide of the mark imputing sympathy with eugenicists and forced euthanasia to me. My sympathies are for self-determination or even termination for that matter; if anything is truly yours then it is surely your life and body. I know personally what it is to have and recover from a damaged intellect (or a damaged brain if you must be pedantic). I've also watched some of the strongest and smartest people I ever knew taken away from the family piece by piece and it was hell for pretty much everybody. I also have personal and extensive experience with what goes on in nursing homes. It just isn't for me; others are quite welcome to it as I've said before. Understand that your positive experiences aren't everybody else's. There is another side to this. Don't presume to tell me what is false and what isn't.
All Schiavo had left were lower brain structures that regulate autonomous functions. The autopsy showed that her cortex was gone. This guy had interludes of consciousness even without the stimulator. It isn't even remotely the same thing. There are degrees of "serious brain injury". If I were like the guy in the story then there is legitimate reason for hope. On the other hand, if the best thing I can look forward too after years of stimulation and therapy is the intellect of end stage Alzheimer's patient then forget it. That is a "Gift Of Life" I want no truck with. Note full well that I'm not dictating the wishes of others; if others want to cling to any shadow of life no matter how lacking in thought or dignity then that is their right with no argument from me. I'm making clear what my wishes are. And I believe that my wishes as I am now fully possessed of my faculties is what should hold sway if the physical basis of them is destroyed or mostly destroyed. I am making damn sure that those family members who would disagree with me on this are explicitly named as having no authority should I lose the ability to decide for myself.
A drunk is apt to be in a state I can only describe as "loose and relaxed". When faced with high mechanical energy, the human body tends to fare better if it acts more like a ragdoll and less like a rigid board. Think about what you'd do if sober and driving at night when all of the sudden a pair of headlights is coming at you VERY quickly. More than likely, you'll tense up and this seems to magnify the injuries you are about to receive. The drunk behind those headlights on the other hand.......
I have some overly religious relatives and should I ever be in the condition Schiavo was in, I am very very very glad that she will have more power concerning my interests and wishes than they. What is tragic here is the conjunction of extreme religious beliefs and medical technology. It wasn't so long ago that someone like Schiavo wouldn't have been able to hang on for years and years. Now we can keep a heart beating long after any reason for it to beat is gone. If I have (practically) no brain, I don't want food and an education taken from my son and all assets from my wife to keep my shell of body warm for years and years.
Many here are saying the GPLv3 can't be used to ambush MS (Novell/SuSe on the other hand....) but I suspect using a patent troll as proxy won't necessarily fly in court either. MS would at least be taking a serious risk with such a tactic.
The question isn't whether Microsoft can be bound by the GPLv3; it is whether Novell can be bound. Novell cannot simultaneously honor the license on any GPLv3 code they distribute and the contract they executed with MS. The best the FSF could have hoped for was to defang a portion of MS' patent portfolio. If this lawyer says that can't happen, I tend to agree. The GPLv3 does make it impractical and of no benefit to execute any more of these deals with MS.
Under the Window menu you can "Split View Right/Left" and "Split View Top/Bottom". A single Split Right/Left gives you a two pane filemanager although you can go more panes than that if you want. Split views with particular directories loaded up can also be saved as "View Profiles". When I plug in my music player, I have a "View Profile" with my hard drive directory of music on the left pane and the player on the right pane. Just delete, drag and drop.
The one catch is that some distros disable this in the name of "usability". I'd use Gnome if I wanted that sort of "usability". It can be re-enabled (not obvious how though) and used to be a major peeve of mine with Kubuntu.
"Active Views" can be created and destroyed at will. I find it insanely handy and the combination of that with kioslaves is a level of convenience I haven't seen duplicated (well) elsewhere.
If I buy a Gamecube or whatever then it is my gamecube. Contract law IMHO is being severely abused by corporates. All they have to is put a f***** contract on EVERYTHING to see to it that nobody ever has a shred of rights again. Buy a bottle of barbecue sauce? You agreed to a contract. No rights. Period.
The grandparent isn't pirating games. He's using his own personal private property as he sees fit and under no ethical theory that I can think of does it cost Nintendo anything. If contract law can be twisted to preclude such things then I say it is our sacred duty to violate it at every opportunity.
I've been under the impression that point release Software Updates can break such installs so I'm leery of doing that. Since OS X uses the TCPA chip on real hardware to authenticate I suppose it might be possible to simply employ it with a virtualizer to start the normal OS X. Then again, one of the points of TCPA is to be resistant to that sort of thing. It doesn't enamor me of it.
Some users such as myself project Reality Assertion Fields. I have and enjoy using a MacBook Pro but this is a work machine and I don't find OS X so compelling to switch all my personal desktops from my fast, reliable, and inexpensive Linux installs (which I find more than adequately useful BTW). I could catalog complaints about Linux, Windows, aaaand OS X but that would get three sets of fanboys after me. Anyhoo, I find Parallels sufficient for my cross platform needs with the MacBook in question. Still, if I could run Linux as the primary OS on the MacBook and virtualize OS X then I would do it. I used to run my PowerPC notebook that way with Mac-On-Linux and it worked quite well.
When I was an HS, WordPerfect was the "unalterable-never-ever-change-"Business Standard". I feel soooo fortunate that I'm well schooled in the "Business Standard".
Partition and disk device handling will also cause unhappiness in this situation. OS X seems to expect external disks to either have no partitions or OS X partitions. Windows on the other hand seems to expect that any hard disk will have at least 1 partition. The rub here is that OS X doesn't like Windows partitions and Windows only understands it's own partition table format. Linux of course will easily mount filesystems from either type of partition table or a disk that has been directly formatted with no partition table. This has been my experience with IEEE1394 drives. I don't know if the behavior is different with USB external drives.
The upshot of all this is that it is easy to share an external hard disk between Windows and Linux and between OS X and Linux but it is very difficult to share one between all three operating systems. You are already in for this partition grief before having to deal with the sad reality that only FAT32 is supported equally well on all three platforms. Note: USB flash drives aren't affected by this. OS X and Windows hard coded assumptions about how drives will be setup only come into play when the device in question is an actual hard disk.
Perhaps making it illegal is not the way to handle it. I would favor ISPs losing broad swaths of legal protections the instant they filter traffic. Basically, an ISP should in no way be considered a "common carrier" once they filter for corporate advantage. So they'll have to offset extorting the likes of Google for access to their customers against increased liability for anything that crosses their network.
It is an article of faith among most fundamentalist Christians that any pornography leads to kiddy-fiddling. Fundamentalists basically have a "gateway drug" mentality on the subject and the Senator is pandering to it. Fundamentalists also tend not to distinguish among types of pornography. They make no distinction between material depicting consenting adults and kiddie porn. To them, it is all of a piece and should all be banned. At least, this has been true of the fundamentalists I've talked too.
If I needed to run a RedHat specific package on say Debian badly enough, I could accomplish it with a chroot and whatever bits from RedHat are required. I don't argue that it would be an arduous PITA but it is there as an all-else-fails measure. I have noticed though that some vendors seem to understand versioned libraries better than others. If an app has been built correctly, I can keep an old binary running for quite a long time by just providing the old versions of the needed libraries. A good for-instance is my install of Unreal Tournament. I've been running it for five years unchanged from Debian Woody clear up to Ubuntu Gutsy. I haven't even needed to bother with compatibility libraries. Whoever built those binaries had a good understanding of what it takes to make a long lasting package.
Actually, you pretty much can do the equivalent of going from 2000 to XP with Linux upgrades. I was on the same install of Debian then Ubuntu for almost 5 years. A bad hard drive was what it took to put an end to that install. I apt-got dist-upgraded with abandon, installed non-distro provided packages, and basically stomped on this thing with heavy lead boots. I spent 20 minutes a couple of times fixing borked up packages but I was basically as mean as I could possibly be to this thing software-upgrade wise and had a nicely stable desktop machine out of it. The last year I had the install, I upgraded in place from Debian to Ubuntu. You don't pull that particular stunt without being able to manually solve some dependency puzzles but it did work. I even heard of someone at the local usergroup who installed Debian over RedHat and got away with it. Yes, it is possible to launch many distro installers from a root prompt in an alien distro. He had quite the bit of cruft here and there but did wind up with an internally consistent set of packages.
/etc directory. Install the new distro, refer to the package list to fill in everything that should be installed for equivalent function, and use the old /etc as a reference in case something like Samba doesn't work like it used to. Then create a user and dump the contents of your old homedir into the directory.
Incidentally, there is even a right way to switch distros entirely and have a sane system. Back up the home directory, take a list of installed packages, and back up the
If it is just security updates then I don't see Novell having any harder a time of it than say the maintainers of Debian Stable. They essentially do this with their Enterprise releases anyway. Novell can indeed maintain a GPLv2 status quo for a couple of years if they desire. The problem for them is that significant development will occur on desirable GPLv3 codebases like the packages you mention. Customers will want those features and at that point we aren't talking "maintaining" anymore. We are talking "forking". A feature parity fork of Samba alone would Novell big bucks two years down the line.
Not really. Code obtained under GPLv2 terms can still be used under those terms and even further developed.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/pedro45acp/ HarryPotterScandals.jpg
We're basically talking about the police tampering with a computer to get evidence. It'll work against Joe XP and Bob Macintosh but they would be better off just taking the machine if they have any reason to suspect technical smarts in their target. An integrity scanner like Tripwire will catch anything the police install software wise, especially if the target is extra paranoid and keeps his signatures on external media and boots from a CD to check them. As for hardware, geeks are poking around inside their computers all the time. I sure as hell know what belongs in there and what doesn't. The extra paranoid target could also just keep anything incriminating on a virtual machine stored on encrypted external media.
The fiddled BIOS is an interesting idea but that would require either multiple break ins or serious time for one. The hardware would have to be identified and the appropriate diddled BIOS obtained and installed. I suspect only the most high value targets like mob bosses would merit something like that. It would be too difficult to do routinely. Of course, such targets should operate under the most paranoid conditions possible. If nothing else, there should be physical security on the machine to preclude such shenanigans; locked rooms, tamper-revealing lock on machine, security cameras, the works....... Such targets either need practiced IT skills or should employ the best they can buy. (paid well I presume, who better to install diddly bits for the police?)
The other smart thing the cops could do is tap communications at the ISP. Everything has to be encrypted by default then and most times that isn't practical.
I'll grant you that then. But I still find that the system fights me and wants me to work it's way rather than my way. Another man's pleasure is my poison and all that. iTunes+iPod+Store is designed to be an integrated ensemble. I can understand that it is genuine and desirable for many. I simply prefer more generic and generalizable tools for my music (and data in general).
Hell, even then it's difficult, look at GIMP that *still* can't support more than 8bits/channel even though it's obviously wanted and useful.
8-bits/channel was an early design assumption of the GIMP that all subsequent code hasn't questioned. It isn't a matter of changing a few pointers and routines here and there. "8-bits" is all over the primary codebase and the most popular scripts and plugins as well. GIMP will have to be refactored from the ground up to remove that limitation. The GEGL libraries are supposed to be foundation of this refactoring and have been "coming soon" for a number of years now. If removing that limitation were easy, it would have been done long ago. Well, the Cinepaint guys did it but not much has happened with it lately. It still exists as a gtk1 fork of codebase that has been gtk2 for years now. I'd keep an eye on Krita as it has been built from the ground up not to be hardwired to 8-bit/channel color as GIMP is.