I think the more interesting question is why an entity possesing the ability to create an entire universe from nothing would not also implement a set of physical laws that allow life to evolve automatically? Why would said entity go in after the initial creation event and manually tinker with biological molecules to get them to develop into complex life forms? Sounds like a huge kludge to me. I prefer to believe that any supreme being that may exist is competant enough to get the laws of physics right the first time. Tinkering and hardcoding workarounds for the mistakes is not eligant.
No, I have used lexis/nexis and other search engines that are often found in libraries. Am I going to find detailed information about approaches to Cannon Mt. and Druid Plateau in the Alpine Lakes wilderness (along with helpful pictures) on lexis/nexis? No! I found it in under 30 seconds on google because I knew what I was looking for and how to find it. I consider that to be unbelievably efficient. Making a blanket statement that google is inefficient because in a few isolated cases a better tool is available is silly.
The point is that this guy has declared google to be inefficient because it is not as good as some other tools at finding whatever "scholarly" information he is interested in. He makes the assumption that his interests are more important than all others. All of the other stuff people use google for is just a collection of random and relatively useless facts. It's that elitist attitude that irks people. Instead of saying "Google isn't very good at finding the things I'm interested in but other people find it to be useful" he says "Google isn't exclusively (or even primarily) a scholarly search tool which makes it useless to anyone. Some people believe it's useful because they are unable to distinguish useful information from useless crap." He places a value judgment on anyone who does not share is interests. He ignores the fact that people actually do use it for real-life research and are able to find information that would not otherwise be available.
I read a lot of stuff that he would consider to be "scholarly" (meaning that the average person's eyes will glaze over as soon as they open the book). Other people like to discuss their collections of belly-button lint. Fine. If that makes them happy, then information related to belly-buttons and the lint they accumulate is interesting and valuable to them.
There are a lot of amazing things about that statement (Google is notoriously inefficient according to who?), but the most amazing thing is that it makes it appear that he has never done any serious research of any kind, online or offline. Google rarely gives you a link to exactly the information you are seeking on the first page. But it does give you a good starting point for finding links to the page you really do want or refining your search term to get more useful results. How is that different than old fashioned research? The only real difference is that it is significantly faster (more efficient).
I've done a lot of old fashioned library research and I've learned a lot of tricks to doing it efficiently. Here's the first tip: Never expect to find the information you want in the first book or journal you look at. The first book you look at should be one that is somehow related to the topic of interest with a large index and good bibliography. That will hopefully lead you to other books with indexes and bibliographies and maybe some useful content. But the main goal is to collect a list of books and journal articles that might be useful (most of them aren't). The next step is narrowing the search. How do you decide which books and articles to look at? Sometimes you can tell from a title that it will be useful. Usually you go through the list of possible hits and find the items that appear frequently. The good books and articles tend to get referrenced a lot by other authors. The good authors also get referrenced a lot. Notice that this is essentially a manual implementation of the algorithm Google uses. Shocking!
I think it's pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand how to use search engines properly and doesn't have the patience to learn. And in defence of blogs and other pages with "random facts," a lot of them are unpublishable, but that does not mean they are useless. Publishers want to make money and if they don't believe there is a large enough audience for some content, they won't publish it. I use Google all the time to find information that does not exist in any book, but is nevertheless extremely useful to me. It is probably useful to six other people in the world also, but that's not enough to justify publishing it in a book no matter how well written it is.
You example doesn't stand bacause you compare a piece of proprietary code with a piece of GPL code, then just say that BSD is obviously worse.
No, I'm comparing a piece of GPL code with a piece of BSD code that has been made proprietary. It's the "made proprietary" part that is important to the comparison. It's true that you can still get the original code after some BSD code has been made proprietary, but that just means that the original code is free and derivatives might be free. If we were talking about books, that might not be an important distinction. But with software the derivatives of the original are often more valuable than the original. For example, I could fix a serious bug in a piece of BSD code and then sell the updated software as a proprietary product. I don't have to tell anyone where the bug was or what I did to fix it. If it's a really significant security bug, the original might be rendered unusable. You could argue that people are always free to debug the original themselves, but what if the bug only appears on a particular piece of proprietary hardware and only I have the specs? In that case it could be impossible (or close to it) for anyone else to fix the bug even if it is a trivial change if you know where to look. So on my proprietary hardware there is no usable free version of the software. If someone else wants to use that hardware, the fact that they can get the origianl free version of the software is irrelevant. I consider that to be a significant loss of freedom.
I think this argument really revolves around two entirely different types of freedom. The BSD license grants you the freedom to modify, redistribute, and relicense the original code. None of those rights extend to derivatives, so I may have the right to relicense the original, but I have no right to relicense derivatives (unless they are also BSD, of course). The GPL grants you the freedom to modify and redistribute the original and derivatives. The fact that the GPL must apply to derivatives makes it incompatible with the broad freedom to relicense granted by BSD. I consider the freedom to modify derivatives to be a greater freedom than the freedom to relicense. BSD advocates seem to believe that the restrictions on relicensing GPLed software makes it non-free somehow, but it should also be noted that the BSD license also contains restrictions on relicensing. I can't, for example, attach a license to BSD software that says "you may redistribute and modify this software in source or binary form, provided that no copyright or license notices are included with the software." Both the GPL and BSD license prohibit relicensing in that fashion. Both licenses allow relicensing if the new license is consistent with the terms of the original. Neither license grants absolute freedom to do whatever you would like to do with the code. If relicensing restrictions make the GPL non-free, then they also make BSD non-free.
This is true for BSD, not for GPL, you should read: I am also glad that I can license my code with the GPL and ensure that all users of my code are free to modify and are bounded to redistribute it GPL.
No, my original statement is correct. If I license code under a BSD license and company X takes that code and makes it proprietary (allowed under that license) then users who get the software from company X do not have any freedom to modify or redistribute that version at all. The GPL may require any redistribution to be done under the GPL, but BSD allows licensees to prohibit future redistribution altogether. So the GPL always has a small restriction on redistribution, but BSD allows for absolute restriction on redistribution.
As I said, most of the GPL pro-freedom guys argue that GPL ensure that the code is free. But this is just insane. One can only be free if it can enjoy the freedom, hence an inanimate virtual piece of code cannot be free.
I smell a diversionary tactic. We all know that when people say that the GPL ensures that code will be free, the implicit meaning is that the GPL ensures that users of the code are free to modify and redistribute it. Don't be daft.
Both the BSD and GPL licenses grant freedoms, but the GPL, unlike the BSD license, is designed to preserve those freedoms. Yes it is true that the freedoms are preserved by imposing restrictions on other behaviors, but that in no way makes the GPL non-free or less free than BSD. All freedoms in the real world are accompanied by restrictions on behavior. Living in a free democracy means that citizens are not free to become tyranical dictators (I think this is a good restriction). The first amendment to the US Constitution prohibits Congress from passing laws that restrict speech (again, a restriction on one freedom to preserve a more important freedom). The fourth amendment prohibits government officials from coming into your house and rifling through your personal belongings whenever they feel like it. That's another "freedom" that has been taken away because it is incompatible with a more important freedom. I, for one, am glad that people are not free to barge into my house on a whim and look through my underwear drawer. I am also glad that I can license my code with the GPL and ensure that all users of my code are free to modify and redistribute it without some third party trying to take that away. It isn't free because it doesn't allow people to remove the freedoms that are granted? That's logically incoherent.
is what this is. MD5 is not a reversible algorithm. There is no way, even in principle, to go from a hashed result to retrieve the input. An infinite number of letter/number combinations could be used to produce any given MD5 hash. At best, they could come up with a combination that produces the same hash as the one given to them, but that does not mean it is the right answer. And they have virtually no chance of cracking a hash made from a well-selected password.
Study Louis Armstrong's work (especially the early stuff) to see what a musician can do with a single note. The first half of one of his most famous solos, from West End Blues, consists of a single note held for 4 bars. He did variations on that solo in later work that sounded dramatically different, mostly because of the way that one note was played.
Uh... No. In areas that have been marked as "Fragile Alpine Meadows," I stay on the trail. No plants there to step on.
I'm so glad enlightened people like you are looking out for the "public resource" by keeping the public out.
Your elitism is offensive and self defeating. You would deny others the chance you have been granted to learn about and appreciate nature. The people you so deny will remain so ignorant that they won't mind pulling crude oil, another "public resource", out of the ground where you like to camp.
You make it fairly obvious that you have never spent any significant amount of time in wilderness areas. No one who is capable of hauling a backpack 15 miles up a trail is prevented from enjoying nature, even in restricted areas. When the forest service doesn't want somebody to camp in an area or trample the plants, they generally put up a small sign that says "Fragile Area -- Please Stay on the Trail" or something similar. That's it. Everyone can still look. Plastic ribbons will occasionally be placed around an especially sensitive area that has already been damaged and needs to recover, but again, everyone can still look and enjoy the scenery. It is extremely rare for a trail to be closed altogether, and that generally happens only when a natural disaster has made it impassible.
I'm not at all offended that the forest service will sometimes request that I not leave the trail for 100 yards out of a 20 mile trail. Those policies preserve some of the most amazing places in the country for everyone to enjoy.
I already see signs about not being able so spend the night in areas and other mindless restrictions that assume the park belongs to the park service rather than the park service belongs to me.
I, for one, am glad they put in restrictions to keep people from camping in fragile areas. Some dumbass who pitches a tent on top of delicate alpine plants can ruin the scenery for everyone else for years until the plants can recover. That isn't a mindless restriction. It's a restriction that protects a public resource from morons who don't understand alpine biology.
As for sensors in the woods, I'm not going to get worked up. They would be pointless on busy trails (sensors would be tripped constantly -- you wouldn't know which signal represented the missing person). On more remote trails, there is just no practical way to set up a network of sensors with enough resolution to be useful for S&R. Aside from that, the forest service can barely keep the current trail system maintained, let alone setting up and maintaining a vast array of sensors to spy on a few hikers. Does anyone seriously think that the government, or anyone else, has an interest in what hiker X is doing on a trail that is traversed once a week at most? If anyone really wants to go to that much trouble to spy on me in the backcountry, I'll give them a show they won't soon forget.
Public education is the least of our problems in this area. The biggest problem (the one that scientists have been warning about for the past 20+ years) is that the public in general, and politicians in particular, are scientifically illiterate. There are certainly problems with the current educational system, but the people making the money decisions (i.e. The ones killing off basic research funding) were in school in the 50s and 60s or earlier, when the US k-12 system was supposedly at its greatest (I don't believe it for a second).
The sad reality is that we have a huge oversupply of people who are qualified to do basic research competing for a dwindling number of jobs. A few years ago, there were over 1000 trained particle physicists for every real position in the field. University students are very aware of this and the smart ones no longer try to get into programs that focus on basic research. My advisors told me (and everyone else) not to go to graduate school for physics unless I wanted to do industrial research. How many of my classmates applied to physics graduate programs the year I graduated? Zero! That was 7 years ago and the situation has only gotten worse since then. Few people want to spend 4-5 years getting a PhD and then spend another 6-10 years doing low paying post-doc work before the can compete with hundreds or even thousands of other applicants for a single real research position.
The people who are responsible for this mess are the ones who have been cutting funding for basic research for the past 20 years. The same ones who killed the SSC because they didn't want to pay for an "expensive toy for overeducated elitists," as one congress person said after the vote passed. These are usually the same people who love to bitch and moan about the dreadful state of public education in the hopes that voters will point the finger at teachers and children for the woes of society instead of placing the blame where it belongs.
From conservation of energy, we know that any energy radiated away from a black hole has to be matched by a decrease of energy inside the black hole. E==mc^2, so a decrease in energy is equivalent to a decrease in mass.
It's actually the birds that you have to watch out for the most. Bears are dramatic, but they usually either ignore you or run away. I have seen two bears while backpacking, and neither wanted anything to do with me.
On the other hand, I have been attacked by several grouse, buzzed by an eagle, and harrased by ravens. I almost shit my pants last summer when I was on a narrow trail with a near-verticle drop-off on one side when a grouse popped out of a bush and flew straight at my head. Imagine having a miniature turkey flapping right in front of your face while hissing like an angry cat.
They didn't give an explanation in the court filings of how the GPL is unconstitutional, but Blake Stowell gave an explanation in an interview. The exact verbage should be in Groklaw's quotation database. They basically want to argue that the constitution specifies Congress as the sole regulator of copyrights. So far, so good. Then they claim that the FSF is attempting to regulate copyrights by publishing the GPL and enforcing its terms on software they own. Following their logic, the FSF has set up its own parallel set of copyright laws via the GPL and that is clearly unconstitutional. They do not explain, however, how the publication of a copyright license equates to the establishment of an independant law-making body. Say what you will about RMS, but I don't think he believes that he is the President of the GNUnited States of America (the GNU/President?).
I have two guesses as to what is really going on here: 1) David Boies and Co. have found a source of some really good smack. 2) They are planning to spike Judge Kimball's coffee with a hit of LSD right before oral arguments begin.
I think you have a misunderstanding about what makes a theory testable. Testable means that it is testable in principle, even if we do not yet have the technology available to carry out any experiments. The inability to carry out experiments in the real world may make a theory scientifically useless, but that does not make it untestable or invalid.
The second thing to remember about testability is that the experiments do not have to be original. Supertring theory will have to explain all of the phenomena that we see with standard quantum mechanics. That by itself won't be enough to demonstrate that superstring theory is correct or likely to be correct, but it does show that it can at least explain what we already know about the world. That is no small feat and should not be disregarded. There are many theories that have been tossed in the trash because they made predictions that were known to be false.
Another way that superstring theory can be tested is to see if it explains experiments that have already been done but with results that don't fit any existing theories. The standard model of QM has a lot of holes in it. We know that it is not completely correct because some of the experiments that have been done did not work out the way they should have. If superstrings can fill in the gaps in the standard model then that may be enough to confirm its validity.
All of this pseudo-intelligencia, philosophizing garbage demonstrates how isolated most computer science geeks (and thus developers) are from the majority of computer users.
Whoa! Somebody doesn't like philosophers! Like it or not, both the FS and OSS movements are founded on philosophy. Take that away and they die. Usually when people whine about "philosophical garbage" what they are really complaining about is that some other people are able to use logic and reason to make a point, and that makes it difficult to refute.
The expectation you have of the user to close the distance between what they know and what you want them to learn is naive. That's not how industries produce consumable goods.
First of all, most of us who actually develop Free Software are not interested in producing consumable goods for any industry. And I, personally, have only one expectation from users: don't complain at me for what I have given you for free. If you need help with my software, ask for help. If you want improvements, offer them. If you think my software is just too damn difficult to use, don't. It's that simple. What I don't need is a bunch of arrogant commentators coming along and demanding that I follow this or that standard, reduce the learning curve for users, or join some other project instead of working on my own because that would be a more efficient use of community resources and would be a more effective way to achieve some goal that I do not share. Nobody pays me to develop Free Software and I (and other FS/OSS developers) don't owe anybody anything beyond what I am already giving away.
Despite whatever philosophies you chose with which to see the world, supply and demand exists.
This is exactly the point. There is a demand for software that can be freely modified and offers greater choice to users than proprietary software offers. Linux and other Free Software provides the supply. You can complain all you want about how we need to enforce standards to defeat MS (or whatever it is you want), but that desire will never remove the demand for software that does not follow the standard. If someone tries to enforce a standard gui across all distros, another distro will pop up that does not follow that standard and people who do not like the standard will use it. There is nothing you or anyone else can do to stop it. As long as there is a demand for choice, and there is, FS/OSS developers are going to supply that demand. In many cases the suppliers and demanders are the same people. You can complain all you want about how there should be a standard desktop that all distros should default to, but unless you have a way to prevent people from developing other distros that fit their preferences, it is about as useful as complaining that the moon should be pink.
The real question to be asking is what we will gain by providing a standard gui for Linux. I don't see what the benefit is. People who want standards for the sake of standards already have windows and mac. Why would they want to move to Linux unless it offers something that is different from the standard? People who aren't interested in choice will never move to Linux regardless of whatever standards are implemented for Linux guis.
I think the real problem here is that McBride and his cronies have decided to apply the Toddler Law of Ownership to software. If SCO used some code in the past, the code belongs to SCO. If some code resembles something SCO already owns, the code belongs to SCO. If somebody else is using some code on their own computer, the code belongs to SCO. If SCO's freind (not that they have many) has some code, the code belongs to SCO. If Darl walks into a room and sees some code, the code belongs to SCO. If somebody talks about some code in Darl's presence, the code belongs to SCO.
The only real hope for the OS community at this point is to just spell L-I-N-U-X so Darl won't know what we're talking about. Or maybe he'll crack his head open on a concrete floor when he throws himself down on the ground for the inevitable tantrum.
Then what do you say to the not-so-few who believe that selling software commercially is immoral
I say that there is a difference between opinions on morality and forcing those opinions on others. There are plenty of behaviors that I believe are immoral, but I would be the first to fight any attempt to make those behaviors illegal. The fact that some people feel that selling proprietary software is wrong does not imply that they want to pass laws against it.
and that "information wants to be free!"?
It's a silly phrase. Information doesn't want anything at all. Information should be free because the concept of "owning" and idea is logically incoherent.
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The "Techie" Vote?
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As well-intentioned as many of our views are, a lot of them reek of communism.
Study your political philosophy! Those well-intentioned "communist" ideals are more accurately categorized under classical anarchism than communism. The anarchists broke with the early Marxist movement because they were strong civil libertarians and could not put up with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (it was an anarchist who originally warned of the dangers of the Red Beuracracy). Sharing is good, but it must be voluntary sharing and never forced. I have yet to meet a geek who is not a strong civil libertarian, and that libertarian streak quickly rules out any hints of communism.
The GPL forms the basis for many of IBM's counterclaims. That fact alone will cause SCO to raise questions about the validity of the GPL in court if the case ever makes it that far. There are a number of terms in the GPL that are not present in BSD style licenses, such as the restriction on sublicensing. SCO's many violations of the GPL opened the door for several of IBM's claims. The GPL will also play a huge role in the Redhat case
That's exactly the point. Simplicity is an inherently subjective concept. God is not a good explanation for physical phenomena because there is no known way to test the hypothesis, not because the God explanation is any more or less "simple" than some other explanation. Occam's razor should not play a serious role in science until someone is able to provide an objective method for measuring the simplicity of an idea. I don't think it can be done.
It's not a contract or a EULA, it's a license to create derivative works and redistribute. It basically says that you have permission to make derivative works and publish both the original and changes so long as you follow some rules (don't try to take rights away from others). If you're just using the software, you don't need any license at all.
I will be interested to see what kind of argument SCO comes up with to defend their behavior. They obviously believe that the terms of the GPL just don't apply to them and that they can continue to distribute linux despite their present lack of permission to do so. My guess is that they think (incorrectly) that they have found a loophole in the GPL that allows them to license object code under more restrictive terms. Even if that were correct, they have a problem because their conflicting license expressly prohibits redistribution and the creation of derivative works. So they are violating the GPL even if their lame object code argument is correct. My other guess is that they will claim that all of Linux became a derivative work of system v when the offending code was inserted, and its derivative status makes it the property of SCO. They can issue the new license because they own all of the code in Linux in the first place. I don't believe that any judge would go for that since it does not even resemble the legal definition of a derivative work. I guess the last option is that they are all smoking crack and decided to come up with a plausible argument later on. They can't be hoping to just void the GPL outright, because that would mean that they are distributing linux without any license at all. That is the greatest strength of the GPL, IMO, because you can't argue that it is unlawful without also arguing that you are violating someone elses copyright.
The phrase did originate with the Greeks (probably) but there was a great deal of contact between Greek philosophers and Eastern philosophers after Alexander the Great established trade routes with India. There is a well known Buddhist work called Questions of Milinda that deals with dialogs between Menander, the Greek king of Bactria, and the monk Nagasena. It is not surprising that elements of Greek philosophy can occasionaly be found in Buddhist stories. The saying about the river would have been especially appealing to Buddhist teachers.
As for your second criticism, there is much more to Zen than koans. Koans are intended to be a teaching tool. Some teachers use them and others do not. They are by no means a universal feature of Zen practice. More important are the Zen sermons and anecdotes, which in general are completely comprehensible and are often easier to understand than many of the historical Buddhist sutras. The account of the river is a good example of this because it illustrates the concept of impermanence in a few sentances, whereas the canonical sutras can go on for pages and pages discussing the same concept in a much more confusing manner.
Either I'm not as smart as I think I am, or he's BSing his way through this.
The problem is that you are locked in to thinking about time and motion in a particular way (the result of a mix of tradition and neurobiology). But the real block to understanding what he is talking about is that it is mind-bogglingly simple. People don't get it because they assume that if it were a simple idea then they would have thought of it themselves. Special Relativity is a perfect example of this phenomenon. If you ask the right questions about light and its relation to time and motion, you can derive the basic theory in 15 minutes using simple geometry and algebra. Nobody before Einstein bothered to ask those questions.
This paper is really not very remarkable when viewed from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy, although I am not aware of anyone else using Buddhist concepts to address Zeno's paradox. One of the fundamental concepts in Buddhism is the principle of impermanence -- everything is in a state of constant flux. There is no such thing as a static quantity or permanent, unchanging object. There is a story from Zen Buddhism about a master who told his student that you can never step in the same river twice because the river is always in motion and always changing. Every time you step in the river, it will be physically different from the last time you stepped in it. The student responded that, folloing the master's logic, it is impossible to step in the same river once. The river will change its physical configuration while you are stepping, not just in between steps. If this concept is applied to the moving arrow in Zeno's paradox, it is impossible to determine the arrow's position at any given time because it will always move while you are in the process of making the measurement. It is only possible to make an absolute measurement of the position of a moving object if time is frozen. Without an absolute measurment of position, you can never say exactly how far the arrow has to travel before it is half way to the target.
The problem with Zeno's paradox is that it is not dealing with motion at all. It is dealing with series of stationary arrows. We have all been duped into believing that it is a paradox of motion because we represent moving objects on paper as a series of stationary objects. We have been confusing the representation with physical reality for thousands of years.
His first point argues that he doesn't have all the facts. He sets up a strawman outlining what he thinks SCO's position is, and then proceeds to argue against it. Bad form.
I think you missed the point of his argument. His admission that he doesn't have all the facts is made to point out the inherent weakness in SCO's argument. Moglen doesn't have all the facts because SCO is deliberately witholding evidence. They are making broad claims about other parties violating their rights while refusing to specify exactly what rights they have and how they are being violated. That Moglen does not have all the facts because SCO refuses to back up their claims with evidence is not a demonstration of his willful ignorance, but a demonstration of the weakness of SCO's argument. Moglen goes on to discuss the only form of IP that we can reasonably believe SCO is talking about. This is not a strawman argument, it is an argument by reduction. Moglen is simply pointing out that SCO uses a lot of fancy words to say very little. Their argument reduces to "Anybody who uses Linux is violating our rights." Not really an argument at all, just an unsubstantiated and vague assertion.
Except for Free software, it's accepted that users need valid licenses for their software. His argument hinges on the position that SCO is going after copyright issues, which SCO hasn't claimed (point 1).
For one thing, this is Free software we're talking about. Unless a piece of software requires you to agree to a license before installing it, you don't have to agree to any license at all. Moglen is talking about the law here, not PHBs misconceptions about the law. Secondly, SCO has made claims of copyright infringement repeatedly in public forums, if not in their legal filings. That is the basis of them allowing people to view isolated pieces of system v code compared to linux code (under the NDA). They claim that "entire files" in the linux kernel source are copied directly from system v. That claim is only relevant to copyright, not patents, tradesecrets, or trademarks.
I thought his argument was that they don't need a license? His argument here is the same as IBM's position paper - they distributed under the GPL so tough luck.
I'm assuming that you believe that he is contradicting his earlier argument by talking about the GPL issue. Moglen isn't admiting that SCO is correct, he is saying that even if they did get a ruling that copyright law would allow them to force people to buy a license for software usage, the GPL will still get in their way. Good debaters (and good lawyers by extension) cover their bases and refute all of the counter arguments that are being made. Failure to respond to an argument could be viewed as an implicitely accepting that it is correct.
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I think the more interesting question is why an entity possesing the ability to create an entire universe from nothing would not also implement a set of physical laws that allow life to evolve automatically? Why would said entity go in after the initial creation event and manually tinker with biological molecules to get them to develop into complex life forms? Sounds like a huge kludge to me. I prefer to believe that any supreme being that may exist is competant enough to get the laws of physics right the first time. Tinkering and hardcoding workarounds for the mistakes is not eligant.
The point is that this guy has declared google to be inefficient because it is not as good as some other tools at finding whatever "scholarly" information he is interested in. He makes the assumption that his interests are more important than all others. All of the other stuff people use google for is just a collection of random and relatively useless facts. It's that elitist attitude that irks people. Instead of saying "Google isn't very good at finding the things I'm interested in but other people find it to be useful" he says "Google isn't exclusively (or even primarily) a scholarly search tool which makes it useless to anyone. Some people believe it's useful because they are unable to distinguish useful information from useless crap." He places a value judgment on anyone who does not share is interests. He ignores the fact that people actually do use it for real-life research and are able to find information that would not otherwise be available.
I read a lot of stuff that he would consider to be "scholarly" (meaning that the average person's eyes will glaze over as soon as they open the book). Other people like to discuss their collections of belly-button lint. Fine. If that makes them happy, then information related to belly-buttons and the lint they accumulate is interesting and valuable to them.
I've done a lot of old fashioned library research and I've learned a lot of tricks to doing it efficiently. Here's the first tip: Never expect to find the information you want in the first book or journal you look at. The first book you look at should be one that is somehow related to the topic of interest with a large index and good bibliography. That will hopefully lead you to other books with indexes and bibliographies and maybe some useful content. But the main goal is to collect a list of books and journal articles that might be useful (most of them aren't). The next step is narrowing the search. How do you decide which books and articles to look at? Sometimes you can tell from a title that it will be useful. Usually you go through the list of possible hits and find the items that appear frequently. The good books and articles tend to get referrenced a lot by other authors. The good authors also get referrenced a lot. Notice that this is essentially a manual implementation of the algorithm Google uses. Shocking!
I think it's pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand how to use search engines properly and doesn't have the patience to learn. And in defence of blogs and other pages with "random facts," a lot of them are unpublishable, but that does not mean they are useless. Publishers want to make money and if they don't believe there is a large enough audience for some content, they won't publish it. I use Google all the time to find information that does not exist in any book, but is nevertheless extremely useful to me. It is probably useful to six other people in the world also, but that's not enough to justify publishing it in a book no matter how well written it is.
I think this argument really revolves around two entirely different types of freedom. The BSD license grants you the freedom to modify, redistribute, and relicense the original code. None of those rights extend to derivatives, so I may have the right to relicense the original, but I have no right to relicense derivatives (unless they are also BSD, of course). The GPL grants you the freedom to modify and redistribute the original and derivatives. The fact that the GPL must apply to derivatives makes it incompatible with the broad freedom to relicense granted by BSD. I consider the freedom to modify derivatives to be a greater freedom than the freedom to relicense. BSD advocates seem to believe that the restrictions on relicensing GPLed software makes it non-free somehow, but it should also be noted that the BSD license also contains restrictions on relicensing. I can't, for example, attach a license to BSD software that says "you may redistribute and modify this software in source or binary form, provided that no copyright or license notices are included with the software." Both the GPL and BSD license prohibit relicensing in that fashion. Both licenses allow relicensing if the new license is consistent with the terms of the original. Neither license grants absolute freedom to do whatever you would like to do with the code. If relicensing restrictions make the GPL non-free, then they also make BSD non-free.
Both the BSD and GPL licenses grant freedoms, but the GPL, unlike the BSD license, is designed to preserve those freedoms. Yes it is true that the freedoms are preserved by imposing restrictions on other behaviors, but that in no way makes the GPL non-free or less free than BSD. All freedoms in the real world are accompanied by restrictions on behavior. Living in a free democracy means that citizens are not free to become tyranical dictators (I think this is a good restriction). The first amendment to the US Constitution prohibits Congress from passing laws that restrict speech (again, a restriction on one freedom to preserve a more important freedom). The fourth amendment prohibits government officials from coming into your house and rifling through your personal belongings whenever they feel like it. That's another "freedom" that has been taken away because it is incompatible with a more important freedom. I, for one, am glad that people are not free to barge into my house on a whim and look through my underwear drawer. I am also glad that I can license my code with the GPL and ensure that all users of my code are free to modify and redistribute it without some third party trying to take that away. It isn't free because it doesn't allow people to remove the freedoms that are granted? That's logically incoherent.
is what this is. MD5 is not a reversible algorithm. There is no way, even in principle, to go from a hashed result to retrieve the input. An infinite number of letter/number combinations could be used to produce any given MD5 hash. At best, they could come up with a combination that produces the same hash as the one given to them, but that does not mean it is the right answer. And they have virtually no chance of cracking a hash made from a well-selected password.
Study Louis Armstrong's work (especially the early stuff) to see what a musician can do with a single note. The first half of one of his most famous solos, from West End Blues, consists of a single note held for 4 bars. He did variations on that solo in later work that sounded dramatically different, mostly because of the way that one note was played.
I'm not at all offended that the forest service will sometimes request that I not leave the trail for 100 yards out of a 20 mile trail. Those policies preserve some of the most amazing places in the country for everyone to enjoy.
As for sensors in the woods, I'm not going to get worked up. They would be pointless on busy trails (sensors would be tripped constantly -- you wouldn't know which signal represented the missing person). On more remote trails, there is just no practical way to set up a network of sensors with enough resolution to be useful for S&R. Aside from that, the forest service can barely keep the current trail system maintained, let alone setting up and maintaining a vast array of sensors to spy on a few hikers. Does anyone seriously think that the government, or anyone else, has an interest in what hiker X is doing on a trail that is traversed once a week at most? If anyone really wants to go to that much trouble to spy on me in the backcountry, I'll give them a show they won't soon forget.
The sad reality is that we have a huge oversupply of people who are qualified to do basic research competing for a dwindling number of jobs. A few years ago, there were over 1000 trained particle physicists for every real position in the field. University students are very aware of this and the smart ones no longer try to get into programs that focus on basic research. My advisors told me (and everyone else) not to go to graduate school for physics unless I wanted to do industrial research. How many of my classmates applied to physics graduate programs the year I graduated? Zero! That was 7 years ago and the situation has only gotten worse since then. Few people want to spend 4-5 years getting a PhD and then spend another 6-10 years doing low paying post-doc work before the can compete with hundreds or even thousands of other applicants for a single real research position.
The people who are responsible for this mess are the ones who have been cutting funding for basic research for the past 20 years. The same ones who killed the SSC because they didn't want to pay for an "expensive toy for overeducated elitists," as one congress person said after the vote passed. These are usually the same people who love to bitch and moan about the dreadful state of public education in the hopes that voters will point the finger at teachers and children for the woes of society instead of placing the blame where it belongs.
From conservation of energy, we know that any energy radiated away from a black hole has to be matched by a decrease of energy inside the black hole. E==mc^2, so a decrease in energy is equivalent to a decrease in mass.
It's actually the birds that you have to watch out for the most. Bears are dramatic, but they usually either ignore you or run away. I have seen two bears while backpacking, and neither wanted anything to do with me.
On the other hand, I have been attacked by several grouse, buzzed by an eagle, and harrased by ravens. I almost shit my pants last summer when I was on a narrow trail with a near-verticle drop-off on one side when a grouse popped out of a bush and flew straight at my head. Imagine having a miniature turkey flapping right in front of your face while hissing like an angry cat.
They didn't give an explanation in the court filings of how the GPL is unconstitutional, but Blake Stowell gave an explanation in an interview. The exact verbage should be in Groklaw's quotation database. They basically want to argue that the constitution specifies Congress as the sole regulator of copyrights. So far, so good. Then they claim that the FSF is attempting to regulate copyrights by publishing the GPL and enforcing its terms on software they own. Following their logic, the FSF has set up its own parallel set of copyright laws via the GPL and that is clearly unconstitutional. They do not explain, however, how the publication of a copyright license equates to the establishment of an independant law-making body. Say what you will about RMS, but I don't think he believes that he is the President of the GNUnited States of America (the GNU/President?).
I have two guesses as to what is really going on here: 1) David Boies and Co. have found a source of some really good smack. 2) They are planning to spike Judge Kimball's coffee with a hit of LSD right before oral arguments begin.
The second thing to remember about testability is that the experiments do not have to be original. Supertring theory will have to explain all of the phenomena that we see with standard quantum mechanics. That by itself won't be enough to demonstrate that superstring theory is correct or likely to be correct, but it does show that it can at least explain what we already know about the world. That is no small feat and should not be disregarded. There are many theories that have been tossed in the trash because they made predictions that were known to be false.
Another way that superstring theory can be tested is to see if it explains experiments that have already been done but with results that don't fit any existing theories. The standard model of QM has a lot of holes in it. We know that it is not completely correct because some of the experiments that have been done did not work out the way they should have. If superstrings can fill in the gaps in the standard model then that may be enough to confirm its validity.
Whoa! Somebody doesn't like philosophers! Like it or not, both the FS and OSS movements are founded on philosophy. Take that away and they die. Usually when people whine about "philosophical garbage" what they are really complaining about is that some other people are able to use logic and reason to make a point, and that makes it difficult to refute.
The expectation you have of the user to close the distance between what they know and what you want them to learn is naive. That's not how industries produce consumable goods.
First of all, most of us who actually develop Free Software are not interested in producing consumable goods for any industry. And I, personally, have only one expectation from users: don't complain at me for what I have given you for free. If you need help with my software, ask for help. If you want improvements, offer them. If you think my software is just too damn difficult to use, don't. It's that simple. What I don't need is a bunch of arrogant commentators coming along and demanding that I follow this or that standard, reduce the learning curve for users, or join some other project instead of working on my own because that would be a more efficient use of community resources and would be a more effective way to achieve some goal that I do not share. Nobody pays me to develop Free Software and I (and other FS/OSS developers) don't owe anybody anything beyond what I am already giving away.
Despite whatever philosophies you chose with which to see the world, supply and demand exists.
This is exactly the point. There is a demand for software that can be freely modified and offers greater choice to users than proprietary software offers. Linux and other Free Software provides the supply. You can complain all you want about how we need to enforce standards to defeat MS (or whatever it is you want), but that desire will never remove the demand for software that does not follow the standard. If someone tries to enforce a standard gui across all distros, another distro will pop up that does not follow that standard and people who do not like the standard will use it. There is nothing you or anyone else can do to stop it. As long as there is a demand for choice, and there is, FS/OSS developers are going to supply that demand. In many cases the suppliers and demanders are the same people. You can complain all you want about how there should be a standard desktop that all distros should default to, but unless you have a way to prevent people from developing other distros that fit their preferences, it is about as useful as complaining that the moon should be pink.
The real question to be asking is what we will gain by providing a standard gui for Linux. I don't see what the benefit is. People who want standards for the sake of standards already have windows and mac. Why would they want to move to Linux unless it offers something that is different from the standard? People who aren't interested in choice will never move to Linux regardless of whatever standards are implemented for Linux guis.
The only real hope for the OS community at this point is to just spell L-I-N-U-X so Darl won't know what we're talking about. Or maybe he'll crack his head open on a concrete floor when he throws himself down on the ground for the inevitable tantrum.
I say that there is a difference between opinions on morality and forcing those opinions on others. There are plenty of behaviors that I believe are immoral, but I would be the first to fight any attempt to make those behaviors illegal. The fact that some people feel that selling proprietary software is wrong does not imply that they want to pass laws against it.
and that "information wants to be free!"?
It's a silly phrase. Information doesn't want anything at all. Information should be free because the concept of "owning" and idea is logically incoherent.
Study your political philosophy! Those well-intentioned "communist" ideals are more accurately categorized under classical anarchism than communism. The anarchists broke with the early Marxist movement because they were strong civil libertarians and could not put up with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (it was an anarchist who originally warned of the dangers of the Red Beuracracy). Sharing is good, but it must be voluntary sharing and never forced. I have yet to meet a geek who is not a strong civil libertarian, and that libertarian streak quickly rules out any hints of communism.
The GPL forms the basis for many of IBM's counterclaims. That fact alone will cause SCO to raise questions about the validity of the GPL in court if the case ever makes it that far. There are a number of terms in the GPL that are not present in BSD style licenses, such as the restriction on sublicensing. SCO's many violations of the GPL opened the door for several of IBM's claims. The GPL will also play a huge role in the Redhat case
That's exactly the point. Simplicity is an inherently subjective concept. God is not a good explanation for physical phenomena because there is no known way to test the hypothesis, not because the God explanation is any more or less "simple" than some other explanation. Occam's razor should not play a serious role in science until someone is able to provide an objective method for measuring the simplicity of an idea. I don't think it can be done.
I will be interested to see what kind of argument SCO comes up with to defend their behavior. They obviously believe that the terms of the GPL just don't apply to them and that they can continue to distribute linux despite their present lack of permission to do so. My guess is that they think (incorrectly) that they have found a loophole in the GPL that allows them to license object code under more restrictive terms. Even if that were correct, they have a problem because their conflicting license expressly prohibits redistribution and the creation of derivative works. So they are violating the GPL even if their lame object code argument is correct. My other guess is that they will claim that all of Linux became a derivative work of system v when the offending code was inserted, and its derivative status makes it the property of SCO. They can issue the new license because they own all of the code in Linux in the first place. I don't believe that any judge would go for that since it does not even resemble the legal definition of a derivative work. I guess the last option is that they are all smoking crack and decided to come up with a plausible argument later on. They can't be hoping to just void the GPL outright, because that would mean that they are distributing linux without any license at all. That is the greatest strength of the GPL, IMO, because you can't argue that it is unlawful without also arguing that you are violating someone elses copyright.
As for your second criticism, there is much more to Zen than koans. Koans are intended to be a teaching tool. Some teachers use them and others do not. They are by no means a universal feature of Zen practice. More important are the Zen sermons and anecdotes, which in general are completely comprehensible and are often easier to understand than many of the historical Buddhist sutras. The account of the river is a good example of this because it illustrates the concept of impermanence in a few sentances, whereas the canonical sutras can go on for pages and pages discussing the same concept in a much more confusing manner.
The problem is that you are locked in to thinking about time and motion in a particular way (the result of a mix of tradition and neurobiology). But the real block to understanding what he is talking about is that it is mind-bogglingly simple. People don't get it because they assume that if it were a simple idea then they would have thought of it themselves. Special Relativity is a perfect example of this phenomenon. If you ask the right questions about light and its relation to time and motion, you can derive the basic theory in 15 minutes using simple geometry and algebra. Nobody before Einstein bothered to ask those questions.
This paper is really not very remarkable when viewed from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy, although I am not aware of anyone else using Buddhist concepts to address Zeno's paradox. One of the fundamental concepts in Buddhism is the principle of impermanence -- everything is in a state of constant flux. There is no such thing as a static quantity or permanent, unchanging object. There is a story from Zen Buddhism about a master who told his student that you can never step in the same river twice because the river is always in motion and always changing. Every time you step in the river, it will be physically different from the last time you stepped in it. The student responded that, folloing the master's logic, it is impossible to step in the same river once. The river will change its physical configuration while you are stepping, not just in between steps. If this concept is applied to the moving arrow in Zeno's paradox, it is impossible to determine the arrow's position at any given time because it will always move while you are in the process of making the measurement. It is only possible to make an absolute measurement of the position of a moving object if time is frozen. Without an absolute measurment of position, you can never say exactly how far the arrow has to travel before it is half way to the target.
The problem with Zeno's paradox is that it is not dealing with motion at all. It is dealing with series of stationary arrows. We have all been duped into believing that it is a paradox of motion because we represent moving objects on paper as a series of stationary objects. We have been confusing the representation with physical reality for thousands of years.
I think you missed the point of his argument. His admission that he doesn't have all the facts is made to point out the inherent weakness in SCO's argument. Moglen doesn't have all the facts because SCO is deliberately witholding evidence. They are making broad claims about other parties violating their rights while refusing to specify exactly what rights they have and how they are being violated. That Moglen does not have all the facts because SCO refuses to back up their claims with evidence is not a demonstration of his willful ignorance, but a demonstration of the weakness of SCO's argument. Moglen goes on to discuss the only form of IP that we can reasonably believe SCO is talking about. This is not a strawman argument, it is an argument by reduction. Moglen is simply pointing out that SCO uses a lot of fancy words to say very little. Their argument reduces to "Anybody who uses Linux is violating our rights." Not really an argument at all, just an unsubstantiated and vague assertion.
Except for Free software, it's accepted that users need valid licenses for their software. His argument hinges on the position that SCO is going after copyright issues, which SCO hasn't claimed (point 1).
For one thing, this is Free software we're talking about. Unless a piece of software requires you to agree to a license before installing it, you don't have to agree to any license at all. Moglen is talking about the law here, not PHBs misconceptions about the law. Secondly, SCO has made claims of copyright infringement repeatedly in public forums, if not in their legal filings. That is the basis of them allowing people to view isolated pieces of system v code compared to linux code (under the NDA). They claim that "entire files" in the linux kernel source are copied directly from system v. That claim is only relevant to copyright, not patents, tradesecrets, or trademarks.
I thought his argument was that they don't need a license? His argument here is the same as IBM's position paper - they distributed under the GPL so tough luck.
I'm assuming that you believe that he is contradicting his earlier argument by talking about the GPL issue. Moglen isn't admiting that SCO is correct, he is saying that even if they did get a ruling that copyright law would allow them to force people to buy a license for software usage, the GPL will still get in their way. Good debaters (and good lawyers by extension) cover their bases and refute all of the counter arguments that are being made. Failure to respond to an argument could be viewed as an implicitely accepting that it is correct.