Oh c'mon. While you're technically correct in saying Linux is "just the kernel", it's a distinction that doesn't help the discussion. Your just being pedantic.
That creepy, ethereal not-quite-human sound you hear right now is Richard Stallman's nerd rage.
Tell me the last time a politician voted on something they saw as political suicide?
Well, not really a "vote," but Gerald Ford. Ford was likable and had a good shot at winning a full term on his own, but the pardon pretty much ended his political career. Ironically, at the time, the perception was that letting Nixon "take his lumps" would have been taking the high road. But Ford did what he thought was right, instead of what was politically expedient, even though what he thought was right looked a lot like political croneyism, and what was politically expedient looked like a lot like "statesmanship." And now a lot of people (including, for example, the late Ted Kennedy) agree that history is on Ford's side: the pardon avoided the dog and pony show of a Nixon trial and let the country move on.
I'm not aware that the IPCC was ever on the other side of it. I don't think I've ever heard any climatologists saying "There may be something to investigate here." From the start, it's been "OH NOES! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! WE NEED MORE SOCIALISM NOW!!! BECAUSE WE HAVE COMPUTER MODELS! AND COMPUTER MODELS ARE INFALLIBLE! LIKE THE POPE!"
Al Gore and the UN have never been on the side of science. They have an axe to grind.
Well, I think it's a reference to "The Lazarus Experiment," where the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to turn the organ up to 11 so that he can blast Lazarus out of the bell tower. So there.
And you broadly assume that all employees have a contract that addresses this issue ("That depends very much on the terms of your contract"). Perhaps you have negotiated special clauses with every single employer that you retain right to all your intellectual property, but if so, you are by far in the minority. Copyright law provides for ownership when there is no agreement to change the default positions, which is the case for most people. Yes, you can contract for just about anything under the sun, but in the absence of an express contract, an employee's work is owned by his employer. So no, it doesn't "depend very much on the terms of your contract." It depends on your status as an employee or a contractor unless you happen to have a contract. Then it depends on the terms of your contract. Similarly, the ownership of the computer I am typing this on depends entirely on personal property law, unless I have some agreement that changes it.
It's perfectly grammatical to begin a sentence with a conjunction. Go read a professionally-edited journal or a well-written book. It will be teeming with such sentences. In fact, the real problem with the post was the ungainly "However," he used to start his second sentence, when a straightforward "But" would have served quite nicely.
That depends very much on the terms of your contract. *I* for example, have never given up any rights to my software. My employers have always had a non-exclusive right to use and distribute the software, but I have always retained my full rights to it.
If they are true "employers" (meaning you were an "employee") and you wrote your software in the course and scope of employment, then your employer owns the copyright in your work. (See 17 USC 101 for the definition of a "work made for hire" and 17 USC 201(b) for ownership of a work made for hire). If as an employee you wrote code and kept a copy for yourself to use in your next job, you have committed copyright infringement, and jeapordized your new employer's product (your new employer's product is now a derivative work of code owned by somebody else). On the other hand, if you are an independent contractor, then you own the copyright in your work unless expressly agreed otherwise.
This is not, of course, legal advice. But it's definitely something you should think about.
To clarify just a little, most of the poor slugs writing software are employees, so their work is owned by the employer. Most of the people writing books are not employees of the publisher, so their work is owned by them until they sell it to a publisher.
Entitlements don't bankrupt us at all. Old people do need money to eat and get health care. If if not for social security, medicare, etc, people would just have to redirect what they now pay in taxes towards savings for retirement, or spend more on supporting their elderly parents, etc. It's not like all that money people are now using to put food on the table, keep their homes warm, and get medical treatment would magically be available to build super-weapons instead.
You say this like it's an argument for keeping entitlement programs. I, for one, would love to live in a world where people voluntarily took care of themselves and each other instead of the government forcibly taking money from us (sometimes literally at gunpoint) and wasting it on fraud-laden programs that are sold off to political cronies and that encourage people to rely on the government rather than think and plan for themselves, thus ensuring that the corrupt incumbents keep their jobs, because if you vote me out, that "other guy" might take away your free stuff. In fact, I consider the one to be pretty much the ideal society, one where everybody works hard and where nobody is poor because those with the ability to make more care enough about those who don't make as much to give them a hand. The other I consider to be pretty much the polar opposite, where politicians and their cronies enable and encourage slothfulness and dependency to protect their own power base, and where we must eventually crumble into mutual poverty under the weight of our complacency and greed.
Speeding is not criminal. It is an administrative infraction. Misdemeanor and felony (i.e. criminal) traffic violations are few and far between--mostly reckless endangerment and DUIs.
A civil offense with no chance of causing physical harm is not a meaningful phrase. Contract disputes between two parties regularly run into the tens of millions of dollars, and they are civil offenses with no chance of causing physical harm to anyone. Employment dispute cases include awards in the hundreds of thousands and are civil offenses with no chance of causing physical harm to anyone.
Speeding, that is, exceeding a posted limit set by political forces and not traffic surveys, is an administrative offense with no chance of causing physical harm to anyone. If people are driving at unsafe speeds, then the risk of injury to others may increase, depending on traffic conditions.
I love it when plausible-sounding but completely wrong posts are modded insightful on Slashdot.
In every jurisdiction I know of, speeding is a misdemeanor. Granted, it's a very low-level misdemeanor, so minor that most people who ask about criminal convictions specifically except moving violations. But it is still technically a crime. If you want to, you can plead "not guilty" to the charge and demand a jury trial. (But note: you will almost certainly lose). And as for not having any chance of causing harm, there is a broadly-accepted link between increased speed and increased incidence of accidents (as well as severity of accidents) (see, e.g., http://www.roadsafety.org.uk/information/publish/article_127.shtml). Now, just because somebody did a study doesn't mean it's necessarily so, but don't pretend like it doesn't exist.
What the FSF is doing is saying I would be morally wrong to buy and use an iPad because they disagree with the software model, and surely that is the antithesis of what they stand for. If I want to exercise my choice to use a closed system I should be able to, just in the same way my DVR box runs an OS that I cannot modify, recording encrypted content to its internal HD.
You've obviously never heard Richard Stallman speak. This is exactly what the FSF stands for. If they had their way, they would force all software to be free, regardless of what works for people. Stallman will tell you straight up that he believes it is immoral to use closed software, even if it works better.
No, he doesn't. Hence the word mimic. I think the comparison is apt (ha!) - even though Apple's single source is mandatory, and you can add whatever sources you want to Ubuntu. They're otherwise quite similar.
To the extent that Ubuntu provides a simple but optional way of installing software easily, it mimics FreeBSD ports, not the App Store.
Doesn't even Ubuntu try to mimic this in some respects with its downloader?
Do you honestly believe that having a repository where people can easily get most of the stuff they want is the same thing as having a single app store that is the only place your computer will let you get stuff from? I don't think anybody would be complaining if Apple had a nice, tidy app store, but still let people run arbitrary code on their stuff.
Had we not been fighting those wars we may not now have had an unbalanced budget
Both wars together have totaled about $750B. That's a lot of money, but it's still not as much as even one of the two big "stimulus" packages. Since 2001, the "war" appropriations have been about 4% of our federal budget. 4% is nowhere near enough to bring us into the black.
There's nothing more expensive than war, nor as useless (except for the fat cats who benefit from it financially at taxpayers' expense).
Entitlement programs are way more expensive than war, and are teeming with fraud and abuse. Cutting all of the money we spend on those two wars would hardly have made a dent in our budget. For example, we spent about 118% of what we brought in last year. The 4% of that we spent on wars would not make a huge difference. But cutting even half the money we spend on entitlement programs would easily put us within budget.
Now, maybe you like entitlement programs. Maybe you think FDR hung the freakin' moon. Maybe you believe that we would be uncivilized brutes without all those programs. Fine. You're entitled to your opinion. But don't pretend like it's our little romps in the middle east that are squeezing out all the money we could be spending on science.
The deficit is getting out of control. While everyone here of course favors cutting things like defense spending over science funding, at least you have to acknowledge that if you're going to cut some science funding, going to the moon is a pretty decent place to start.
You're almost right. The deficit is already out of control. We're spending ourselves into oblivion, and the only place I can see it going is the eventual collapse of the dollar (perhaps soon; perhaps we can hold it off for a while).
But cutting Constellation will hardly amount to a rounding error. If you want to reduce the deficit, the only truly meaningful way to do it is to cut entitlement programs (and to a lesser extend, defense spending, which still accounts for less than half of what we spend on entitlements). Constellation is not the giant lead weight that's drowning us. Entitlements are. And Obama won't cut them, because all those entitlement programs keep Democrats in office. And Republicans won't do it whenever they come back into power, because that's a sure fire way to hand the government back to the Democrats. Once you start giving people stuff, they feel entitled to it, and if you take it away, they will revolt. And it probably would be a little harsh to cut all those people off cold turkey after we've got them dependent on those programs. So we're stuck with the entitlement programs. All this talk of cutting Constellation and a discretionary spending freeze is just hand-waving so Obama can put on a face of fiscal responsibility to a population that is nervous about his spending. Obama knows that the same population demands free stuff from the government. So what's a president to do? He makes a big show of cutting stuff that Joe Public doesn't really care about. Cutting Constellation is a great way to look like he's doing something about the budget without making any hard choices.
Apparently, it's any driving the government doesn't like. (Especially note the last bullet point: "any other issues that could be considered anti-social"). They wanted a little Fahrenheit 451 flavor to mix in with the 1984. When you have anti-social drivers (or crazy old coots who actually enjoy taking a morning stroll instead of vegging in front of the television), you can set the mechanical hounds on them to show them the error of their ways.
The Doctor already knew this. But watch out. What they don't mention is that planets with diamond waterfalls also apparently have strange, ethereal aliens that like to play "copycat" and have a thing for possessing lesbian women.
She's a single mother of 4, that means not only did she not have the sense to not get knocked up without proper support, she did it 4 times. There isn't a lot of common sense in that family so its highly unlikely any of her rugrats are going to do anything more than Janitorial service. Its possible, but its just not a realistic expectation.
Or, you know, it's possible that she was married and that her husband ran off with another man, or mysteriously disappeared from a bar one day, or was killed in an auto accident, or a million other things. But don't let facts like having no idea what her situation is get in the way of your right to sneer at her.
Actually, if you uploaded an Avatar screener, the actual damages would still be very hard to prove. Not impossible, but hard. It's more likely that they would still go after statutory damages, and since statutory damages are assessed per work infringed, the statutory maximum would be $30,000 (or $150,000 if they proved willful infringement). On the other hand, the owner of the no-name album you uploaded that had 10 songs could get up to $300,000 (or $1.5M for willful).
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Oh c'mon. While you're technically correct in saying Linux is "just the kernel", it's a distinction that doesn't help the discussion. Your just being pedantic.
That creepy, ethereal not-quite-human sound you hear right now is Richard Stallman's nerd rage.
Tell me the last time a politician voted on something they saw as political suicide?
Well, not really a "vote," but Gerald Ford. Ford was likable and had a good shot at winning a full term on his own, but the pardon pretty much ended his political career. Ironically, at the time, the perception was that letting Nixon "take his lumps" would have been taking the high road. But Ford did what he thought was right, instead of what was politically expedient, even though what he thought was right looked a lot like political croneyism, and what was politically expedient looked like a lot like "statesmanship." And now a lot of people (including, for example, the late Ted Kennedy) agree that history is on Ford's side: the pardon avoided the dog and pony show of a Nixon trial and let the country move on.
Sometimes they collect a $1/year salary to look good
Well, that and by not having a salary, they totally avoid the SSM tax, which has no deductions, exemption, or credits.
Well played, sir.
I'm not aware that the IPCC was ever on the other side of it. I don't think I've ever heard any climatologists saying "There may be something to investigate here." From the start, it's been "OH NOES! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! WE NEED MORE SOCIALISM NOW!!! BECAUSE WE HAVE COMPUTER MODELS! AND COMPUTER MODELS ARE INFALLIBLE! LIKE THE POPE!"
Al Gore and the UN have never been on the side of science. They have an axe to grind.
Well, I think it's a reference to "The Lazarus Experiment," where the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to turn the organ up to 11 so that he can blast Lazarus out of the bell tower. So there.
And you broadly assume that all employees have a contract that addresses this issue ("That depends very much on the terms of your contract"). Perhaps you have negotiated special clauses with every single employer that you retain right to all your intellectual property, but if so, you are by far in the minority. Copyright law provides for ownership when there is no agreement to change the default positions, which is the case for most people. Yes, you can contract for just about anything under the sun, but in the absence of an express contract, an employee's work is owned by his employer. So no, it doesn't "depend very much on the terms of your contract." It depends on your status as an employee or a contractor unless you happen to have a contract. Then it depends on the terms of your contract. Similarly, the ownership of the computer I am typing this on depends entirely on personal property law, unless I have some agreement that changes it.
he abused the English language in ways that people never imagined it could be abused. Most of our great writers do that.
To effectively abuse the rules of grammar, you must first be master of them. Generation txt has skipped a critical step.
It's perfectly grammatical to begin a sentence with a conjunction. Go read a professionally-edited journal or a well-written book. It will be teeming with such sentences. In fact, the real problem with the post was the ungainly "However," he used to start his second sentence, when a straightforward "But" would have served quite nicely.
That depends very much on the terms of your contract. *I* for example, have never given up any rights to my software. My employers have always had a non-exclusive right to use and distribute the software, but I have always retained my full rights to it.
If they are true "employers" (meaning you were an "employee") and you wrote your software in the course and scope of employment, then your employer owns the copyright in your work. (See 17 USC 101 for the definition of a "work made for hire" and 17 USC 201(b) for ownership of a work made for hire). If as an employee you wrote code and kept a copy for yourself to use in your next job, you have committed copyright infringement, and jeapordized your new employer's product (your new employer's product is now a derivative work of code owned by somebody else). On the other hand, if you are an independent contractor, then you own the copyright in your work unless expressly agreed otherwise.
This is not, of course, legal advice. But it's definitely something you should think about.
To clarify just a little, most of the poor slugs writing software are employees, so their work is owned by the employer. Most of the people writing books are not employees of the publisher, so their work is owned by them until they sell it to a publisher.
Entitlements don't bankrupt us at all. Old people do need money to eat and get health care. If if not for social security, medicare, etc, people would just have to redirect what they now pay in taxes towards savings for retirement, or spend more on supporting their elderly parents, etc. It's not like all that money people are now using to put food on the table, keep their homes warm, and get medical treatment would magically be available to build super-weapons instead.
You say this like it's an argument for keeping entitlement programs. I, for one, would love to live in a world where people voluntarily took care of themselves and each other instead of the government forcibly taking money from us (sometimes literally at gunpoint) and wasting it on fraud-laden programs that are sold off to political cronies and that encourage people to rely on the government rather than think and plan for themselves, thus ensuring that the corrupt incumbents keep their jobs, because if you vote me out, that "other guy" might take away your free stuff. In fact, I consider the one to be pretty much the ideal society, one where everybody works hard and where nobody is poor because those with the ability to make more care enough about those who don't make as much to give them a hand. The other I consider to be pretty much the polar opposite, where politicians and their cronies enable and encourage slothfulness and dependency to protect their own power base, and where we must eventually crumble into mutual poverty under the weight of our complacency and greed.
Well, it's not every day that I learn something from Slashdot. Thanks.
Speeding is not criminal. It is an administrative infraction. Misdemeanor and felony (i.e. criminal) traffic violations are few and far between--mostly reckless endangerment and DUIs.
A civil offense with no chance of causing physical harm is not a meaningful phrase. Contract disputes between two parties regularly run into the tens of millions of dollars, and they are civil offenses with no chance of causing physical harm to anyone. Employment dispute cases include awards in the hundreds of thousands and are civil offenses with no chance of causing physical harm to anyone.
Speeding, that is, exceeding a posted limit set by political forces and not traffic surveys, is an administrative offense with no chance of causing physical harm to anyone. If people are driving at unsafe speeds, then the risk of injury to others may increase, depending on traffic conditions.
I love it when plausible-sounding but completely wrong posts are modded insightful on Slashdot.
In every jurisdiction I know of, speeding is a misdemeanor. Granted, it's a very low-level misdemeanor, so minor that most people who ask about criminal convictions specifically except moving violations. But it is still technically a crime. If you want to, you can plead "not guilty" to the charge and demand a jury trial. (But note: you will almost certainly lose). And as for not having any chance of causing harm, there is a broadly-accepted link between increased speed and increased incidence of accidents (as well as severity of accidents) (see, e.g., http://www.roadsafety.org.uk/information/publish/article_127.shtml). Now, just because somebody did a study doesn't mean it's necessarily so, but don't pretend like it doesn't exist.
What the FSF is doing is saying I would be morally wrong to buy and use an iPad because they disagree with the software model, and surely that is the antithesis of what they stand for. If I want to exercise my choice to use a closed system I should be able to, just in the same way my DVR box runs an OS that I cannot modify, recording encrypted content to its internal HD.
You've obviously never heard Richard Stallman speak. This is exactly what the FSF stands for. If they had their way, they would force all software to be free, regardless of what works for people. Stallman will tell you straight up that he believes it is immoral to use closed software, even if it works better.
No, he doesn't. Hence the word mimic. I think the comparison is apt (ha!) - even though Apple's single source is mandatory, and you can add whatever sources you want to Ubuntu. They're otherwise quite similar.
To the extent that Ubuntu provides a simple but optional way of installing software easily, it mimics FreeBSD ports, not the App Store.
Doesn't even Ubuntu try to mimic this in some respects with its downloader?
Do you honestly believe that having a repository where people can easily get most of the stuff they want is the same thing as having a single app store that is the only place your computer will let you get stuff from? I don't think anybody would be complaining if Apple had a nice, tidy app store, but still let people run arbitrary code on their stuff.
But I thought he said CONSTITUTION!
Don't worry. That's next on his list.
Had we not been fighting those wars we may not now have had an unbalanced budget
Both wars together have totaled about $750B. That's a lot of money, but it's still not as much as even one of the two big "stimulus" packages. Since 2001, the "war" appropriations have been about 4% of our federal budget. 4% is nowhere near enough to bring us into the black.
There's nothing more expensive than war, nor as useless (except for the fat cats who benefit from it financially at taxpayers' expense).
I beg to differ.
Entitlement programs are way more expensive than war, and are teeming with fraud and abuse. Cutting all of the money we spend on those two wars would hardly have made a dent in our budget. For example, we spent about 118% of what we brought in last year. The 4% of that we spent on wars would not make a huge difference. But cutting even half the money we spend on entitlement programs would easily put us within budget.
Now, maybe you like entitlement programs. Maybe you think FDR hung the freakin' moon. Maybe you believe that we would be uncivilized brutes without all those programs. Fine. You're entitled to your opinion. But don't pretend like it's our little romps in the middle east that are squeezing out all the money we could be spending on science.
The deficit is getting out of control. While everyone here of course favors cutting things like defense spending over science funding, at least you have to acknowledge that if you're going to cut some science funding, going to the moon is a pretty decent place to start.
You're almost right. The deficit is already out of control. We're spending ourselves into oblivion, and the only place I can see it going is the eventual collapse of the dollar (perhaps soon; perhaps we can hold it off for a while).
But cutting Constellation will hardly amount to a rounding error. If you want to reduce the deficit, the only truly meaningful way to do it is to cut entitlement programs (and to a lesser extend, defense spending, which still accounts for less than half of what we spend on entitlements). Constellation is not the giant lead weight that's drowning us. Entitlements are. And Obama won't cut them, because all those entitlement programs keep Democrats in office. And Republicans won't do it whenever they come back into power, because that's a sure fire way to hand the government back to the Democrats. Once you start giving people stuff, they feel entitled to it, and if you take it away, they will revolt. And it probably would be a little harsh to cut all those people off cold turkey after we've got them dependent on those programs. So we're stuck with the entitlement programs. All this talk of cutting Constellation and a discretionary spending freeze is just hand-waving so Obama can put on a face of fiscal responsibility to a population that is nervous about his spending. Obama knows that the same population demands free stuff from the government. So what's a president to do? He makes a big show of cutting stuff that Joe Public doesn't really care about. Cutting Constellation is a great way to look like he's doing something about the budget without making any hard choices.
What the heck is 'antisocial driving'?
Apparently, it's any driving the government doesn't like. (Especially note the last bullet point: "any other issues that could be considered anti-social"). They wanted a little Fahrenheit 451 flavor to mix in with the 1984. When you have anti-social drivers (or crazy old coots who actually enjoy taking a morning stroll instead of vegging in front of the television), you can set the mechanical hounds on them to show them the error of their ways.
The Doctor already knew this. But watch out. What they don't mention is that planets with diamond waterfalls also apparently have strange, ethereal aliens that like to play "copycat" and have a thing for possessing lesbian women.
Those kids were never going to college.
She's a single mother of 4, that means not only did she not have the sense to not get knocked up without proper support, she did it 4 times. There isn't a lot of common sense in that family so its highly unlikely any of her rugrats are going to do anything more than Janitorial service. Its possible, but its just not a realistic expectation.
Or, you know, it's possible that she was married and that her husband ran off with another man, or mysteriously disappeared from a bar one day, or was killed in an auto accident, or a million other things. But don't let facts like having no idea what her situation is get in the way of your right to sneer at her.
Actually, if you uploaded an Avatar screener, the actual damages would still be very hard to prove. Not impossible, but hard. It's more likely that they would still go after statutory damages, and since statutory damages are assessed per work infringed, the statutory maximum would be $30,000 (or $150,000 if they proved willful infringement). On the other hand, the owner of the no-name album you uploaded that had 10 songs could get up to $300,000 (or $1.5M for willful).
Houston, please repeat. Right. Yes, the new solar panel has been successfully installed. ISS out.
Today:
hstn, lol wut?1? ya we pwnd sol pan1 suxrz1!!