Right... because government assassinations happen so often they don't even make the news... oh wait, there's a huge debate happening just about giving the elected leader of the people the power to order the assassinations of accused war criminals ! More-over the vast majority of times when people DO go into a blind killing rage they do so with LEGAL guns and America has a disproportionately high number of such incidents...
In fact, the vast majority of gundeaths are accidental or suicides and most of them are caused by legal guns. The amount actually used for crimes by criminals is relatively minor. Only for that tiny minority is there a majority use of illegal weapons.
So I guess, if both groups did the maths - then the gun-nuts (and you) suck at doing maths.
That said- your conclusion is simply false. It's also true that a massively disproportionate percentage of American gun law supporters are white, among other races gun-control is much more highly supported. The real group of people wanting to own lots of guns are the racists assholes who are afraid of everybody that doesn't look like them.
This is a perfectly understandable thing too - goes back to our early evolution. As apes, you could identify threats by visual cues. A lion-shaped thing meant "danger will robinson" - and lead to a fight or flight response. But we live in a different world now, you can NOT identify threats by visual cues anymore. 9/10 violent crimes are committed by somebody you know and trust. So worrying about some black guy with a gun holding you up is... er... stupid, especially as the number of such incidents happening at all (by anybody to anybody) has been going down world wide for a century and is now one of the least likely ways to die.
The ones that still do happen, are almost all done by your neighbour, or your ex-boyfriend - not by some black guy from another part of town - or most likely of all - yourself. Gun suicides make up over 70% of all gun-related deaths world-wide (not sure how it looks specifically in the USA - but I seem to recall reading ones that it's higher than the global average)
So they don't trust their fellow citizens at all - if they did they would realize that their fellow citizens aren't a risk - and they don't NEED guns to protect themselves from their fellow citizens(what the hell do you think a criminal is if not a fellow citizen ?) they would be better off preventing the few who are likely to go postal from getting to go postal with a gun in their hands, the even tinier percentage who engage in violent crime for a living would actually be REDUCED if they stopped robbing houses to steal guns...
Yeah, owning a gun makes it MORE likely you'll be robbed because a gun is a very valuable thing to steal.
>The term you're looking for is observation bias. You don't read about the massacres that didn't happen because the bad guy got shot at.
That's idiotic. Every time somebody in America shoots a criminal in the face the guy is all over the news and hailed as a hero citizen ! What we've never seen is a case where a maniac starts shooting at a crowd and ANY of the people in that crowd starts shooting back and kills him after he only hit one or two people.
That kind of story would support your theory... unless your heroes are somehow prescient and actually shooting the bad guys BEFORE they commit the crime. I'm sure I trust the judgement of every testosterone filled idiot who has a hunch that I look like I MAY be planning to start shooting in the crowd...
You know what's funny about your example. Breivik achieved no more success than most crowd-shooters in the USA do. Colombine, the Washington Sniper, the Virginia Tech shooter... all of these guys did very much the same thing.
You know what's odd though ? They did this in America where everybody has a legal right to a gun... and do you know how many of them were shot by one of those armed citizens ? Not ONE.
Not a single bloody one of them - ever. Not once has a crowd-shooting postal-goer ever been taken out because somebody in the crowd could shoot back - it's never happened. So it seems that what happened in Norway would have happened (most likely) in exactly the same way even if everybody there were allowed to own guns.
Now here's the really strange thing. Breivik made international news because it was such a big thing, nothing like that had happened in Norway before. In America you have a shooting like that... what once a year, maybe once every two years on average ?
So it seems that having a lot of citizens with guns did nothing to reduce the harm done by the maniac who goes postal, all it did was to make sure that all the postal maniacs have got nice big guns. The reason Breivik was so unusual is because all the other people who ever went postal in Norway didn't HAVE a gun, and the harm they could do was therefore rather severely limited.
Hate to break it to you - but if anything, your own damn example is an argument AGAINST gun ownership.
>At this point it was nothing to do with ID, just a general gun scare.
As an outsider looking in on an America's gun-law debates... I've come to the conclusion that there are two types of people in America. 1) A large group of people who are deathly afraid of "criminals" and so feel that they couldn't possibly protect themselves unless they carry more firepower than Wile E. Coyote. To quote an awesome movie: a pussy can become a tough guy, if he has a gun in his hand. Somehow these people have all managed to remain completely unaware that crime reporting may be going up but actual crime rates have been going down consistently for over a century and more people die from suicide than violent crime in America. They all cite stuff like the second ammendment and the revolution but pretty much none of them actually give a damn about that stuff- they sure as hell aren't planning to ever revolt against Washington, they just like having an excuse to keep their tough-guy-makers.
2) Another large group of people who have figured out that a large group of pussies with guns in their hands are a much, much scarier thing than a tiny minority of people who engage in a life of violent crime.
Both groups are trying to protect themselves and their families. But only one of them have managed to do an accurate risk-assessment, worked out who is most likely to harm them and tried to make an effort to reduce that risk. In case you're wondering: it's the gun-grabbers who did the maths.
>kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
About a dozen, several award winners. I've had projects included in the cover CD's of major Linux Magazines (more than once).
And your point is er... bullshit. The problem you cite only exists for people who don't play by the rules. If your code is free software you will never have to support any distribution but your own. You know why ? Because if it's good and users want it then other distributions will build and include it FOR you. The problem here only exists for proprietory software that won't ALLOW those distributions to build for them. Even then the distributions will make an effort if they are allowed. If you don't give them the code they will try their best to provide a working package - and bear the support burden on your behalf - if you at LEAST allow redistribution.
If you don't allow redistribution or support, then guess what- the reason Linux is hard to support is because you refuse to do things the linux way. No linux developer tries to support multiple distributions, we build on our favourite, and let the other distributions who want to include the stuff package it for us.
Even for the few others, there are options - Icculus has done great work porting and maintaining cross-distro installers for many games on Linux - all we need is for the companies to LET us.
We don't even need them to PROVIDE Linux versions, just ALLOW us and we'll do the work to support linux FOR them. The community has proven that over and over with every company who did allow them.
The difficulty of gaming on Linux is a direct result of the publishers ultra-copyright-and-drm model. Even Blizzard with their proprietory programs which do at least allow redistribution (and relies on web-authentication to ensure compliance) has their games running very well on Linux and they don't even have ports. People actually go out of their way to provide patches for wine to support blizzard games (Diablo 3 worked on release day !)
Basically - if a game doesn't work on Linux, it's because the publishers shot themselves in the foot, they don't have to DO anything, just ALLOW the community and we'll do all the work FOR them - and even if it's only 1% extra sales, an increase of 1% in sales at ZERO cost, is a bloody huge margin.
Hey, I wasn't critisizing the bill, just wondering where the money is. Says something that I'm basically incapable of seeing a politician do anything (good or bad) without wondering where the money is.
>Who then pays for the insurance? Those who want to borrow money today in exchange of returning more money tomorrow. Without them banks would close their doors.
Wrong. In every single respect. Moneylending predates banking and banking developed independently of moneylending - the two only merged (in historical terms) quite recently. Moneylending is a way to fund the operation of banks but it's certainly not the only way and it's definitely not a requirement of the concept of banking. Banking isn't even about MONEY per se.
Banking is simply the provision of a secure storage service for other people's property - usually money, but most banks also offer things like safety-deposit boxes to protect other kinds of property.
Until quite recently in fact (as in - within my lifetime) in many countries it wasn't even LEGAL to call yourself a bank if you didn't have a deposit/secure-storage service - lending companies had to go by more descriptive names such as "bond associations".
There are many different funding models for banks that can and have been used. The first real banks were established by the Knights Templar to protect the money of pilgrims - they didn't do any lending, they just did it as religious charity. More recent models have included mutualisms and even non-profit mutualisms (sometimes such mutualisms would use the deposited money to give loans INTEREST FREE).
These are all valid forms of banking - lending is something else, it's only one model that combines them. In that model, of course, that source of income is how insurance is paid.
I'm guessing the fact that all those silicon valley megatech companies that opposed SOPA fall in his jurisdiction and are potential campaign contributors may have helped a teeny bit...
Blame Gnome for that one - the KDE developers were livid about DBUS - not just how it worked but how it was implemented. The old KDE protocol (I've forgotten the name now) was far more mature and stable and had plugged into HAL beautifully.
Gnome invented DBUS - which is fine, but then made it into a freedesktop standard which it should never have been.
With KDE4 then KDE was now in the difficult position of using an IPC technology (which is a crucial part of hardware abstraction as well) which was unique to them, while there was a standard being pushed - so gnome apps on KDE couldn't handle it's protocol, and vice versa. They ended up going to DBUS despite most of them despising how limited it was simply because they felt sticking to the promoted standard was important.
This was one of the reasons early KDE4 releases were so feature-poor, they had to reimplement everything that wasn't using DBUS from scratch using a protocol with much less power. That happened purely because Gnome pushed DBUS, and freedesktop accepted DBUS for really only one reason: it was written in C rather than C++.
Now on what basis a non-object-oriented language is BETTER for writing a protocol/library for desktop application IPC than an object-oriented one I will never understand...
In other news: Strippers complaining because men stare at their nipples and bangkok Hookers are complaining that their customers just want to have sex with them all the time.
>Anyone who works as a booth babe and doesn't like being stared at, probably should find another line of work. Kinda goes with the territory (particularly with the stuff they wear often).
While the job is obviously perfect for those woman (and that's their right) who love being stared at and feel empowered by their ability to make men drool.
True, though the summary is wrong. Yeah, I know I RTFA'd I must be new here, but the actual post said "whoever wrote it please comply with the GPL", It never actually said it was the US or any other Government.
>It isn't that one is trying to skirt it. One is all for the software item being distributed, as long as it's being paid for. That is what makes freedoms 2 & 3 of the GNU very unsuitable for business - if I'm a software vendor and lose 90% of customers, who might have otherwise paid for it, it wouldn't be long before I go out of business.
If you can't figure out a way to make money without exploiting people, then you deserve to go out of business. It's not the FSF's responsibility to give you a market or a business model. Their job is to make sure users know what rights they can demand. Lucky for you the lawmakers haven't listened to them... yet.
>No. I just want clearly drawn lines between what is considered a modification that must be shared back, what is considered licensed use and what I have a right to control in a product that includes GPL controlled programs and libraries along with programs and content that I wrote. It takes a programmer and two lawyers just to figure out what the hell GPL3 means.
Anything that changes the code that was there is a modification and must be shared. This part of GPL didn't even CHANGE between 2 and 3. What was added was only 2 things: 1) Some patent rules, - that simply cover exactly what was there but for patents 2) A restriction that prevents you from stopping users who want to run modified versions of the software through hardware hacks (TiVo style). These did not change or expand ANYTHING in the "share a modification" clauses, they are exactly as they always were.
>No, I declared that MOST programmers can't because the markets they would have to serve to do that comprise only a small portion of the much wider market for software.
But if all software was GPL then the market would for GPL related work would be just as big as the entire software market today (GPL+everything else).
> I'm sure you think you're the only person with your skills. That goes well with the egotistical horn-blowing.
Well, considering that I'm in the smallest and most elite (in the real meaning of the word) programming group in my company, I clearly have some rare skills. That said- as it stands there are too many programmers out there - most of them are horribly bad. That isn't good for anybody, all it does is give an oversupply in the market and make everybody else earn less. Anything that reduced the programmer market to people who actually loved to program would only benefit programmers... oh and customers too.
>This is not about my motivation or ethics. It is about whether the GPL is restrictive to the point that it prevents or should prevent the use of GPL'd software in commercial endeavors.
Actually it is. The primary motivation for the existence of the GPL is ethical. See commercial consideration is secondary - it doesn't MATTER to those of us who use it. We don't CARE whether it's the most PROFITABLE license, only that it's the most ETHICAL license. First you draw the ethical line, then you figure out a businessmodel. Only a greedy, unethical bastard could think it's EVER acceptable to even ASK the questions in the other order. Congratulations, I see a great career on wall street for you.
>I think it is and, perversely, you're arguing with me about my morals even though you seem to think it is too because you consider me to be intending to do something immoral if I want to have FOSS included as components in a product that I otherwise develop and want to then control the distribution of any portion of the total package that contains the code that I developed.
If you want that control, which you should not ethically ever have, right now the system lets you have it. All you have to do is write your OWN damn code. If you want o use MY code, you use it under MY terms. I will never accept that a customer out there could be using code I wrote, and not have all the freedoms I intended him to have. The GPL lets me share my work with those who share my ethics, and deny it to those who do not share those ethics and who would use it in ways I consider harmful to my end-users.
As far as I'm concerned a legal mandate for the GPL on software wouldn't even count as "market interference" - it would just be a consumer rights law. Demanding that the source code be shipped with software is no more wrong than demanding that a candy bar list the ingredients on the side. Allowing a user to to modify it is no more wrong than letting him melt the chocolate he bought, mix it with whipped cream and use it as a cake decoration. Allowing him to share it, is no more wrong than letting him tell his neighbour how he made his chocolate icing. None of it is market interference - they are just basic human rights, basic freedom of speech and consumer-rights which the current system does not recognize. I believe in those rights, so I do my work in ways that protect them, even if the law hadn't caught up to the need for them yet. That you wish to exploit this gap in the law for profit I cannot prevent, but at the very least I can prevent you from using MY code to do it with. The law is supposed to protect people's rights, not guarantee anybody's profits. Finding a viable business model is YOUR responsibility, not the governments. Their job is to protect your CUSTOMERS not YOU.
While there is some truth to that, the counterpoint is that self-taught people (especially in high-tech fields) tend to be BETTER educated and better at their jobs than university educated people. Somebody who learns to do something because they have a passion for what they are learning is simply going to be more motivated and more skilful in the end than somebody who did it because it promised a good return on their study-investment.
Neither of these are hard-and-fast-rules however, and an interesting counterpoint is that perhaps the greatest techs of all ARE in fact university educated - but not in tech. Philosophy students especially those who did logic and critical thinking courses tend to become absolutely brilliant programmers if that's where they go later on - outperforming both the CS students and the self taught HS-only guys.
I suspect this trend is true in many fields, though perhaps less strongly. One of the things about programming that is rather unique is that it requires a degree of understanding of many other subjects to do well. You cannot write a program for any field without at least understanding the needs of that field - so multi-skilled programmers are simply better than highly specialised ones.
>The key word is few. Your example is a particular case of one of the ways I outlined to make some money out of a license like GPL.
No the keyword in "quite a few" is most certainly not "few", it's a phrase that means "a lot".
>. The sparseness of your market illustrates the reason why GPL isn't suitable for most programmers who want to earn money selling the product of their work.
You are reading what you want to read. My market was most certainly not sparse, when I said few there I was talking relative to the total number of users. If you measure the number of potential customers it's a different story. The truth is I had to turn some customers away because I simply couldn't service all of the contracts I was offered (there are, after all, only so many hours in a month and I can't sell the same hour to two different companies). I could actually afford to be picky about which customers' features I wanted to develop.
Now was mine a multi-billion dollar business ? Nope, but why should THAT matter ? I made very good money, way more than I could earn as a salary at the time which is really good for a one-man business. You declared that programmers cannot make a living out of the GPL - I decisively proved you wrong, so now you choose to argue matters of degree: "oh SOME programmers can make a living that way..."
The problem is you spoke about programmers earning a living but we both know that isn't what you actually meant - which is why my post bothered you. What you actually meant is: "I personally am too greedy to be happy with the money I can make ethically so I will defend a system that denies my customers their basic freedoms in order to let me exploit them for more money." Hey, don't feel too bad- every corporation on earth agrees with you and will do the exact same thing to the maximum extent they can get away with it. But personally I have a conscience and I refuse to do business outside of what I consider fair and ethical practise. Now of course, that means I'll make less money than the people who don't do honest, fair and ethical business - but I do not consider that an argument in favour of unethical business. That really is the essence of your argument: "Charging protection money is much more profitable than selling legitimate insurance."
>Work for a company that sells software. Form my own company to sell software. >Work for a company that sells software. Form my own company to sell software. >In the latter two cases, you need to use copyright to control the distribution of the software. If you don't control the distribution, the price you can get for the software is zero or damn near that and your kids are going to starve.
Wrong. There are quite a few successful companies that do free software, and have been for decades. I am myself an example of the contrary. For quite some time I ran my consultancy company that developed completely free software (at the time the most popular free software in it's market) - there was a lot of people who used it for free in their small businesses.
But a few people wanted additional features - not least one company who wanted to start a franchise of the type of small businesses my software was aimed at. These people were my bread and butter. While they COULD hire anybody to add the features they wanted -the truth is that I knew the code better than anybody and I could do it faster and cheaper than any outsider. So they came to me - I charged an hourly rate for the task of developing the feature they wanted. I travelled around the world sometimes to work for customer's onsite and I earned a very nice income, while having lots of free time in between and all done under the GPL.
There were one or two customers who insisted they didn't want their custom features made available to the rest of the community, that they felt it would give them a competitive edge in their neighbourhood. For those customers I was willing to develop their requested feature under a closed private license. Since this didn't harm anybody (the only people actually restricted had the source anyway) - when that happened however, I charged tripple my usual rate. The reason of course was simple: I could never again add that feature to the main program, the only way to legally do so was for a volunteer contributor to write the same feature without any help from me (effectively a clean-room reimplementation) - for denying the feature to other users, I charged tripple rates. It happened very rarely anyway, most customers recognized that they benefit from features other customers had paid for and were happy to let those customers benefit from the ones they paid for in turn.
Sorry - but your argument is just plain wrong. I did ultimately close the business but that wasn't because the model wasn't working, it was simply that technology changed and the kind of small businesses I sold to were no longer viable in the market - so my customer base was shrinking. I didn't at that stage feel up to creating something new and finding a new market to target - it was easier just to get a normal job. But guess what the company I work for now does to make it's money ?
Yep, same thing, only difference is, I'm not the one who has to stress when a customer takes 3 months to pay. I can spend my time doing what I'm good at - which is writing code.
You're right about that, but I was responding particularly to the GP - who was apparently under the impression that THIS experiment had sent a signal out and was declared a failure for not receiving a reply.
>To put it another way, in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, every other form of life that has every existed or still exists hasn't had radio. None of them had it.
That's an entirely unproven assumption. In fact many evolutionary biologists believe it's quite arrogant to assume we're the first or last technologically advanced species on the planet. 97% of all species that ever existed is extinct. We have no proof that none of them achieved technological civilizations - we don't have any proof that they did but that's beside the point. If we get hit by a giant rock from space (like most other lifeforms on this planet did sooner or later) tomorrow - how much evidence of our existence will still be around in 10 million years ? A few slow-wearing roads, the odd bit of glass maybe ? How about a billion years ? Enough to be recognizable ?
It could well be that the first time anybody found out we ever existed is when they too visit the moon where the lack of erosion may let them find artefacts that survived there.
And what if a few other species made it ALMOST as far as we did before getting hit ? If we'd been hit just one century ago - there would be practically nothing to show we were ever hear even a million years later. Most of what we built that could survive natural destructive forces for more than that was only built in the last century. It was also only in the last century that we discovered radio. Hell as we speak the effect of erosion is starting to be a problem on some of our earliest surviving structures like the pyramids, and those are just a few thousand years old... in a few million years ? There won't be anything there that looks like a pyramid.
More-over there may not be anything there that looks like Egypt. In Dinosaurean times the Karoo desert was a freaking marshland. Since then the continents split -but they kept moving, in another few million a few of them are going to crash into each other on the opposite side of the world they started from... a new supercontinent constructed - can you imagine the impact of something like that on things as fragile as our little buildings and computer parts ?
Hell a dinosaurean race, or even a race from earlier than them may have been more technologically advanced than us - and left not a shred of evidence for us to find. We certainly have no proof either way, all we have are means of trying to estimate odds. The earth had 4.5 billion years, and life for the biggest chunk of that - and we've been here a fraction of a second. That's a LOT of fractions of a second, we really shouldn't just assume that our fraction was so damn special.
From this comes our general assumption that any species we do detect would be more advanced than us. Because we just discovered radio the other day - and we'd not even hear anybody for decades or even centuries after they did so.
>Most of it is empty. On average, we don't actually exist at all. Sigh.
That's derived from a Douglas Adams joke which went as follows: there are an infinite number of planets in the universe since there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. Not all of them have life. x/0 = infinity, therefore x/infinite =0 therefore the average number of planets with life = 0.
It's quite funny but the mathematics is actually wrong. Even if we assume the physics were right (the universe probably isn't REALLY infinite, and doesn't hold an infinite amount of planets) the mathematics are still wrong because infinity is not a number, it's a number system with lots of different values. Basicaly x/0 is infinite. y/0 is infinite but this does not mean that x/0 = y/0. Indeed it wouldn't make sense because that would simply to x = y and basically it would mean all numbers are equal to all other numbers... Both are infinite, but they are not the same infinite (this is not that difficult - there are an infinite number of real numbers, there are an infinite number if integers too - but there are way more real numbers than integers, indeed we know the relationship. If we call the number of integers umpty, then the number of real numbers is umpty^umpty).
So Adam's last conclusion is just plain wrong: x/infinity does not equal zero. It equals something very close to 0, but it doesn't actually equal 0 (at least not for all values of x).
So on average, we do in fact exist- it's just a very small average.
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Right... because government assassinations happen so often they don't even make the news... oh wait, there's a huge debate happening just about giving the elected leader of the people the power to order the assassinations of accused war criminals !
More-over the vast majority of times when people DO go into a blind killing rage they do so with LEGAL guns and America has a disproportionately high number of such incidents...
In fact, the vast majority of gundeaths are accidental or suicides and most of them are caused by legal guns. The amount actually used for crimes by criminals is relatively minor. Only for that tiny minority is there a majority use of illegal weapons.
So I guess, if both groups did the maths - then the gun-nuts (and you) suck at doing maths.
That said- your conclusion is simply false. It's also true that a massively disproportionate percentage of American gun law supporters are white, among other races gun-control is much more highly supported.
The real group of people wanting to own lots of guns are the racists assholes who are afraid of everybody that doesn't look like them.
This is a perfectly understandable thing too - goes back to our early evolution. As apes, you could identify threats by visual cues. A lion-shaped thing meant "danger will robinson" - and lead to a fight or flight response. ... er... stupid, especially as the number of such incidents happening at all (by anybody to anybody) has been going down world wide for a century and is now one of the least likely ways to die.
But we live in a different world now, you can NOT identify threats by visual cues anymore. 9/10 violent crimes are committed by somebody you know and trust. So worrying about some black guy with a gun holding you up is
The ones that still do happen, are almost all done by your neighbour, or your ex-boyfriend - not by some black guy from another part of town - or most likely of all - yourself. Gun suicides make up over 70% of all gun-related deaths world-wide (not sure how it looks specifically in the USA - but I seem to recall reading ones that it's higher than the global average)
So they don't trust their fellow citizens at all - if they did they would realize that their fellow citizens aren't a risk - and they don't NEED guns to protect themselves from their fellow citizens(what the hell do you think a criminal is if not a fellow citizen ?) they would be better off preventing the few who are likely to go postal from getting to go postal with a gun in their hands, the even tinier percentage who engage in violent crime for a living would actually be REDUCED if they stopped robbing houses to steal guns...
Yeah, owning a gun makes it MORE likely you'll be robbed because a gun is a very valuable thing to steal.
>The term you're looking for is observation bias. You don't read about the massacres that didn't happen because the bad guy got shot at.
That's idiotic. Every time somebody in America shoots a criminal in the face the guy is all over the news and hailed as a hero citizen !
What we've never seen is a case where a maniac starts shooting at a crowd and ANY of the people in that crowd starts shooting back and kills him after he only hit one or two people.
That kind of story would support your theory... unless your heroes are somehow prescient and actually shooting the bad guys BEFORE they commit the crime. I'm sure I trust the judgement of every testosterone filled idiot who has a hunch that I look like I MAY be planning to start shooting in the crowd...
You know what's funny about your example. Breivik achieved no more success than most crowd-shooters in the USA do. Colombine, the Washington Sniper, the Virginia Tech shooter... all of these guys did very much the same thing.
You know what's odd though ? They did this in America where everybody has a legal right to a gun... and do you know how many of them were shot by one of those armed citizens ? Not ONE.
Not a single bloody one of them - ever. Not once has a crowd-shooting postal-goer ever been taken out because somebody in the crowd could shoot back - it's never happened. So it seems that what happened in Norway would have happened (most likely) in exactly the same way even if everybody there were allowed to own guns.
Now here's the really strange thing. Breivik made international news because it was such a big thing, nothing like that had happened in Norway before. In America you have a shooting like that... what once a year, maybe once every two years on average ?
So it seems that having a lot of citizens with guns did nothing to reduce the harm done by the maniac who goes postal, all it did was to make sure that all the postal maniacs have got nice big guns. The reason Breivik was so unusual is because all the other people who ever went postal in Norway didn't HAVE a gun, and the harm they could do was therefore rather severely limited.
Hate to break it to you - but if anything, your own damn example is an argument AGAINST gun ownership.
>At this point it was nothing to do with ID, just a general gun scare.
As an outsider looking in on an America's gun-law debates... I've come to the conclusion that there are two types of people in America.
1) A large group of people who are deathly afraid of "criminals" and so feel that they couldn't possibly protect themselves unless they carry more firepower than Wile E. Coyote. To quote an awesome movie: a pussy can become a tough guy, if he has a gun in his hand.
Somehow these people have all managed to remain completely unaware that crime reporting may be going up but actual crime rates have been going down consistently for over a century and more people die from suicide than violent crime in America. They all cite stuff like the second ammendment and the revolution but pretty much none of them actually give a damn about that stuff- they sure as hell aren't planning to ever revolt against Washington, they just like having an excuse to keep their tough-guy-makers.
2) Another large group of people who have figured out that a large group of pussies with guns in their hands are a much, much scarier thing than a tiny minority of people who engage in a life of violent crime.
Both groups are trying to protect themselves and their families. But only one of them have managed to do an accurate risk-assessment, worked out who is most likely to harm them and tried to make an effort to reduce that risk.
In case you're wondering: it's the gun-grabbers who did the maths.
>kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
About a dozen, several award winners. I've had projects included in the cover CD's of major Linux Magazines (more than once).
And your point is er... bullshit. The problem you cite only exists for people who don't play by the rules. If your code is free software you will never have to support any distribution but your own. You know why ? Because if it's good and users want it then other distributions will build and include it FOR you.
The problem here only exists for proprietory software that won't ALLOW those distributions to build for them.
Even then the distributions will make an effort if they are allowed. If you don't give them the code they will try their best to provide a working package - and bear the support burden on your behalf - if you at LEAST allow redistribution.
If you don't allow redistribution or support, then guess what- the reason Linux is hard to support is because you refuse to do things the linux way. No linux developer tries to support multiple distributions, we build on our favourite, and let the other distributions who want to include the stuff package it for us.
Even for the few others, there are options - Icculus has done great work porting and maintaining cross-distro installers for many games on Linux - all we need is for the companies to LET us.
We don't even need them to PROVIDE Linux versions, just ALLOW us and we'll do the work to support linux FOR them. The community has proven that over and over with every company who did allow them.
The difficulty of gaming on Linux is a direct result of the publishers ultra-copyright-and-drm model.
Even Blizzard with their proprietory programs which do at least allow redistribution (and relies on web-authentication to ensure compliance) has their games running very well on Linux and they don't even have ports. People actually go out of their way to provide patches for wine to support blizzard games (Diablo 3 worked on release day !)
Basically - if a game doesn't work on Linux, it's because the publishers shot themselves in the foot, they don't have to DO anything, just ALLOW the community and we'll do all the work FOR them - and even if it's only 1% extra sales, an increase of 1% in sales at ZERO cost, is a bloody huge margin.
Hey, I wasn't critisizing the bill, just wondering where the money is. Says something that I'm basically incapable of seeing a politician do anything (good or bad) without wondering where the money is.
>Who then pays for the insurance? Those who want to borrow money today in exchange of returning more money tomorrow. Without them banks would close their doors.
Wrong. In every single respect. Moneylending predates banking and banking developed independently of moneylending - the two only merged (in historical terms) quite recently. Moneylending is a way to fund the operation of banks but it's certainly not the only way and it's definitely not a requirement of the concept of banking. Banking isn't even about MONEY per se.
Banking is simply the provision of a secure storage service for other people's property - usually money, but most banks also offer things like safety-deposit boxes to protect other kinds of property.
Until quite recently in fact (as in - within my lifetime) in many countries it wasn't even LEGAL to call yourself a bank if you didn't have a deposit/secure-storage service - lending companies had to go by more descriptive names such as "bond associations".
There are many different funding models for banks that can and have been used. The first real banks were established by the Knights Templar to protect the money of pilgrims - they didn't do any lending, they just did it as religious charity. More recent models have included mutualisms and even non-profit mutualisms (sometimes such mutualisms would use the deposited money to give loans INTEREST FREE).
These are all valid forms of banking - lending is something else, it's only one model that combines them. In that model, of course, that source of income is how insurance is paid.
Which as Chomsky has also pointed out, perfectly fits your own legal definition of "an act of terrorism".
In fact, it seems that the unwritten part of the law reads:" Unless it's us doing it to somebody else."
Apparently it's only terrorism if somebody does to us what we do to everybody else.
One of my favorite Chomsky papers that was... (I'm paraphrasing though - not quoting a long and well argued article).
My personal statement would be: that's the thinking of a bully, and countries ought to behave a little more maturely than pubescent boys.
I'm guessing the fact that all those silicon valley megatech companies that opposed SOPA fall in his jurisdiction and are potential campaign contributors may have helped a teeny bit...
Blame Gnome for that one - the KDE developers were livid about DBUS - not just how it worked but how it was implemented.
The old KDE protocol (I've forgotten the name now) was far more mature and stable and had plugged into HAL beautifully.
Gnome invented DBUS - which is fine, but then made it into a freedesktop standard which it should never have been.
With KDE4 then KDE was now in the difficult position of using an IPC technology (which is a crucial part of hardware abstraction as well) which was unique to them, while there was a standard being pushed - so gnome apps on KDE couldn't handle it's protocol, and vice versa. They ended up going to DBUS despite most of them despising how limited it was simply because they felt sticking to the promoted standard was important.
This was one of the reasons early KDE4 releases were so feature-poor, they had to reimplement everything that wasn't using DBUS from scratch using a protocol with much less power.
That happened purely because Gnome pushed DBUS, and freedesktop accepted DBUS for really only one reason: it was written in C rather than C++.
Now on what basis a non-object-oriented language is BETTER for writing a protocol/library for desktop application IPC than an object-oriented one I will never understand...
In other news: Strippers complaining because men stare at their nipples and bangkok Hookers are complaining that their customers just want to have sex with them all the time.
>Anyone who works as a booth babe and doesn't like being stared at, probably should find another line of work. Kinda goes with the territory (particularly with the stuff they wear often).
While the job is obviously perfect for those woman (and that's their right) who love being stared at and feel empowered by their ability to make men drool.
True, though the summary is wrong. Yeah, I know I RTFA'd I must be new here, but the actual post said "whoever wrote it please comply with the GPL",
It never actually said it was the US or any other Government.
That claim was made on slashdot alone.
>It isn't that one is trying to skirt it. One is all for the software item being distributed, as long as it's being paid for. That is what makes freedoms 2 & 3 of the GNU very unsuitable for business - if I'm a software vendor and lose 90% of customers, who might have otherwise paid for it, it wouldn't be long before I go out of business.
If you can't figure out a way to make money without exploiting people, then you deserve to go out of business. It's not the FSF's responsibility to give you a market or a business model. Their job is to make sure users know what rights they can demand. Lucky for you the lawmakers haven't listened to them... yet.
>No. I just want clearly drawn lines between what is considered a modification that must be shared back, what is considered licensed use and what I have a right to control in a product that includes GPL controlled programs and libraries along with programs and content that I wrote. It takes a programmer and two lawyers just to figure out what the hell GPL3 means.
Anything that changes the code that was there is a modification and must be shared.
This part of GPL didn't even CHANGE between 2 and 3. What was added was only 2 things:
1) Some patent rules, - that simply cover exactly what was there but for patents
2) A restriction that prevents you from stopping users who want to run modified versions of the software through hardware hacks (TiVo style).
These did not change or expand ANYTHING in the "share a modification" clauses, they are exactly as they always were.
>No, I declared that MOST programmers can't because the markets they would have to serve to do that comprise only a small portion of the much wider market for software.
But if all software was GPL then the market would for GPL related work would be just as big as the entire software market today (GPL+everything else).
> I'm sure you think you're the only person with your skills. That goes well with the egotistical horn-blowing.
Well, considering that I'm in the smallest and most elite (in the real meaning of the word) programming group in my company, I clearly have some rare skills. That said- as it stands there are too many programmers out there - most of them are horribly bad. That isn't good for anybody, all it does is give an oversupply in the market and make everybody else earn less. Anything that reduced the programmer market to people who actually loved to program would only benefit programmers ... oh and customers too.
>This is not about my motivation or ethics. It is about whether the GPL is restrictive to the point that it prevents or should prevent the use of GPL'd software in commercial endeavors.
Actually it is. The primary motivation for the existence of the GPL is ethical. See commercial consideration is secondary - it doesn't MATTER to those of us who use it. We don't CARE whether it's the most PROFITABLE license, only that it's the most ETHICAL license. First you draw the ethical line, then you figure out a businessmodel. Only a greedy, unethical bastard could think it's EVER acceptable to even ASK the questions in the other order. Congratulations, I see a great career on wall street for you.
>I think it is and, perversely, you're arguing with me about my morals even though you seem to think it is too because you consider me to be intending to do something immoral if I want to have FOSS included as components in a product that I otherwise develop and want to then control the distribution of any portion of the total package that contains the code that I developed.
If you want that control, which you should not ethically ever have, right now the system lets you have it. All you have to do is write your OWN damn code. If you want o use MY code, you use it under MY terms. I will never accept that a customer out there could be using code I wrote, and not have all the freedoms I intended him to have.
The GPL lets me share my work with those who share my ethics, and deny it to those who do not share those ethics and who would use it in ways I consider harmful to my end-users.
As far as I'm concerned a legal mandate for the GPL on software wouldn't even count as "market interference" - it would just be a consumer rights law. Demanding that the source code be shipped with software is no more wrong than demanding that a candy bar list the ingredients on the side. Allowing a user to to modify it is no more wrong than letting him melt the chocolate he bought, mix it with whipped cream and use it as a cake decoration. Allowing him to share it, is no more wrong than letting him tell his neighbour how he made his chocolate icing.
None of it is market interference - they are just basic human rights, basic freedom of speech and consumer-rights which the current system does not recognize.
I believe in those rights, so I do my work in ways that protect them, even if the law hadn't caught up to the need for them yet. That you wish to exploit this gap in the law for profit I cannot prevent, but at the very least I can prevent you from using MY code to do it with.
The law is supposed to protect people's rights, not guarantee anybody's profits. Finding a viable business model is YOUR responsibility, not the governments. Their job is to protect your CUSTOMERS not YOU.
While there is some truth to that, the counterpoint is that self-taught people (especially in high-tech fields) tend to be BETTER educated and better at their jobs than university educated people.
Somebody who learns to do something because they have a passion for what they are learning is simply going to be more motivated and more skilful in the end than somebody who did it because it promised a good return on their study-investment.
Neither of these are hard-and-fast-rules however, and an interesting counterpoint is that perhaps the greatest techs of all ARE in fact university educated - but not in tech. Philosophy students especially those who did logic and critical thinking courses tend to become absolutely brilliant programmers if that's where they go later on - outperforming both the CS students and the self taught HS-only guys.
I suspect this trend is true in many fields, though perhaps less strongly. One of the things about programming that is rather unique is that it requires a degree of understanding of many other subjects to do well. You cannot write a program for any field without at least understanding the needs of that field - so multi-skilled programmers are simply better than highly specialised ones.
>The key word is few. Your example is a particular case of one of the ways I outlined to make some money out of a license like GPL.
No the keyword in "quite a few" is most certainly not "few", it's a phrase that means "a lot".
>. The sparseness of your market illustrates the reason why GPL isn't suitable for most programmers who want to earn money selling the product of their work.
You are reading what you want to read. My market was most certainly not sparse, when I said few there I was talking relative to the total number of users. If you measure the number of potential customers it's a different story. The truth is I had to turn some customers away because I simply couldn't service all of the contracts I was offered (there are, after all, only so many hours in a month and I can't sell the same hour to two different companies). I could actually afford to be picky about which customers' features I wanted to develop.
Now was mine a multi-billion dollar business ? Nope, but why should THAT matter ? I made very good money, way more than I could earn as a salary at the time which is really good for a one-man business. You declared that programmers cannot make a living out of the GPL - I decisively proved you wrong, so now you choose to argue matters of degree: "oh SOME programmers can make a living that way..."
The problem is you spoke about programmers earning a living but we both know that isn't what you actually meant - which is why my post bothered you. What you actually meant is: "I personally am too greedy to be happy with the money I can make ethically so I will defend a system that denies my customers their basic freedoms in order to let me exploit them for more money."
Hey, don't feel too bad- every corporation on earth agrees with you and will do the exact same thing to the maximum extent they can get away with it. But personally I have a conscience and I refuse to do business outside of what I consider fair and ethical practise. Now of course, that means I'll make less money than the people who don't do honest, fair and ethical business - but I do not consider that an argument in favour of unethical business.
That really is the essence of your argument: "Charging protection money is much more profitable than selling legitimate insurance."
>Work for a company that sells software.
Form my own company to sell software.
>Work for a company that sells software.
Form my own company to sell software.
>In the latter two cases, you need to use copyright to control the distribution of the software. If you don't control the distribution, the price you can get for the software is zero or damn near that and your kids are going to starve.
Wrong. There are quite a few successful companies that do free software, and have been for decades. I am myself an example of the contrary. For quite some time I ran my consultancy company that developed completely free software (at the time the most popular free software in it's market) - there was a lot of people who used it for free in their small businesses.
But a few people wanted additional features - not least one company who wanted to start a franchise of the type of small businesses my software was aimed at. These people were my bread and butter. While they COULD hire anybody to add the features they wanted -the truth is that I knew the code better than anybody and I could do it faster and cheaper than any outsider.
So they came to me - I charged an hourly rate for the task of developing the feature they wanted. I travelled around the world sometimes to work for customer's onsite and I earned a very nice income, while having lots of free time in between and all done under the GPL.
There were one or two customers who insisted they didn't want their custom features made available to the rest of the community, that they felt it would give them a competitive edge in their neighbourhood. For those customers I was willing to develop their requested feature under a closed private license. Since this didn't harm anybody (the only people actually restricted had the source anyway) - when that happened however, I charged tripple my usual rate.
The reason of course was simple: I could never again add that feature to the main program, the only way to legally do so was for a volunteer contributor to write the same feature without any help from me (effectively a clean-room reimplementation) - for denying the feature to other users, I charged tripple rates. It happened very rarely anyway, most customers recognized that they benefit from features other customers had paid for and were happy to let those customers benefit from the ones they paid for in turn.
Sorry - but your argument is just plain wrong. I did ultimately close the business but that wasn't because the model wasn't working, it was simply that technology changed and the kind of small businesses I sold to were no longer viable in the market - so my customer base was shrinking. I didn't at that stage feel up to creating something new and finding a new market to target - it was easier just to get a normal job. But guess what the company I work for now does to make it's money ?
Yep, same thing, only difference is, I'm not the one who has to stress when a customer takes 3 months to pay. I can spend my time doing what I'm good at - which is writing code.
>that is certainly a lot better than what you replied to.
Being better than the guy I replied to is not my greatest achievement... that's basically being a tastier turd...
You're right about that, but I was responding particularly to the GP - who was apparently under the impression that THIS experiment had sent a signal out and was declared a failure for not receiving a reply.
>To put it another way, in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, every other form of life that has every existed or still exists hasn't had radio. None of them had it.
That's an entirely unproven assumption. In fact many evolutionary biologists believe it's quite arrogant to assume we're the first or last technologically advanced species on the planet. 97% of all species that ever existed is extinct. We have no proof that none of them achieved technological civilizations - we don't have any proof that they did but that's beside the point.
If we get hit by a giant rock from space (like most other lifeforms on this planet did sooner or later) tomorrow - how much evidence of our existence will still be around in 10 million years ? A few slow-wearing roads, the odd bit of glass maybe ? How about a billion years ? Enough to be recognizable ?
It could well be that the first time anybody found out we ever existed is when they too visit the moon where the lack of erosion may let them find artefacts that survived there.
And what if a few other species made it ALMOST as far as we did before getting hit ? If we'd been hit just one century ago - there would be practically nothing to show we were ever hear even a million years later. Most of what we built that could survive natural destructive forces for more than that was only built in the last century. It was also only in the last century that we discovered radio. Hell as we speak the effect of erosion is starting to be a problem on some of our earliest surviving structures like the pyramids, and those are just a few thousand years old... in a few million years ? There won't be anything there that looks like a pyramid.
More-over there may not be anything there that looks like Egypt. In Dinosaurean times the Karoo desert was a freaking marshland. Since then the continents split -but they kept moving, in another few million a few of them are going to crash into each other on the opposite side of the world they started from... a new supercontinent constructed - can you imagine the impact of something like that on things as fragile as our little buildings and computer parts ?
Hell a dinosaurean race, or even a race from earlier than them may have been more technologically advanced than us - and left not a shred of evidence for us to find. We certainly have no proof either way, all we have are means of trying to estimate odds. The earth had 4.5 billion years, and life for the biggest chunk of that - and we've been here a fraction of a second. That's a LOT of fractions of a second, we really shouldn't just assume that our fraction was so damn special.
From this comes our general assumption that any species we do detect would be more advanced than us. Because we just discovered radio the other day - and we'd not even hear anybody for decades or even centuries after they did so.
>Most of it is empty. On average, we don't actually exist at all. Sigh.
That's derived from a Douglas Adams joke which went as follows: there are an infinite number of planets in the universe since there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. Not all of them have life. x/0 = infinity, therefore x/infinite =0 therefore the average number of planets with life = 0.
It's quite funny but the mathematics is actually wrong. Even if we assume the physics were right (the universe probably isn't REALLY infinite, and doesn't hold an infinite amount of planets) the mathematics are still wrong because infinity is not a number, it's a number system with lots of different values.
Basicaly x/0 is infinite. y/0 is infinite but this does not mean that x/0 = y/0. Indeed it wouldn't make sense because that would simply to x = y and basically it would mean all numbers are equal to all other numbers...
Both are infinite, but they are not the same infinite (this is not that difficult - there are an infinite number of real numbers, there are an infinite number if integers too - but there are way more real numbers than integers, indeed we know the relationship. If we call the number of integers umpty, then the number of real numbers is umpty^umpty).
So Adam's last conclusion is just plain wrong: x/infinity does not equal zero. It equals something very close to 0, but it doesn't actually equal 0 (at least not for all values of x).
So on average, we do in fact exist- it's just a very small average.
More like an intergalactic version of "Should I call her, or wait for her to call me" ?
Unrelated event. That message wasn't sent to this star as part of this search. This was a listen-only exercise.