but I am sure, all countries, like Germany, have it in their constitution, that church and state are separate.
The Church of England is headed by the monach, some bishops sit in the upper house of parliament by right. The Church of Scotland is slightly more distant from the state, but still connected.
The close links between church and state in the UK probably explains the proliferation of small denominations in the past and the weakness of religion now. People who had a problem with the state ended up leaving the state church, and the state church had to remain so bland, to contain pretty much any flavour of western christianity, that it basicly weaned the population off religious dogma.
Cultural differences particularly the American emphisis on individuality and self-sufficency.
It does not seem likely that an emphasis on individuality would result in a mass movement.
It's not as if there weren't politically active religious movements in, for example, the UK (eg the methodists). However, they thrived in the 18th and 19th centuries, not the 20th and 21st.
"This Sceptred Isle" - despite the billing, it's a history of England
Of course the title makes that clear. The people who put descriptions of programmes in listings or on web pages have the same special training in bollocks production as the people who write blurbs for books.
Why is it that prejudice against Christians is the last remaining acceptable prejudice?
It is not prejudice to dislike someone because of their beliefs and attitudes.
If it were, then some people's dislike of christians would not be the last acceptable prejudice, since there are many other such `prejudices'. Personally, I dislike people whose beliefs and attitudes might be described as neo-nazi.
As for tolerance, by definition tolerance implies that you dislike something, so you can't argue from the fcat that some people dislike christians to conclude they are intolerant of christians.
Tolerance doesn't mean they won't laugh at you, it just means that they will let you hang around to be laughed at.
[Literalists] are baffled and confused by current society moving too fast for them; not just the pace, but also the pace of change.
This still leaves the problem of why the USA has been the only (supposedly:-)) developed country where this has happened. There must be some factor producing this particular symptom of future shock.
I don't think Japan, which has had at least as big a shake up as the US, has seen the rise of a large religiously motivated subculture. In Europe the rapid changes over the past couple of centuries have undermined religiosity in the mass of people, rather than boosting it.
Fighting Talk [...] so popular, it's uniquely available as an MP3
Pedant mode on:
Actually, it's not unique, nor is it down to popularity. The main problem with having things available for download, as opposed to replay, is the performing rights.
The BBC have been trialing MP3 download for some programs, picked for easy rights issues. I think the first was In Our Time, which is just some people talking about an issue which is usually complex enough to make re-listening worthwhile, all except Melvyn Bragg are authors or accademics and so not uptight about broadcast rights (its free advertising to them), and Bragg was enthusiastic about the project (probably because he likes himself so much he thinks we should all hear him more often, even if he doesn't get more money for it).
Fighting Talk has some of the same advantages (pundits, not performers), though I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to keep some has-beens and journoes wibbling on about this week's trivia about kids games.
If the bible is a collection of stories with allegory/metaphor can I know why people need it in the first place, since modern, educated people can be taught things without making up stories and hiding meaning in them ?
The same reason that scientists haven't filtered all those thought experiments out of introductory descriptions of relativity and quantum mechanics.
It is often useful to have illustrations for the idea you are trying to get across, and there is not always a concrete example to had which illustrates the issue at hand without so much extra complexity the issue is burried.
Professional software rarely gives a price publicly.
Of course, the definition of `professional' here is `to be bought by PHBs'. People spending money which isn't their's fundamentally don't care what the price is.
A similar case is companies who don't provide any worthwhile description of what the product does. This is for the case where the person buying won't be using the product or be responsible for the end result.
You can tell a product aimed at government or large corporate customers, no specs and no price.
The important word here is `is'. I'm easily old enough to know there were worse things before.
I'm sure there are people whose PHBs have nailed them back there, but nothing anyone sane should be considerring, even for small personal jobs, is going to be worse than CVS.
If nothing else, CVS is free and more or less everywhere and so forms a least common denominator.
I never, ever received that kind of call/SMS on my cell.
I think we were all talking about landlines. I believe (from the TPS web site) that SMS marketing spam is illegal EU-wide (the UK legislation they talk about is an implementation of an EU rule). I do occasionally get what is clearly SMS spam, but I suspect they are tip-toeing around the edge of the rules -- ``it's not sales, it's <WHATEVER>''.
I can't remember any voice spam to my mobile either. I suspect the call cost is just enough higher to make it not worth doing random spam campagns to mobiles (cost just to get hung up on can be significant calling a mobile).
The data protection rules are also, I think, EU-wide. But I don't think they are relevent here. Unlike email spammers, phone spammers don't need big lists of numbers for undirected campagns. They have the phone book, and some of them call at random (using the known structure of the number space) to hit ex-directory numbers (just as some email is sent to common names @some.known.domain).
If I were a politician out for some easy votes, I'd outlaw auto-dialers. That would really bite telemarketing. The relatively few people who would fear for their jobs would, I think, be massively outnumbered by the thankful millions who would call down a blessing on me each time they managed to finish dinner or watching a movie without a call.
You should try turning the time spent on the phone with sales-people into something funny.
Also be sure to fuck with the bastards.
One of my regulars has been a holliday scam run by some very very dim people. I left the phone off the hook and their taped message happily talked on and on. My record with them was nearly 30 minutes. Even if they get tehir calls cheap, I am stopping someone else being botherred on that outgoing line.
Another was a south african lot trying to get me to go to some sales operation, probably timeshare sales, in return for the inevitable free holliday vouchers. They used to regularly call when I was cooking my dinner, so I would happilly talk to them on the speakerphone for ten minutes, giving them bollocks information and swearing blind I'd go to their meeting this month. They even snail-mailed me reminders (they already had my address from somewhere, bastards!). Mildly entertaining if you like play acting, and cost the company money, and I didn't have to be nasty to the poor sods whose best job option is to be call center fodder.
What is a disgrace is that with 71% of users falling for this 4 years ago they haven't audited again for it in the interim.
No point testing the same social hacking hole too often on the same population, unless you can keep the results secret. People who were embarassed first time around will be sensitised to the attack.
Wouldn't suprise me if this is the reason for much of the improvement from 4 years ago. N% of people were caught and embaressed back then and M% have heard the coffee-room teasing of the N%. 71% of the remainder fell for it this time.
70% of people would give away their password for a block of chocolate!
I would, if it was good chocolate. Of course, I'd immediatly replace my account with one which captured information about anyone trying to use it. Maybe I could get a bounty for catching the bastard and buy more chocolate.
Decideing not to open source purely because you don't want to lose some control, which was one of the reasons given, and the one I was addressing at that point, is sulking.
People can't "choose" which one they want if applications install their own modified versions in order to work.
They can choose which application to install, knowing that some of them are incompatible with each other. This gives application developers a motivation to standardise on one version, or at least a set of mutually compatible ones.
The fact is, there is no license which meets these requirements.
Lots of licences meet the requirement of not allowing people to ship modified versions. The only issue is that they are not called `open source', because `open source' has a meaning fundamentally at odds with that requirement. It's like saying there are no CDs which play on LP turntables.
Why do you feel you need to have that particular label on the licence?
Not a single day goes by when I'm not phoned up by some mechanical phonedialer/call centre and asked if I'd like to buy double glazing/dial a premium line/order jam. Arrrgh!!
You seem to be in the UK, so... Are you registered with the TPS? If not do so. It only cuts out the semi-legitimate ones, but that is a supprisingly proportion, got me doen from one every day or so to one every week.
Then make sure you have caller ID and don't answer calls from hidden numbers (unless you work at home and use that line for work, in which case you have to take your chances in working hours. Sigh!). Your friends shouldn't be hiding their identity from you, so this filters out almost all of the rest of the telesales and `surveys'.
[The solution is perhaps to grow up and stop wanting to keep control. Life is to short to worry about that kind of thing.]
An easier solution is to not open the source at all.
Indeed, it's always easier to sulk.
There are valid reasons to prevent forking.
Indeed, but merely wanting to maintain control is not one of them. Control for control's sake is not a reasonable motivation for an adult.
I dont want developers to ship modfied versions of the library with their apps, because multiple modified versions cannot be installed alongside each other.
So people get to choose one. And since
a fork is better for compatability than a reimplementation, they get to choose between versions which are fairly compatable.
XFree86 and X.org are again a good example. What proportion of Linux and BSD desktops were running something other than XFree86 until XFree86 became moribund?
And unfortuantly, there is no open source license which lets you achieve this.
Because your requirement is fundamentally that you do not want to open source this module. There are licences which don't allow redistribution of modified versions, but by that very fact they are not called `open source'.
ISTM you feel you'd get some kind of kudos from the label `open source', but don't want to actually do what earns that kudos (letting go to some small extent of your creation).
OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(filename);
Which would be OK if an OutputStream was usefull for anything much. You'd probably have to wrap that into a PrintWriter, or a BufferedOutputStream or something to get to where you can start work.
And that's just for simple file IO. When you get to anything interesting in the libraries you seem to always end up creating a FooFactoryConfigurationInterfaceTemplateCreatorCla ssDescriptorSetHandle.
Java is quite nice, even if making boxed and unboxed values visible is a bit sick, but the libraries are just painful.
What license can I use that would effecively prevent forking, but at the same time be open source?
By definition of the term `open source' as it is used now, it means that people can get, change and use the source and at least with some restrictions redistribute the resulting changed version.
I.e. `open source' more or less means `you can fork'.
The solution is perhaps to grow up and stop wanting to keep control. Life is to short to worry about that kind of thing.
And, of course, the fact that control is not enforced by the licence doesn't mean that there will be no central control. I think most people would say that Linus has reasonable control of the future of the linux kernel, dispite the fact that anyone could fork it, and many do for special purposes.
Consider XFree86 vs X.org for an instance of why the ability to fork is a good thing. Sometime when you get bored with working on your library, or fall under a bus, someone else with enthusiasm can take over, and if they do a good job, their branch will take over from yours and, assuming it wasn't a bus, you can go off and do whatever you are more interested in doing at that point.
For that matter, it is trivial for someone
to tap your home line
The communication should be encrypted.
More importantly, I don't know of any serious problem with phone lines getting infected with spyware. Computers are really much more vulnerable than the lines between them because they get attacked en-mass by viruses and such.
What the banks should do is create a level of access which allows you to check your balance etc without letting you empty your account or set up a payment mandate or anything like that. Then you could use that name and password to access when away, or over the phone, but only do thing which could cause you real problems when you authenticate yousrself properly from home.
Slashdot Mirror
The Church of England is headed by the monach, some bishops sit in the upper house of parliament by right. The Church of Scotland is slightly more distant from the state, but still connected.
The close links between church and state in the UK probably explains the proliferation of small denominations in the past and the weakness of religion now. People who had a problem with the state ended up leaving the state church, and the state church had to remain so bland, to contain pretty much any flavour of western christianity, that it basicly weaned the population off religious dogma.
But if I record a song and have opinions about where and when it should be played, and you nick a copy and play it, then I have lost my choice.
Copyright is about protecting choices, not the `thing' itself. Effectively it is legal enforcement of good manners.
It does not seem likely that an emphasis on individuality would result in a mass movement.
It's not as if there weren't politically active religious movements in, for example, the UK (eg the methodists). However, they thrived in the 18th and 19th centuries, not the 20th and 21st.
Of course the title makes that clear. The people who put descriptions of programmes in listings or on web pages have the same special training in bollocks production as the people who write blurbs for books.
It is not prejudice to dislike someone because of their beliefs and attitudes.
If it were, then some people's dislike of christians would not be the last acceptable prejudice, since there are many other such `prejudices'. Personally, I dislike people whose beliefs and attitudes might be described as neo-nazi.
As for tolerance, by definition tolerance implies that you dislike something, so you can't argue from the fcat that some people dislike christians to conclude they are intolerant of christians.
Tolerance doesn't mean they won't laugh at you, it just means that they will let you hang around to be laughed at.
This still leaves the problem of why the USA has been the only (supposedly:-)) developed country where this has happened. There must be some factor producing this particular symptom of future shock. I don't think Japan, which has had at least as big a shake up as the US, has seen the rise of a large religiously motivated subculture. In Europe the rapid changes over the past couple of centuries have undermined religiosity in the mass of people, rather than boosting it.
Pedant mode on:
Actually, it's not unique, nor is it down to popularity. The main problem with having things available for download, as opposed to replay, is the performing rights.
The BBC have been trialing MP3 download for some programs, picked for easy rights issues. I think the first was In Our Time, which is just some people talking about an issue which is usually complex enough to make re-listening worthwhile, all except Melvyn Bragg are authors or accademics and so not uptight about broadcast rights (its free advertising to them), and Bragg was enthusiastic about the project (probably because he likes himself so much he thinks we should all hear him more often, even if he doesn't get more money for it).
Fighting Talk has some of the same advantages (pundits, not performers), though I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to keep some has-beens and journoes wibbling on about this week's trivia about kids games.
The same reason that scientists haven't filtered all those thought experiments out of introductory descriptions of relativity and quantum mechanics.
It is often useful to have illustrations for the idea you are trying to get across, and there is not always a concrete example to had which illustrates the issue at hand without so much extra complexity the issue is burried.
Of course, the definition of `professional' here is `to be bought by PHBs'. People spending money which isn't their's fundamentally don't care what the price is.
A similar case is companies who don't provide any worthwhile description of what the product does. This is for the case where the person buying won't be using the product or be responsible for the end result.
You can tell a product aimed at government or large corporate customers, no specs and no price.
The important word here is `is'. I'm easily old enough to know there were worse things before.
I'm sure there are people whose PHBs have nailed them back there, but nothing anyone sane should be considerring, even for small personal jobs, is going to be worse than CVS.
If nothing else, CVS is free and more or less everywhere and so forms a least common denominator.
More or less anything is superior to CVS. Consider deleting directories or moving things or...
A reasonable list of the most obvious evils of CVS can be found as the list of features on the Subversion project home page.
CVS's only real advantage is ubiquity.
And one where they expect you to lease the software. Must make for easy decisions around lease renewal time.
So far as I can see on their website, BitMover fall under that heading.
I think we were all talking about landlines. I believe (from the TPS web site) that SMS marketing spam is illegal EU-wide (the UK legislation they talk about is an implementation of an EU rule). I do occasionally get what is clearly SMS spam, but I suspect they are tip-toeing around the edge of the rules -- ``it's not sales, it's <WHATEVER>''.
I can't remember any voice spam to my mobile either. I suspect the call cost is just enough higher to make it not worth doing random spam campagns to mobiles (cost just to get hung up on can be significant calling a mobile).
The data protection rules are also, I think, EU-wide. But I don't think they are relevent here. Unlike email spammers, phone spammers don't need big lists of numbers for undirected campagns. They have the phone book, and some of them call at random (using the known structure of the number space) to hit ex-directory numbers (just as some email is sent to common names @some.known.domain).
If I were a politician out for some easy votes, I'd outlaw auto-dialers. That would really bite telemarketing. The relatively few people who would fear for their jobs would, I think, be massively outnumbered by the thankful millions who would call down a blessing on me each time they managed to finish dinner or watching a movie without a call.
Also be sure to fuck with the bastards.
One of my regulars has been a holliday scam run by some very very dim people. I left the phone off the hook and their taped message happily talked on and on. My record with them was nearly 30 minutes. Even if they get tehir calls cheap, I am stopping someone else being botherred on that outgoing line.
Another was a south african lot trying to get me to go to some sales operation, probably timeshare sales, in return for the inevitable free holliday vouchers. They used to regularly call when I was cooking my dinner, so I would happilly talk to them on the speakerphone for ten minutes, giving them bollocks information and swearing blind I'd go to their meeting this month. They even snail-mailed me reminders (they already had my address from somewhere, bastards!). Mildly entertaining if you like play acting, and cost the company money, and I didn't have to be nasty to the poor sods whose best job option is to be call center fodder.
No point testing the same social hacking hole too often on the same population, unless you can keep the results secret. People who were embarassed first time around will be sensitised to the attack.
Wouldn't suprise me if this is the reason for much of the improvement from 4 years ago. N% of people were caught and embaressed back then and M% have heard the coffee-room teasing of the N%. 71% of the remainder fell for it this time.
I would, if it was good chocolate. Of course, I'd immediatly replace my account with one which captured information about anyone trying to use it. Maybe I could get a bounty for catching the bastard and buy more chocolate.
Decideing not to open source purely because you don't want to lose some control, which was one of the reasons given, and the one I was addressing at that point, is sulking.
People can't "choose" which one they want if applications install their own modified versions in order to work.
They can choose which application to install, knowing that some of them are incompatible with each other. This gives application developers a motivation to standardise on one version, or at least a set of mutually compatible ones.
The fact is, there is no license which meets these requirements.
Lots of licences meet the requirement of not allowing people to ship modified versions. The only issue is that they are not called `open source', because `open source' has a meaning fundamentally at odds with that requirement. It's like saying there are no CDs which play on LP turntables.
Why do you feel you need to have that particular label on the licence?
You seem to be in the UK, so... Are you registered with the TPS? If not do so. It only cuts out the semi-legitimate ones, but that is a supprisingly proportion, got me doen from one every day or so to one every week.
Then make sure you have caller ID and don't answer calls from hidden numbers (unless you work at home and use that line for work, in which case you have to take your chances in working hours. Sigh!). Your friends shouldn't be hiding their identity from you, so this filters out almost all of the rest of the telesales and `surveys'.
An easier solution is to not open the source at all.
Indeed, it's always easier to sulk.
There are valid reasons to prevent forking.
Indeed, but merely wanting to maintain control is not one of them. Control for control's sake is not a reasonable motivation for an adult.
I dont want developers to ship modfied versions of the library with their apps, because multiple modified versions cannot be installed alongside each other.
So people get to choose one. And since a fork is better for compatability than a reimplementation, they get to choose between versions which are fairly compatable.
XFree86 and X.org are again a good example. What proportion of Linux and BSD desktops were running something other than XFree86 until XFree86 became moribund?
And unfortuantly, there is no open source license which lets you achieve this.
Because your requirement is fundamentally that you do not want to open source this module. There are licences which don't allow redistribution of modified versions, but by that very fact they are not called `open source'.
ISTM you feel you'd get some kind of kudos from the label `open source', but don't want to actually do what earns that kudos (letting go to some small extent of your creation).
Which would be OK if an OutputStream was usefull for anything much. You'd probably have to wrap that into a PrintWriter, or a BufferedOutputStream or something to get to where you can start work.
And that's just for simple file IO. When you get to anything interesting in the libraries you seem to always end up creating a FooFactoryConfigurationInterfaceTemplateCreatorCla ssDescriptorSetHandle.
Java is quite nice, even if making boxed and unboxed values visible is a bit sick, but the libraries are just painful.
By definition of the term `open source' as it is used now, it means that people can get, change and use the source and at least with some restrictions redistribute the resulting changed version.
I.e. `open source' more or less means `you can fork'.
The solution is perhaps to grow up and stop wanting to keep control. Life is to short to worry about that kind of thing.
And, of course, the fact that control is not enforced by the licence doesn't mean that there will be no central control. I think most people would say that Linus has reasonable control of the future of the linux kernel, dispite the fact that anyone could fork it, and many do for special purposes.
Consider XFree86 vs X.org for an instance of why the ability to fork is a good thing. Sometime when you get bored with working on your library, or fall under a bus, someone else with enthusiasm can take over, and if they do a good job, their branch will take over from yours and, assuming it wasn't a bus, you can go off and do whatever you are more interested in doing at that point.
Do you have spray the machine rooms with billicide in the spring to prevent Windows machines growing as weeds between the rows?
The communication should be encrypted.
More importantly, I don't know of any serious problem with phone lines getting infected with spyware. Computers are really much more vulnerable than the lines between them because they get attacked en-mass by viruses and such.
What the banks should do is create a level of access which allows you to check your balance etc without letting you empty your account or set up a payment mandate or anything like that. Then you could use that name and password to access when away, or over the phone, but only do thing which could cause you real problems when you authenticate yousrself properly from home.
Can I get fries with that?