I'm not saying they need to be experts in o-chem or anything, but a general understanding of the field is very important. As the grandparent-post suggested, a different style of o-chem course tailored for medical students may be more appropriate.
And yes, I would say a doctor should indeed know how drugs work to prescribe them, at least on a basic level. o-chem is a fundamental part of drug action, and not knowing anything about that means you are treating it like magic.
To use the EE example again, no, I couldn't tell you the specific difference between NPN and PNP transistors, from a material-science/physics perspective, but I could at least tell you that there IS a difference, and would know how to look it up if I needed to. This HAS come up in a few places, such as wondering why some input device is giving bad results, and having to get down into the raw electrical level for a moment to determine that no, it was not my software that was the problem, there was a strange edge-case on the input hardware that was causing things to act funny. If I had not known how hardware worked, I would have probably spend a LOT more time trying to find the bug in my code, which would have been futile.
Again, I'm not saying you have to be experts or anything. But at least a broad, general knowledge in foundational fields like this can be the difference between someone who is "good" at a job and someone who can actually deal with highly exceptional circumstances.
If you want to take all this as an indictment against modern schools, in how they need to have more "science for non-science major" type classes, that works too. All they really need is one really good overview/survey course on o-chem, to cover the fundamentals. The piles of flash-cards that most people end up with in o-chem classes is way beyond what most doctors need.
o-chem is vitally important for medical students for the same reason basic electrical engineering classes on basic circuit design is important to us computer people. Sure, all I do is write software all day, and haven't had to touch a transistor in a long time. But knowing at least the basic theory of how the computer works has helped invaluably in some important cases.
Both doctoring and code-monkeying are applied fields, grounded in results instead of theory, but knowing at least the basis for the theory can let you apply your real-world technique in a lot more interesting ways.
I fear the doctor that just treats pills like some sort of magic black box as they don't understand any of the chemistry involved.
It probably doesn't help that, normally, all those flashing lights are running of something like +40V, instead of the +12V the lamps normally require. They do it to make the rise-time of the bulb's glow faster, but yah, it burns out lamps really fast.
Converting that to the +5V or whatever the LED requires is probably a non-trivial design change.
There's a lot of inertia in design - old techniques take a long time to die...
What the hell does a historical record have to do with anything?
Are you saying I should somehow get in trouble if I acquire said textbook and post all the answers to every question on the web? In nice searchable format? (note: I haven't been in school in years) It would be a variation on "Cliff's Notes", so to speak.
There is no way this could be considered "copyright infringement", either - I'm only posting solutions, not the problems themselves. Nothing is copied from the original textbook.
If this happens to destroy the "security" of the book, by making future use of those problems as homework assignments, so what? It's up to the instructor to generate good problems if they need them.
This also ignores that placing such weight on a homework assignment is insane, especially at the college level. Homework should be something you/want/ to do if you want the practice. If you want to measure students performance in something, you have exams.
The one I want to know is how much energy it takes all of the people across the country to separate out and otherwise deal with recycling. Sure, it's just a few seconds here and there, but added up, that's probably a significant number of Joules of energy being used.
And then to convert that amount of energy into the number of barrels of oil it represents. I don't think most people have ever considered the equation of how much oil we are spending to enable us to use less oil. (only talking plastic, of course - aluminum is a pretty clear case of a win for recycling)
There's probably other things, too, that we just take for granted as they are such small impacts on our time (energy), yet add up to significant amounts in aggregate.
Ask them if such cameras can be fed straight to their insurance companies. Most people will write off things about random strangers, 1984 style government stuff, etc, as paranoid. If you can get them in the "It could raise you insurance rates..." angle, though, they listen much more often.
Direct financial motivation usually works better than theoretical effects...
I don't know what you're smoking, but Source-engine games work just fine under wine, seeing as I just played through all of Orange Box recently on linux/wine.
Note: you probably want to tell Source to use DirectX 8.0 which is significantly better supported under wine, with the "-dxlevel 80" option to hl2.exe and similar.
I also played through all of hl1 before that with no problems whatsoever. I suspect you are judging things from an older version of wine - it's come a long way in recent times.
Also - you mention stupid things like "no alsa compatability" - you do realize that wine can be told to use the OSS emulation layer just fine, right?
That's why I see the push for such precision to be detrimental.
Oh, certainly. In fact, I believe that was the original purpose behind the simplicity of the American Constitution. It was supposed to be high-level general concepts, so you wouldn't have to enumerate all the specifics that change all the time. The fact that the founders thought the Bill Of Rights wasn't even necessary is really telling - that such enumeration would lead to problems.
You see it in law all the time, where a law should be simple ("fraud is illegal"), yet you see it complicated with huge amounts of enumeration ("fraud on the telephone", "fraud on paper contracts", "fraud on the internet", etc). It has the direct effect, as you say, of putting things our of the reach of everyday folks.
Looking for a "unified theory" of human interaction.
I suggest a heavy mix of Godel's math as applied to information flow and basic evolutionary concepts. It works for me, at least... though I'm still working on a lot of the details... ^^;
oh, I don't mean it is a successful or useful strategy... just that it does smell of panic a bit. Like he hoped he could just make it all magically vanish and therefor have some potential legal mess go away.
in fact, according to the WIKI and several other sources it *is* a contract
And the wiki is such a good source of reliable legal information?
From the GPLv2:
"Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. This License applies to...
(all emphasis mine, of course)
You will note that even though most EULA's contain
So? The GPL is not an END USER license. It's a distribution license.
You can unilaterally decide to accept it or not, but it's the only thing allowing you to bypass the normal copyright restrictions on further distribution.
As for this idiot in the article, even if he had a different license, copyright is only about distribution. You have no obligation to ever destroy your copy or otherwise do anything the author wants once you have legally acquired a copy. Just as the RIAA has no legal ground to force you to not listen to your CDs at any given time, the author of a program cannot decide after the fact to force you to delete the copy you already have.
To do this kind of restriction, you would need a contract, but most media still is not distributed in a manner that requires you to enter into a contract with the author.
There are very important differences between a "license" and a "contract", and it seems a lot of people get it wrong... sigh...
no, it works like a license, which it is. The author is simply granting you a right (license) to redistribute the code with certain restrictions.
And of course you can unilaterally get out of the GPL. You can, at any time, chose not to accept the license and not be bound by its restrictions.
Of course, that license is probably the only way you are getting a right-to-distribute from the author, so any distribution you do then is most likely a violation of "normal" copyright.
Sure, but you can recurse such skepticism out to infinity, and that's not really useful. In physics, you can apply reductionism to everything and end up using quantum mechanics to solve macro-scale events, because you aren't really certain that the macro-scale even is true. Newton's laws of motion are deficient approximations only. Except that you don't. That's insane. In the same way, you can doubt the definition of every word in every language (and some lawyers certainly try), but at some point you have to accept some things a fundamental and obvious, or you will never have a proper "meeting of the minds".
Well, this might be a good test in the ongoing attempt to validate the GPL in the courts.
No way. The reason there hasn't been a lot of action in the courts with regards to the GPL is that it IS such an obvious and strong license. No sane lawyer wants to touch it, as it's fairly obvious most challenges would lose unless you rewrote large sections of copyright law.
If this guy actually tries to sue over this, a real lawyer should warn him away from such futility before it gets anywhere.
I'm just trying to say that nothing is absolute. Hell, there are folks that can "prove" that 2+2 does not equal 4.
Of course. And if you feel like arguing philosophy or abstract math, then such attitudes are great fun. In the real world, though, there is a minimum level of pragmatism necessary or nobody would ever get anything done.
If the letter written is true and correct, and legal
Sure, IF it's true and correct. The problem is that many non-lawyer types tend to fail on that, thinking they know the law.
It's the same idiocy as, say, someone with no plumbing training going and re-piping their house, or someone with no medical training trying to cure their own cancer. They may get it right, and more power to them if they educate themselves and do it properly, but most people will screw things up.
As is obvious in this case. It's more an issue of consulting with experts so you don't end up looking like an idiot like this guy.
(as an aside: using a lawyer does have one extra advantage over just writing the letter yourself, even if the letter ended up exactly the same: liability. If the lawyer wrote it, you can blame them if it's a total fuck up...)
While this is certainly true, and there are always lots of finer points to argue about in the GPL, I am still amazed when people seem to completely miss the point of the whole thing. The fact that the entire point of the GPL is to guarantee access to the source code of a project makes statements like this guy's rather insane.
Maybe I can blame ESR for this, actually... with all his dilution of the Free Software Movement with his new "open source" terms and such. It has created a huge new group of people that don't seem to understand that there's a major political motivation behind the GPL, not just some software-access pragmatism.
That only works if you got a copy in binary format or similar.
If, by some miracle, he actually did succeed in removing all copies of it, this action would actually work. (the old GPL versions wouldn't be "distributed" and therefor the source code requirements are not relevant)
I highly doubt that he could succeed in such an endeavor, though, unless he had all of 0 people using his code. If that was the case, why did he give it as GPL in the first place? @.@
someone has made noises about suing him for having this software out there
That's a pretty good theory. This whole thing reeks of panic and trying to sweep something back under the rug. I don't really get why, though... from what I can tell, this looks like some drivers for a set of vid-cap cards, and unless he copied the source code itself, simply writing original drivers for something isn't really something you can sue over.
Of course, it looks like this is some HD stuff (I see mentions of 720p and 1080i on a few pages...), so I wonder if there could be some MPAA pressure about not supporting some HDCP or other copy-restriction idiocy? Even so, unless he has a contract/nda/etc with them to not reveal such information, I still don't see how he could be liable in any way.
How is it possible that people still don't get how the GPL works, and still think they can treat it like a contract or something?
I would think that it would be obvious, after reading the FSF web site or even just the news about the GPL, that stupid tricks like this not only don't work, but are the very thing the GPL is intended to prevent.
Even more strange is that people seem to think they can write up these fancy-sounding letters as if they were a lawyer. Did they somehow miss that law is complicated and we have lawyers go to school for many years to properly understand all this? (note: if it actually/was/ a lawyer that wrote this, that's even more insane. Fire that incompetent freak!)
I suggest reading the sci-fi book Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling. Regardless of what you think of it's plot/etc, it's a great example of how the human race (and other things, really) can speciate along ideological lines, not the traditional physical boundaries such as the geographical separation you mention.
I think the thing to remember is that evolution amplifies small differences, just at rates you can't see. So any statement of "$FOO are not producing their own species" needs many thousands of years to actually see.
The main effect I am looking at, though, is how very divergent (fringe) groups tend to restrict interbreeding with other groups. E.g. "You can't marry him! He's a $OTHER and is bad/corrupt/evil/whatever!" That limitation on interbreeding is all evolution needs.
Speciation is most certainly going on. It's not like you can stop evolution by "modern fiat" any more than you can stop any other force of nature. It'll just take... a long time.
Personally, I've always regarded the fight against change that many people do (such as this creationism crap) an artifact of the current speciation. Different species will often regard each other as "enemies" instead of "kinsmen", so we are already different enough in places to trigger this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying they need to be experts in o-chem or anything, but a general understanding of the field is very important. As the grandparent-post suggested, a different style of o-chem course tailored for medical students may be more appropriate.
And yes, I would say a doctor should indeed know how drugs work to prescribe them, at least on a basic level. o-chem is a fundamental part of drug action, and not knowing anything about that means you are treating it like magic.
To use the EE example again, no, I couldn't tell you the specific difference between NPN and PNP transistors, from a material-science/physics perspective, but I could at least tell you that there IS a difference, and would know how to look it up if I needed to. This HAS come up in a few places, such as wondering why some input device is giving bad results, and having to get down into the raw electrical level for a moment to determine that no, it was not my software that was the problem, there was a strange edge-case on the input hardware that was causing things to act funny. If I had not known how hardware worked, I would have probably spend a LOT more time trying to find the bug in my code, which would have been futile.
Again, I'm not saying you have to be experts or anything. But at least a broad, general knowledge in foundational fields like this can be the difference between someone who is "good" at a job and someone who can actually deal with highly exceptional circumstances.
If you want to take all this as an indictment against modern schools, in how they need to have more "science for non-science major" type classes, that works too. All they really need is one really good overview/survey course on o-chem, to cover the fundamentals. The piles of flash-cards that most people end up with in o-chem classes is way beyond what most doctors need.
To expand on your point:
o-chem is vitally important for medical students for the same reason basic electrical engineering classes on basic circuit design is important to us computer people. Sure, all I do is write software all day, and haven't had to touch a transistor in a long time. But knowing at least the basic theory of how the computer works has helped invaluably in some important cases.
Both doctoring and code-monkeying are applied fields, grounded in results instead of theory, but knowing at least the basis for the theory can let you apply your real-world technique in a lot more interesting ways.
I fear the doctor that just treats pills like some sort of magic black box as they don't understand any of the chemistry involved.
You can use "kLoC".
... framebuffer" and thought it was about some new, very-high resolution display technology...
I saw "N-line
It probably doesn't help that, normally, all those flashing lights are running of something like +40V, instead of the +12V the lamps normally require. They do it to make the rise-time of the bulb's glow faster, but yah, it burns out lamps really fast.
Converting that to the +5V or whatever the LED requires is probably a non-trivial design change.
There's a lot of inertia in design - old techniques take a long time to die...
What the hell does a historical record have to do with anything?
/want/ to do if you want the practice. If you want to measure students performance in something, you have exams.
Are you saying I should somehow get in trouble if I acquire said textbook and post all the answers to every question on the web? In nice searchable format? (note: I haven't been in school in years) It would be a variation on "Cliff's Notes", so to speak.
There is no way this could be considered "copyright infringement", either - I'm only posting solutions, not the problems themselves. Nothing is copied from the original textbook.
If this happens to destroy the "security" of the book, by making future use of those problems as homework assignments, so what? It's up to the instructor to generate good problems if they need them.
This also ignores that placing such weight on a homework assignment is insane, especially at the college level. Homework should be something you
yes, that would be my point
The one I want to know is how much energy it takes all of the people across the country to separate out and otherwise deal with recycling. Sure, it's just a few seconds here and there, but added up, that's probably a significant number of Joules of energy being used.
And then to convert that amount of energy into the number of barrels of oil it represents. I don't think most people have ever considered the equation of how much oil we are spending to enable us to use less oil. (only talking plastic, of course - aluminum is a pretty clear case of a win for recycling)
There's probably other things, too, that we just take for granted as they are such small impacts on our time (energy), yet add up to significant amounts in aggregate.
Even better:
Ask them if such cameras can be fed straight to their insurance companies. Most people will write off things about random strangers, 1984 style government stuff, etc, as paranoid. If you can get them in the "It could raise you insurance rates..." angle, though, they listen much more often.
Direct financial motivation usually works better than theoretical effects...
In the meantime, the administrator is continually policing desktops
I believe we call this "Job Security".
I don't know what you're smoking, but Source-engine games work just fine under wine, seeing as I just played through all of Orange Box recently on linux/wine.
Note: you probably want to tell Source to use DirectX 8.0 which is significantly better supported under wine, with the "-dxlevel 80" option to hl2.exe and similar.
I also played through all of hl1 before that with no problems whatsoever. I suspect you are judging things from an older version of wine - it's come a long way in recent times.
Also - you mention stupid things like "no alsa compatability" - you do realize that wine can be told to use the OSS emulation layer just fine, right?
I don't think this is really a new thing from U2.
Note the story of The Letter U and the Numeral 2
That's why I see the push for such precision to be detrimental.
Oh, certainly. In fact, I believe that was the original purpose behind the simplicity of the American Constitution. It was supposed to be high-level general concepts, so you wouldn't have to enumerate all the specifics that change all the time. The fact that the founders thought the Bill Of Rights wasn't even necessary is really telling - that such enumeration would lead to problems.
You see it in law all the time, where a law should be simple ("fraud is illegal"), yet you see it complicated with huge amounts of enumeration ("fraud on the telephone", "fraud on paper contracts", "fraud on the internet", etc). It has the direct effect, as you say, of putting things our of the reach of everyday folks.
Looking for a "unified theory" of human interaction.
I suggest a heavy mix of Godel's math as applied to information flow and basic evolutionary concepts. It works for me, at least... though I'm still working on a lot of the details... ^^;
oh, I don't mean it is a successful or useful strategy... just that it does smell of panic a bit. Like he hoped he could just make it all magically vanish and therefor have some potential legal mess go away.
And the wiki is such a good source of reliable legal information?
From the GPLv2:
(all emphasis mine, of course)
You will note that even though most EULA's contain
So? The GPL is not an END USER license. It's a distribution license.
You can unilaterally decide to accept it or not, but it's the only thing allowing you to bypass the normal copyright restrictions on further distribution.
As for this idiot in the article, even if he had a different license, copyright is only about distribution. You have no obligation to ever destroy your copy or otherwise do anything the author wants once you have legally acquired a copy. Just as the RIAA has no legal ground to force you to not listen to your CDs at any given time, the author of a program cannot decide after the fact to force you to delete the copy you already have.
To do this kind of restriction, you would need a contract, but most media still is not distributed in a manner that requires you to enter into a contract with the author.
There are very important differences between a "license" and a "contract", and it seems a lot of people get it wrong... sigh...
no, it works like a license, which it is. The author is simply granting you a right (license) to redistribute the code with certain restrictions.
And of course you can unilaterally get out of the GPL. You can, at any time, chose not to accept the license and not be bound by its restrictions.
Of course, that license is probably the only way you are getting a right-to-distribute from the author, so any distribution you do then is most likely a violation of "normal" copyright.
the deficiency of language in general
Sure, but you can recurse such skepticism out to infinity, and that's not really useful. In physics, you can apply reductionism to everything and end up using quantum mechanics to solve macro-scale events, because you aren't really certain that the macro-scale even is true. Newton's laws of motion are deficient approximations only. Except that you don't. That's insane. In the same way, you can doubt the definition of every word in every language (and some lawyers certainly try), but at some point you have to accept some things a fundamental and obvious, or you will never have a proper "meeting of the minds".
Well, this might be a good test in the ongoing attempt to validate the GPL in the courts.
No way. The reason there hasn't been a lot of action in the courts with regards to the GPL is that it IS such an obvious and strong license. No sane lawyer wants to touch it, as it's fairly obvious most challenges would lose unless you rewrote large sections of copyright law.
If this guy actually tries to sue over this, a real lawyer should warn him away from such futility before it gets anywhere.
I'm just trying to say that nothing is absolute. Hell, there are folks that can "prove" that 2+2 does not equal 4.
Of course. And if you feel like arguing philosophy or abstract math, then such attitudes are great fun. In the real world, though, there is a minimum level of pragmatism necessary or nobody would ever get anything done.
If the letter written is true and correct, and legal
Sure, IF it's true and correct. The problem is that many non-lawyer types tend to fail on that, thinking they know the law.
It's the same idiocy as, say, someone with no plumbing training going and re-piping their house, or someone with no medical training trying to cure their own cancer. They may get it right, and more power to them if they educate themselves and do it properly, but most people will screw things up.
As is obvious in this case. It's more an issue of consulting with experts so you don't end up looking like an idiot like this guy.
(as an aside: using a lawyer does have one extra advantage over just writing the letter yourself, even if the letter ended up exactly the same: liability. If the lawyer wrote it, you can blame them if it's a total fuck up...)
While this is certainly true, and there are always lots of finer points to argue about in the GPL, I am still amazed when people seem to completely miss the point of the whole thing. The fact that the entire point of the GPL is to guarantee access to the source code of a project makes statements like this guy's rather insane.
Maybe I can blame ESR for this, actually... with all his dilution of the Free Software Movement with his new "open source" terms and such. It has created a huge new group of people that don't seem to understand that there's a major political motivation behind the GPL, not just some software-access pragmatism.
That only works if you got a copy in binary format or similar.
If, by some miracle, he actually did succeed in removing all copies of it, this action would actually work. (the old GPL versions wouldn't be "distributed" and therefor the source code requirements are not relevant)
I highly doubt that he could succeed in such an endeavor, though, unless he had all of 0 people using his code. If that was the case, why did he give it as GPL in the first place? @.@
someone has made noises about suing him for having this software out there
That's a pretty good theory. This whole thing reeks of panic and trying to sweep something back under the rug. I don't really get why, though... from what I can tell, this looks like some drivers for a set of vid-cap cards, and unless he copied the source code itself, simply writing original drivers for something isn't really something you can sue over.
Of course, it looks like this is some HD stuff (I see mentions of 720p and 1080i on a few pages...), so I wonder if there could be some MPAA pressure about not supporting some HDCP or other copy-restriction idiocy? Even so, unless he has a contract/nda/etc with them to not reveal such information, I still don't see how he could be liable in any way.
How is it possible that people still don't get how the GPL works, and still think they can treat it like a contract or something?
/was/ a lawyer that wrote this, that's even more insane. Fire that incompetent freak!)
I would think that it would be obvious, after reading the FSF web site or even just the news about the GPL, that stupid tricks like this not only don't work, but are the very thing the GPL is intended to prevent.
Even more strange is that people seem to think they can write up these fancy-sounding letters as if they were a lawyer. Did they somehow miss that law is complicated and we have lawyers go to school for many years to properly understand all this? (note: if it actually
Talk about self-selecting for "I read web forums"...
I suggest reading the sci-fi book Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling. Regardless of what you think of it's plot/etc, it's a great example of how the human race (and other things, really) can speciate along ideological lines, not the traditional physical boundaries such as the geographical separation you mention.
I think the thing to remember is that evolution amplifies small differences, just at rates you can't see. So any statement of "$FOO are not producing their own species" needs many thousands of years to actually see.
The main effect I am looking at, though, is how very divergent (fringe) groups tend to restrict interbreeding with other groups. E.g. "You can't marry him! He's a $OTHER and is bad/corrupt/evil/whatever!" That limitation on interbreeding is all evolution needs.
Why are you kidding?
Speciation is most certainly going on. It's not like you can stop evolution by "modern fiat" any more than you can stop any other force of nature. It'll just take... a long time.
Personally, I've always regarded the fight against change that many people do (such as this creationism crap) an artifact of the current speciation. Different species will often regard each other as "enemies" instead of "kinsmen", so we are already different enough in places to trigger this.
Vanguard on the Atari 800XL
I think I drove my parents insane with that square-wave theme song when I was 4.