I like that this is the direction we are headed; gov't telling private companies how it's done......
What do you mean "we are headed"? The government has been doing this for decades. In case you didn't realize it, the CAFE standards were first enacted 36 years ago.
Yeah, that damned government, telling us we have to build our houses so they don't catch on fire.
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.
c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.
I ain't no fancy-pants lawyer, but section c pretty clearly says you only get to do this if you specifically include the written offer to provide the source. Presumably emacs didn't do that (presumably using sections d or e - the "available for download" clauses).
I can see myself buying three - one to tape to my TV for a media center, one to carry around my USB computer, and then one to actually hobby-tinker with.
As I understand it, the license defines "source code" as roughly "if you're going to edit this program, the source code is file you would edit".
And it's worded that way to specifically avoid this scenario - if the original author would use Bison to change the program, the Bison code is the "source", not the outputted C code (because you're not intended to edit the C code - you'd go back to Bison and change it there).
I read up and down the thread a few posts, and I think this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot - they found an error, and are moving to fix it quickly. No talk of "ah, just cover it up" or "that's OK, no-one will ever ask". Just a principled "we say we do things this way, we just found out we're not, let's get our house in order".
People unintentionally violate all kinds of laws and contracts. That changes nothing. It is not an argument for or against anything.
If a company or a person does that intentionally or not they can do what RMS said they would do. Delete the files or fix them.
And the bigger test will be how fast they fix it now that they know.
The "aw shit" email is from yesterday. I'd be amazed if they don't have a fix in place inside of a week. Whether the fix is adding the missing source or removing the offending code, I couldn't say.
I still use emacs from time to time. My biggest complaint is that it's not particularly friendly to occasional users. When I used it full time at university, I developed a fairly solid grasp of it. Now that I live in a world that expects Office, I find I have a heck of a time going back - if you don't remember the shortcuts, you're fairly SOL.
But yes, there is a difference between hitting the debt limit and defaulting. Hitting the debt limit says "I'm not going to borrow any more money", while defaulting is reneging on existing agreements to pay back already-borrowed funds.
And increasing the debt ceiling only gives the addict a little more dope. It doesn't prevent the inevitable reckoning that we are on the verge of. The government has maxed out every credit card they have. The Federal government is broke and they want another credit card.
This isn't technically true yet - there's been no indications that the US would be unable to get more credit. (This may change once they default on Tuesday.)
What's going on is the equivalent of your household saying "I'm not going to go more than $10,000 into debt". The bank will happily extend you a loan or line of credit or mortgage beyond that point; you're just choosing not to exercise that option.
This is good, so far as it goes. The problem is that you've *also* kept reducing your income *and* increasing your spending, so you've hit the point where you either have to (a) get a better job, (b) stop taking so many expensive vacations, or (c) accept that you need to call the bank.
This year we got the short form, but my family has done the long-form in years past. (It's pretty damned easy to tell the difference - it goes on for freakin' ever). It goes into a lot more detail. (The short form this year didn't go far beyond basic demographic details.)
Actually, 2/3s sounds pretty close. Remember, he only got 2/5ths of the vote. That makes 3/5s of the population that Harper really doesn't care about.
And to think of it, it's probably even higher when you include the Alberta ridings that are ignored because you could stab little old ladies with blue spears and they'd still vote Conservative.
(I live in Alberta, so I'm allowed to be that sarcastic about our provincial politics. Freaking "dynastys")
Problems in democracies are systemic, not partisan.
Only if you can find instances on multiple sides. Corruption? Yep, Libs and Cons have both screwed that pooch multiple times. Playing one region of the country against the other? Yep, all of them are guilty (even the NDP some days, who I find have the most integrity simply because until recently they didn't have the option of choosing "sell out for political power"). The party system where you're punished for not toeing the line? Yep, everyone gets slapped by that one as well.
But the Cons have to wear prorogation as a blunt instrument of policy. They have to wear their unwillingness to run a minority government. And they have to wear the blatant consolidation of power in the PMO office.
They did not abolish the long form census, they only made it voluntary instead of mandatory.
This sounds good in theory (Freedom good, Privacy good). In practice, I've never heard of a case where someone's personal information leaked from StatsCan. In practice, in order for those statistics to be useful, you need an unbiased random sample. Making it voluntary means it's self-selected, which ruins the results.
And in practice, the long-form census is easily the least intrusive thing the federal government does to us, and it's done with a clearly stated and obvious benefit (I've filled out a long-form - it's really not that bad, and again - StatsCan has built a reputation for not screwing around with this.)
So, while in theory it's good to do this, in practice we just screwed up one of the things our government actually did well.
This Conservative government is an anti-fact government.
If I needed to be more specific, I'd say that the current Conservative government is trying very hard to become a franchisee for the Republicans.
It's moving a little slower up here, but all the fingerprints are there - blocking work to make a point, the compulsion to argue that everyone without an opinion Obviously Believes The Same As I Do, and people who oppose are Subversives (of whatever stripe we're painting this week), and the complete obliviousness to anything that might indicate they may be incorrect in the slightest.
My favorite Harper quote so far: "Conservative values are Canadian values and that the Conservative party is Canada's party". Translation: if you don't believe as we do, you're not Really Canadian. (Keep in mind they only got around 40% of the vote - hardly a massive endorsement.)
I would suggest the best way to help teachers is to make the wages competitive.
And before everyone jumps all over this on a "TEACHERS GET OVERPAID", stop and do the math:
For a pre-schooler, it's going to cost you around $600 a month for day care. That's about $30 a day to supervise and entertain a child.
A teacher is expected not only to do those two things, but also educate them. And they're doing this for a much larger group (your day care is required to have one staff for every ten kids here; your kid's classroom will be double or triply as large).
Do you think your kid's teacher is making $900 a day? (30 kids x $30/day)?
Heck, my wireless router has a drop-down list of public DNS on the same screen as the "what's your DNS" settings. Don't get much easier than a dropdown box.
Say rather that the users who are interested will quickly learn.
There will be simple one-click apps to do it for the rest. And shortly after, Trojans masquerading as such.
Barring that, people will start handing out IP numbers directly. It's worked for phone numbers (ip4 is 12 digits in convenient groupings; I have to dial 10 digits today to call anyone.)
You present removal of links to pirated material as a negative thing. Why? it would be quite good to actually remove any pirated material from the internet.
This is true in theory; so is "it would be quite good to remove all criminals from the streets" or "it would be quite good if none of us had to work". Sounds great on paper, butthe implementation will be troublesome.
Of course, you're missing the other Secret Defense that most European countries have: since they have a small military, they tend not to screw around with the affairs of other countries, which means that no-one really feels the need to attack them.
Agreed - you can make some cases for the royal family's reputation taking a few hits over the years, the Queen herself? I only wish other politicians used her a role model of how authority figures are supposed to act.
I don't think so. Despite the fact that it would help immensely for the C in C to have first-hand military experience, it would also exclude a whole pool of folks who for whatever reason haven't served in the military. The founding fathers got this right. The only two constitutional restrictions for presidential candidates a native-born citizen at least 35 years of age.
Not to mention that the presumption is that a president has access to the best experts available. In the case of military matters, the Joint Chiefs.
And if I had to pick a field of expertise for our leader, I'd rather have an economist than a soldier these days.
I'm sure someone will find the relevant Dilbert comic, but are you honestly expecting your filtering to stand against the combined will of people to find p0rn?
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I like that this is the direction we are headed; gov't telling private companies how it's done......
What do you mean "we are headed"? The government has been doing this for decades. In case you didn't realize it, the CAFE standards were first enacted 36 years ago.
Yeah, that damned government, telling us we have to build our houses so they don't catch on fire.
At the risk of feeding the trolls...
I ain't no fancy-pants lawyer, but section c pretty clearly says you only get to do this if you specifically include the written offer to provide the source. Presumably emacs didn't do that (presumably using sections d or e - the "available for download" clauses).
I can see myself buying three - one to tape to my TV for a media center, one to carry around my USB computer, and then one to actually hobby-tinker with.
Maybe a fourth for my daughter...
As I understand it, the license defines "source code" as roughly "if you're going to edit this program, the source code is file you would edit".
And it's worded that way to specifically avoid this scenario - if the original author would use Bison to change the program, the Bison code is the "source", not the outputted C code (because you're not intended to edit the C code - you'd go back to Bison and change it there).
I read up and down the thread a few posts, and I think this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot - they found an error, and are moving to fix it quickly. No talk of "ah, just cover it up" or "that's OK, no-one will ever ask". Just a principled "we say we do things this way, we just found out we're not, let's get our house in order".
People unintentionally violate all kinds of laws and contracts. That changes nothing. It is not an argument for or against anything.
If a company or a person does that intentionally or not they can do what RMS said they would do. Delete the files or fix them.
And the bigger test will be how fast they fix it now that they know.
The "aw shit" email is from yesterday. I'd be amazed if they don't have a fix in place inside of a week. Whether the fix is adding the missing source or removing the offending code, I couldn't say.
Certainly not what I would consider a VERY BAD MISTAKE!!!
It's a bad mistake in that one of the flagship GPL products isn't currently GPL-legal.
It's not so much a legal mistake as massively embarrassing - like the Apple Store signs that have a Windows blue screen of death showing.
Because no one uses Emacs any more ;D
I still use emacs from time to time. My biggest complaint is that it's not particularly friendly to occasional users. When I used it full time at university, I developed a fairly solid grasp of it. Now that I live in a world that expects Office, I find I have a heck of a time going back - if you don't remember the shortcuts, you're fairly SOL.
Apparently there is some concern that Treasury may not be able to prioritize payments (this article says legal reasons, but I saw another yesterday that said there's no technical setup for letting them choose which cheques are run and which aren't).
But yes, there is a difference between hitting the debt limit and defaulting. Hitting the debt limit says "I'm not going to borrow any more money", while defaulting is reneging on existing agreements to pay back already-borrowed funds.
And increasing the debt ceiling only gives the addict a little more dope. It doesn't prevent the inevitable reckoning that we are on the verge of. The government has maxed out every credit card they have. The Federal government is broke and they want another credit card.
This isn't technically true yet - there's been no indications that the US would be unable to get more credit. (This may change once they default on Tuesday.)
What's going on is the equivalent of your household saying "I'm not going to go more than $10,000 into debt". The bank will happily extend you a loan or line of credit or mortgage beyond that point; you're just choosing not to exercise that option.
This is good, so far as it goes. The problem is that you've *also* kept reducing your income *and* increasing your spending, so you've hit the point where you either have to (a) get a better job, (b) stop taking so many expensive vacations, or (c) accept that you need to call the bank.
This year we got the short form, but my family has done the long-form in years past. (It's pretty damned easy to tell the difference - it goes on for freakin' ever). It goes into a lot more detail. (The short form this year didn't go far beyond basic demographic details.)
Actually, 2/3s sounds pretty close. Remember, he only got 2/5ths of the vote. That makes 3/5s of the population that Harper really doesn't care about.
And to think of it, it's probably even higher when you include the Alberta ridings that are ignored because you could stab little old ladies with blue spears and they'd still vote Conservative.
(I live in Alberta, so I'm allowed to be that sarcastic about our provincial politics. Freaking "dynastys")
Problems in democracies are systemic, not partisan.
Only if you can find instances on multiple sides. Corruption? Yep, Libs and Cons have both screwed that pooch multiple times. Playing one region of the country against the other? Yep, all of them are guilty (even the NDP some days, who I find have the most integrity simply because until recently they didn't have the option of choosing "sell out for political power"). The party system where you're punished for not toeing the line? Yep, everyone gets slapped by that one as well.
But the Cons have to wear prorogation as a blunt instrument of policy. They have to wear their unwillingness to run a minority government. And they have to wear the blatant consolidation of power in the PMO office.
They did not abolish the long form census, they only made it voluntary instead of mandatory.
This sounds good in theory (Freedom good, Privacy good). In practice, I've never heard of a case where someone's personal information leaked from StatsCan. In practice, in order for those statistics to be useful, you need an unbiased random sample. Making it voluntary means it's self-selected, which ruins the results.
And in practice, the long-form census is easily the least intrusive thing the federal government does to us, and it's done with a clearly stated and obvious benefit (I've filled out a long-form - it's really not that bad, and again - StatsCan has built a reputation for not screwing around with this.)
So, while in theory it's good to do this, in practice we just screwed up one of the things our government actually did well.
This Conservative government is an anti-fact government.
If I needed to be more specific, I'd say that the current Conservative government is trying very hard to become a franchisee for the Republicans.
It's moving a little slower up here, but all the fingerprints are there - blocking work to make a point, the compulsion to argue that everyone without an opinion Obviously Believes The Same As I Do, and people who oppose are Subversives (of whatever stripe we're painting this week), and the complete obliviousness to anything that might indicate they may be incorrect in the slightest.
My favorite Harper quote so far: "Conservative values are Canadian values and that the Conservative party is Canada's party". Translation: if you don't believe as we do, you're not Really Canadian. (Keep in mind they only got around 40% of the vote - hardly a massive endorsement.)
I would suggest the best way to help teachers is to make the wages competitive.
And before everyone jumps all over this on a "TEACHERS GET OVERPAID", stop and do the math:
For a pre-schooler, it's going to cost you around $600 a month for day care. That's about $30 a day to supervise and entertain a child.
A teacher is expected not only to do those two things, but also educate them. And they're doing this for a much larger group (your day care is required to have one staff for every ten kids here; your kid's classroom will be double or triply as large).
Do you think your kid's teacher is making $900 a day? (30 kids x $30/day)?
This just in:
Zuckerberg is the bitch in the relationship.
For now.
But Zynga is in control only so long as Facebook needs that revenue. The moment they don't, Zynga will find itself on the wrong end of a TOS change.
Jeez, I hope I can get a discount for buying last-year's second-hand eTexts...
Heck, my wireless router has a drop-down list of public DNS on the same screen as the "what's your DNS" settings. Don't get much easier than a dropdown box.
Say rather that the users who are interested will quickly learn.
There will be simple one-click apps to do it for the rest. And shortly after, Trojans masquerading as such.
Barring that, people will start handing out IP numbers directly. It's worked for phone numbers (ip4 is 12 digits in convenient groupings; I have to dial 10 digits today to call anyone.)
You present removal of links to pirated material as a negative thing. Why? it would be quite good to actually remove any pirated material from the internet.
This is true in theory; so is "it would be quite good to remove all criminals from the streets" or "it would be quite good if none of us had to work". Sounds great on paper, butthe implementation will be troublesome.
Of course, you're missing the other Secret Defense that most European countries have: since they have a small military, they tend not to screw around with the affairs of other countries, which means that no-one really feels the need to attack them.
Compared to other potential "role models" out there, you could do a lot worse than the Queen.
A LOT worse.
Agreed - you can make some cases for the royal family's reputation taking a few hits over the years, the Queen herself? I only wish other politicians used her a role model of how authority figures are supposed to act.
I don't think so. Despite the fact that it would help immensely for the C in C to have first-hand military experience, it would also exclude a whole pool of folks who for whatever reason haven't served in the military. The founding fathers got this right. The only two constitutional restrictions for presidential candidates a native-born citizen at least 35 years of age.
Not to mention that the presumption is that a president has access to the best experts available. In the case of military matters, the Joint Chiefs.
And if I had to pick a field of expertise for our leader, I'd rather have an economist than a soldier these days.
I'm sure someone will find the relevant Dilbert comic, but are you honestly expecting your filtering to stand against the combined will of people to find p0rn?