Posting something on the public internet, as AT&T did, is not equivalent to keeping it in your living room, so your analogy fails. Badly. It's more like putting things out on the sidewalk in front of your house, and then getting upset because someone came along and looked at the sidewalk, instead of following your instructions to keep their eyes closed until they reached the exact GPS coordinates you sent them.
To get the answers you want, phrase the question properly. See Sir Humphrey, from the British comedy, Yes, Prime Minister demonstrate how this works here. (A must-watch for anyone with any interest in, well, anything the government might impinge upon, in my opinion. Intelligent and very funny—something you don't find that often in TV comedy.)
Note that the question in this case was about leaking top secrets, rather than, say, revealing unethical and possibly illegal practices, and it mentioned the leak to the media, rather than saying, for example, "to the public". ("Mainstream media" is a swear word to many people.) If it had asked, for example: "Based on what you've heard, do you think Edward Snowden's release of information about the NSAs surreptitious activies spying on the American public to that public was the right or wrong thing to do?", they might have gotten a quite different result.
I am way too much in love with the power and flexibility of gstreamer. VLC is what I recommend for my friends who use Win or Mac, but for my own style of random hacking around, gstreamer is a better fit.
On the other hand, I have no Qt apps installed, and no particular interest in any Qt apps I've heard of, and I'm not going to install Qt just for the sake of a jumped-up window manager. So this pretty much removes LXDE from the list of WMs/DEs I'm likely to try.
They sued because they wanted people to use Java ME instead, but if they'd actually tried to sue over Java ME, the case would never have gotten as far as it did, because Dalvik was based on Apache Harmony, which in turn was an implementation of Java SE. Not ME. There was absolutely no copying from ME, either actual or even alleged.
The patent part of the suit was more strongly related to Java ME, insofar as the patent licenses for SE didn't apply to mobile devices. However, since Google wasn't practicing their patents, that also got them nowhere.
A great many of those packages are GPL2+, which is compatible with the AGPL. Of course, that means the overall license for the binary would end up AGPL, but the original code would remain under the GPL2+ license, just as BSD code included in a GPL'd binary remains BSD-licensed.
The only projects that would be affected would be those which chose GPL2-only, which in my surveys, is a very small number. Somehow, I seriously doubt that the Linux kernel is or ever was using bdb.:)
BerkeleyDB seems to be a niche product and according to TFA
It comes standard with Perl, Python and Java, among many other things. It may appear niche because it rarely gets much mention, but it's pretty much been the standard tool used for persistent associative arrays for a long time. Of course, it's also fairly generic, and eminently replaceable. I agree that this is unlikely to be a huge problem.
Has anyone ever been sued over an open source deployment done off license?
Um, yes, it happens all the time. The owners of BusyBox, for example, have not only sued, but won several cases, for example. And Oracle sued Google, in part because Google's Dalvik was under a less restrictive license than Java's GPL—and they only lost because Google was able to show that the parts they actually copied (the API) weren't subject to copyright. But that's a clear precedent for worry about what Oracle might do.
It already was GPL-compatible, so that part hasn't changed. They've gone from a more liberal license (the old license was compatible with, among other things, the GPL v2) to a less liberal one. That's always going to piss off some people. Just look at the controversy when a project goes from BSD or MIT to GPL.
I don't know about minority, though it may come in second to Mandarin. Last I heard, though, it still had a solid lead on everything else, though Spanish and Japanese were starting to contend..
And yes, there are plenty of people—probably, I agree, a majority—who don't speak English, but English has become a sort of international Lingua Franca (which in English means common language, even though it literally translates as French Language, just for added irony). If a Japanese tourist is trying to check into a hotel in Kenya, statistically speaking, if he can communicate at all, it's almost certainly going to be in English.
But in any case, that's irrelevant, since the topic under discussion is adding a letter to English. The reason it's silly is that English already has two letters (eth and thorn) to represent th, even if they're generally archaic/obsolete. If we really wanted a separate letter for th, we could just resurrect those instead of buying whatever nonsense this clueless fellow is offering.
I just press [compose] and then t and h to get thorn (and [compose], d, h to get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth). It's not quite as simple as having a dedicated key, but then the same could be said for å, é, ì, ø, ü, ç, ñ, æ, and so on. It's certainly not any more complicated than having to hold down shift to get a capital, which is something I, at least, tend to do whenever I start a new sentence or refer to myself.:)
an essentially bloodless coup was orchestrated by the Stadtholder William of Orange
Bloodless? There's a bunch of corpses buried in Reading that might well dispute that claim. Aye, and not to mention, me laddie, there's a whole lot o' Scots and Irish who will happily kick you in the nadgers for suggesting it was bloodless.
In any case, the fact that the people of England supported the invader doesn't mean it wasn't a foreign invasion, unless you're hopelessly devoted to the myth that England hasn't been invaded since William.
If you're talking about an era where Slackware (or even SLS) existed, then you're looking too late in the history to see what might have happened to BSD if Linux hadn't existed. If it hadn't been for the existence of Linux for the hobbyist crowd, then there's a good chance those tools that were developed to allow early Linux systems to boot from floppy would have been developed for BSD instead.
Now if you want to talk about a deal-breaker--the BSD refusal to operate on a system without an FPU is what initially convinced me to go with Linux, once I got tired of the 16-bit limitations of Minix. (Although I was quite pleased with my success at getting Minix to run in an OS/2 "virtual DOS box".)
"And with his eyes he literally scoured the corners of the cell..." -- Vladimir Nabakov, Invitation to a Beheading
"the wretch did not make a single remark during dinner . . . whereas I literally blazed with wit." -- William Makepeace Thackeray, Punch magazine
"Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet." -- James Joyce, Dubliners
"‘Lift him out,’ said Squeers, after he had literally feasted his eyes in silence upon the culprit." -- Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
"Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye." -- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
"Every day with me is literally another yesterday." -- Alexander Pope, in a letter to Henry Cromwell
Now, ask me which hypthesis I find more plausible: that all these well-respected gentlemen and ladies of the arts are actually idiots? Or that some random anonymous slashdotter who claims that "the dictionary is wrong" is an idiot? I'll give you three guesses, and I hope that'll be enough...:)
Assuming you're dealing with a very simple compiler and a very simple version of init, then yes, Thompson's hack is worth worrying about. But in the real world, where init and the compiler have been rewritten almost completely from scratch several times, and change drastically even when they're not being rewritten from scratch, you'd need a degree of AI simply unavailable in this world in order to "recognize" the relevant code the way Thompson's hack did. Simple pattern matching isn't going to get you there after decades of hacking and rewriting.
But for the record, I have loaded gcc source code into a C interpreter, and used that to compile gcc, and confirmed that my resulting binary compiler was identical to one built with a normally-compiled version of gcc. I did it to stress-test the interpreter, but checking for Thompson's bug was a secondary motivation.
Really? Because people have been using "actually" correctly for a long time, and there's no evidence whatsoever of it growing a new, sarcastic meaning. How would your use of the word suddenly affect the world when everyone else's use (including mine) has not done so in all these centuries? Big ego much? (And even if it did, so what? People are remarkably good at resolving ambiguity.)
Also, referring to the metaphorical use of "literally" as misuse simply proves that you do not know your own language! Because it's not misuse. You might as well claim that using "terrific" to refer to something that doesn't cause terror is misuse. The language has changed since the 1600s (which is how long it's been since "literally" started being used metaphorically). We don't talk like Shakespeare any more. Get over it. Forsooth isn't coming back, and neither is your precious only-one-meaning version of literally.
What people who complain about the metaphoric version of "literally" mean is "ooh, I have a (false) factoid I can dangle to demonstrate my intellectual superiority!" Of course, to anyone who has the wit to open a dictionary, it actually proves the opposite. You know less about your own language than that semi-literate teenager whose perfectly correct usage annoys you so much.
When I meet someone who complains about so-called misuse of "literally", I know I've met my intellectual inferior. And damn straight, I'm smug about it!:p;)
Why should he deliberately avoid a common, standard, and centuries-old (and found in every dictionary) use of a word just to satisfy misguided peevers who don't even know their own language? If you want a word that lacks the inherent ambiguity of "literally" (and ambiguity is found in the majority of common words in English), then use "actually".
An LED lightbulb, yes. But is that still true of a combination LED/computer/radio? Frankly the whole idea seems to me to be slightly missing the point. Just how much power does this beast draw? I imagine that the LED itself is the smallest part of the load. I think I'll go with a plain, unadorned LED bulb. Geting up to turn on/off the lights is not exactly hard work.
When you're old, providing for your kids and grandkids is motivation! If you don't understand that, then you've obviously never been old, or been close to anyone who was.
Plus, fixed-length is simply the easiest and most fair solution all around. It doesn't put works-for-hire in a separate category, and means that you don't have to sit around guessing when someone's going to die. You know when it was created, so you know when it's going to enter the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Posting something on the public internet, as AT&T did, is not equivalent to keeping it in your living room, so your analogy fails. Badly. It's more like putting things out on the sidewalk in front of your house, and then getting upset because someone came along and looked at the sidewalk, instead of following your instructions to keep their eyes closed until they reached the exact GPS coordinates you sent them.
To get the answers you want, phrase the question properly. See Sir Humphrey, from the British comedy, Yes, Prime Minister demonstrate how this works here. (A must-watch for anyone with any interest in, well, anything the government might impinge upon, in my opinion. Intelligent and very funny—something you don't find that often in TV comedy.)
Note that the question in this case was about leaking top secrets, rather than, say, revealing unethical and possibly illegal practices, and it mentioned the leak to the media, rather than saying, for example, "to the public". ("Mainstream media" is a swear word to many people.) If it had asked, for example: "Based on what you've heard, do you think Edward Snowden's release of information about the NSAs surreptitious activies spying on the American public to that public was the right or wrong thing to do?", they might have gotten a quite different result.
Why? Many people prefer metres! :D
I am way too much in love with the power and flexibility of gstreamer. VLC is what I recommend for my friends who use Win or Mac, but for my own style of random hacking around, gstreamer is a better fit.
On the other hand, I have no Qt apps installed, and no particular interest in any Qt apps I've heard of, and I'm not going to install Qt just for the sake of a jumped-up window manager. So this pretty much removes LXDE from the list of WMs/DEs I'm likely to try.
They sued because they wanted people to use Java ME instead, but if they'd actually tried to sue over Java ME, the case would never have gotten as far as it did, because Dalvik was based on Apache Harmony, which in turn was an implementation of Java SE. Not ME. There was absolutely no copying from ME, either actual or even alleged.
The patent part of the suit was more strongly related to Java ME, insofar as the patent licenses for SE didn't apply to mobile devices. However, since Google wasn't practicing their patents, that also got them nowhere.
A great many of those packages are GPL2+, which is compatible with the AGPL. Of course, that means the overall license for the binary would end up AGPL, but the original code would remain under the GPL2+ license, just as BSD code included in a GPL'd binary remains BSD-licensed.
The only projects that would be affected would be those which chose GPL2-only, which in my surveys, is a very small number. Somehow, I seriously doubt that the Linux kernel is or ever was using bdb. :)
BerkeleyDB seems to be a niche product and according to TFA
It comes standard with Perl, Python and Java, among many other things. It may appear niche because it rarely gets much mention, but it's pretty much been the standard tool used for persistent associative arrays for a long time. Of course, it's also fairly generic, and eminently replaceable. I agree that this is unlikely to be a huge problem.
Has anyone ever been sued over an open source deployment done off license?
Um, yes, it happens all the time. The owners of BusyBox, for example, have not only sued, but won several cases, for example. And Oracle sued Google, in part because Google's Dalvik was under a less restrictive license than Java's GPL—and they only lost because Google was able to show that the parts they actually copied (the API) weren't subject to copyright. But that's a clear precedent for worry about what Oracle might do.
It already was GPL-compatible, so that part hasn't changed. They've gone from a more liberal license (the old license was compatible with, among other things, the GPL v2) to a less liberal one. That's always going to piss off some people. Just look at the controversy when a project goes from BSD or MIT to GPL.
I don't know about minority, though it may come in second to Mandarin. Last I heard, though, it still had a solid lead on everything else, though Spanish and Japanese were starting to contend..
And yes, there are plenty of people—probably, I agree, a majority—who don't speak English, but English has become a sort of international Lingua Franca (which in English means common language, even though it literally translates as French Language, just for added irony). If a Japanese tourist is trying to check into a hotel in Kenya, statistically speaking, if he can communicate at all, it's almost certainly going to be in English.
But in any case, that's irrelevant, since the topic under discussion is adding a letter to English. The reason it's silly is that English already has two letters (eth and thorn) to represent th, even if they're generally archaic/obsolete. If we really wanted a separate letter for th, we could just resurrect those instead of buying whatever nonsense this clueless fellow is offering.
I just press [compose] and then t and h to get thorn (and [compose], d, h to get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth). It's not quite as simple as having a dedicated key, but then the same could be said for å, é, ì, ø, ü, ç, ñ, æ, and so on. It's certainly not any more complicated than having to hold down shift to get a capital, which is something I, at least, tend to do whenever I start a new sentence or refer to myself. :)
an essentially bloodless coup was orchestrated by the Stadtholder William of Orange
Bloodless? There's a bunch of corpses buried in Reading that might well dispute that claim. Aye, and not to mention, me laddie, there's a whole lot o' Scots and Irish who will happily kick you in the nadgers for suggesting it was bloodless.
In any case, the fact that the people of England supported the invader doesn't mean it wasn't a foreign invasion, unless you're hopelessly devoted to the myth that England hasn't been invaded since William.
How many satellites do you think you get for one million dollars?
You're supposed to say that with your pinky held to your mouth: [dramatic pause] "One million dollars!"
If you're talking about an era where Slackware (or even SLS) existed, then you're looking too late in the history to see what might have happened to BSD if Linux hadn't existed. If it hadn't been for the existence of Linux for the hobbyist crowd, then there's a good chance those tools that were developed to allow early Linux systems to boot from floppy would have been developed for BSD instead.
Now if you want to talk about a deal-breaker--the BSD refusal to operate on a system without an FPU is what initially convinced me to go with Linux, once I got tired of the 16-bit limitations of Minix. (Although I was quite pleased with my success at getting Minix to run in an OS/2 "virtual DOS box".)
Doesn't change the fact that you can type rm /etc/issue without any negative impact on system performance!
"And with his eyes he literally scoured the corners of the cell..." -- Vladimir Nabakov, Invitation to a Beheading
"the wretch did not make a single remark during dinner . . . whereas I literally blazed with wit." -- William Makepeace Thackeray, Punch magazine
"Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet." -- James Joyce, Dubliners
"‘Lift him out,’ said Squeers, after he had literally feasted his eyes in silence upon the culprit." -- Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
"Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye." -- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
"Every day with me is literally another yesterday." -- Alexander Pope, in a letter to Henry Cromwell
Now, ask me which hypthesis I find more plausible: that all these well-respected gentlemen and ladies of the arts are actually idiots? Or that some random anonymous slashdotter who claims that "the dictionary is wrong" is an idiot? I'll give you three guesses, and I hope that'll be enough... :)
You can use words like "really" or "actually", which don't feature the polysemy of "literally".
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.html
Examples from the 1760s, posted by Prof. Ben Zimmer.
Assuming you're dealing with a very simple compiler and a very simple version of init, then yes, Thompson's hack is worth worrying about. But in the real world, where init and the compiler have been rewritten almost completely from scratch several times, and change drastically even when they're not being rewritten from scratch, you'd need a degree of AI simply unavailable in this world in order to "recognize" the relevant code the way Thompson's hack did. Simple pattern matching isn't going to get you there after decades of hacking and rewriting.
But for the record, I have loaded gcc source code into a C interpreter, and used that to compile gcc, and confirmed that my resulting binary compiler was identical to one built with a normally-compiled version of gcc. I did it to stress-test the interpreter, but checking for Thompson's bug was a secondary motivation.
Really? Because people have been using "actually" correctly for a long time, and there's no evidence whatsoever of it growing a new, sarcastic meaning. How would your use of the word suddenly affect the world when everyone else's use (including mine) has not done so in all these centuries? Big ego much? (And even if it did, so what? People are remarkably good at resolving ambiguity.)
Also, referring to the metaphorical use of "literally" as misuse simply proves that you do not know your own language! Because it's not misuse. You might as well claim that using "terrific" to refer to something that doesn't cause terror is misuse. The language has changed since the 1600s (which is how long it's been since "literally" started being used metaphorically). We don't talk like Shakespeare any more. Get over it. Forsooth isn't coming back, and neither is your precious only-one-meaning version of literally.
What people who complain about the metaphoric version of "literally" mean is "ooh, I have a (false) factoid I can dangle to demonstrate my intellectual superiority!" Of course, to anyone who has the wit to open a dictionary, it actually proves the opposite. You know less about your own language than that semi-literate teenager whose perfectly correct usage annoys you so much.
When I meet someone who complains about so-called misuse of "literally", I know I've met my intellectual inferior. And damn straight, I'm smug about it! :p ;)
Why should he deliberately avoid a common, standard, and centuries-old (and found in every dictionary) use of a word just to satisfy misguided peevers who don't even know their own language? If you want a word that lacks the inherent ambiguity of "literally" (and ambiguity is found in the majority of common words in English), then use "actually".
An LED lightbulb, yes. But is that still true of a combination LED/computer/radio? Frankly the whole idea seems to me to be slightly missing the point. Just how much power does this beast draw? I imagine that the LED itself is the smallest part of the load. I think I'll go with a plain, unadorned LED bulb. Geting up to turn on/off the lights is not exactly hard work.
When you're old, providing for your kids and grandkids is motivation! If you don't understand that, then you've obviously never been old, or been close to anyone who was.
Plus, fixed-length is simply the easiest and most fair solution all around. It doesn't put works-for-hire in a separate category, and means that you don't have to sit around guessing when someone's going to die. You know when it was created, so you know when it's going to enter the public domain.
Unless the GIT repository is in your home and not connected to the internet, the NSA can snoop it.
That's assuming they can break the SSH or SSL encryption. Which is possible, I suppose, but hardly a given.
If you're not using SSH or a VPN, then anyone can snoop it. It's about as secure as running a vanilla telnetd.