You'd have a good argument if the word problems in most textbooks weren't so incredibly stupid and utterly fail to show any relevance to real life. (If you don't already know this, you haven't read enough Richard Feynman.) Who cares at what exact minute to trains happen to pass each other? If you want relevant, ask 'em if they'll be able to make a connection between the two trains, or get stuck on the platform overnight.
Actually, for a commercial entity, the GPL (or other copyleft license) is really the best choice--for releasing their own code! It means that your competitors can't make and sell a version with proprietary enhancements and gain a competitive edge on you based on your own code. Any improvements made by your competitors have to be shared with you, meaning that both of you gain an advantage over any third competitor who isn't participating in the sharing.
Say what? Debian is the only major Linux vendor to offer you the option of using a BSD-licensed kernel! They've got absolutely no preference among free/libre licenses.
That's nonsense. A normal month has 30 or 31 days. If you're paid monthly (or bi-monthly), you're basically getting paid for 2-3 days you didn't work in February. On a leap year, that merely reduces the number of days you're overpaid for by 1-2.
Their calendar ending is extremely significant! To anyone running a Mayan computer. Those things are all going to crash hard this year! It's going to be like Y2K all over!:)
You've got that backwards. The project was scheduled to be killed, which would have resulted in all the engineers on the project getting fired (or moved to other projects where they would displace other engineers, who would then get fired). As it is, they're keeping a skeleton staff. So open source saved jobs.
Furthermore, the fact that this project is going to continue in some form opens up the potential for many many more jobs at many other companies--if it's successful, people are going to be porting apps to it like mad. (Admittedly, that's a big if.)
I didn't say the US had laws like the UK used to--I said it had similar laws to what the UK has. According to the original poster, the UK no longer has the move-as-far-as-possible-from-the-meridian law, so saying that the US doesn't have such a law does nothing to invalidate my point.
I admit I glossed over the whole state-law thing, but to the best of my knowledge, the laws I actually mentioned are more common than not, so pointing out the distinction would have only complicated and confused matters. But perhaps passing on the right is allowed in more states than I thought, so I'll give you a point for that. But even in states where it is against the law, that law is generally ignored and unenforced, for the most part, which was my point.
Actually, US laws are pretty much the same as what you describe: the lane closest to the median is reserved for passing, and what you call "undertaking" is illegal. We also have a law requiring you to change lanes to allow someone to overtake, if you can safely do so. There are signs posted all over the place saying "Slower Traffic Keep Right" to remind people of this law (remember, right is farther from the median in the US).
The difference is that these laws are basically ignored by both drivers and police in the US.
See, to post your fact-filled response, you actually had to RTFA, and you had to take my silly post seriously. To post my silly joke, I only had to read the slashdot summary. I win!:)
BTW, check your math. It's between 2 and 100 times for Win v Linux, not between 2 and 10. 22,350 is more than 100 times greater than 200. Likewise, it's between 2 and 100 with Linux v BSD. Also, chroot is part of GNU coreutils, so with a stock, vanilla GNU/Linux system, the answer seems to be 605, which means the normal, default factor is 36 between Win and Linux, and 6 between Linux and BSD.
And I still haven't glanced at TFA, or made a serious suggestion anywhere.:)
Do you know what "willful" means? The first definition is "said or done on purpose; deliberate". Which fits perfectly with PP's usage. You're probably thinking of the second definition ("obstinately bent on having one's own way"), but that's not the only, or even the most common, meaning.
It's really funny (bordering on ironic) how many self-appointed "grammar nazis" are completely ignorant of polysemy, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of common English nouns and verbs display it. It's even funnier how many self-appointed grammar nazis can't be arsed to pick up a dictionary or reputable usage guide.
1) Central is an hour earlier than Eastern, and the eastern zone is the oldest-settled and most populous region of the US. By showing things an hour earlier in the central zone, they're actually showing them at the same time in both eastern and central, which is easier, especially if you have a mix of live and pre-recorded shows. (Plus, it greatly reduces the number of people who can have shows "spoiled" by phone calls from the east).
2) Central is more rural and agrarian, and farmers tend to get up earlier and go to bed earlier, so by broadcasting the shows an hour earlier, they get a larger audience than they would otherwise.
I find the first a little more plausible, but I'm really not sure.
You forgot: self-diagnosed "Aspie" with an unearned superiority complex.
Ironically, in my experience, the majority of self-diagnosed "Aspies" seem to be perfectly normal people who chose to focus on academics to the exclusion of social skills because they didn't have what it takes to master both. Nevertheless, geeks with social skills are, in my experience, the vast majority. For every John Nash, there are dozens of Richard Feynmans. Asocial geeks tend not to realize this because, well, because they don't get out much. (And because they watch too many Hollywood movies.):)
IBM has already moved for summary judgement and the court has ruled that there are enough issues of law for the case to proceed.
No. First of all, this is a complex case with dozens of claims on both sides, and dozens of motions for summary judgment have been filed, but the one you're probably thinking of is IBM's motion to dismiss SCO's infringement claims. That has not been ruled on. The basis for the motion was two-fold: A) SCO was not sufficiently specific about where the infringement occurred, and B) SCO didn't own the code in the first place and had no standing to sue. Point A was used to throw out about 90% of SCO's alleged evidence, leaving approx. 300 lines of code, but the motion (and the trial) was then suspending pending the outcome of SCO v Novell. Once the trial resumes, the question of ownership is almost certainly going to be one of the first things looked at, and it's nearly certain that IBM will finally win their motion.
Second of all, you have the "issues of law" thing backwards. The judge decides issues of law, while a jury decides issues of fact. Issues of law are exactly what summary judgment is intended to resolve--and legal claims almost always involve both matters of law and fact. For the infringement, it seems like there will be no facts left in dispute--SCO doesn't own the code they claim was infringed, and thus, as a matter of law, has no standing to sue. (Although it's possible that those 300 lines of code will re-appear when it comes time to discuss IBM's Lantham Act claims, as SCO desperately tries to show that they had some basis for all the horrific public statements they made about IBM.)
Darl was just a hired gun all along, brought in by the real villains of the piece who have been doing their best to hide behind the curtain of the corporate veil, but almost certainly include Ralph Yarro as a (if not the) real mastermind. The fact that Canopy told Yarro to go away and take The SCO Group with him is pretty strong (albeit circumstantial) evidence that Yarro is deeply involved in the whole plot.
Darl just did what he was paid to do. Sure, he shouldn't get off scott-free, but trying to paint him as the villain who deserves all our fury is exactly what the real bad guys want.
Have you read Brooks? Set a zombie on fire, and now you're facing a flaming zombie, lurching around, trying to eat your brains, and, incidentally, setting everything around it on fire--possibly including you.
Before you try fire as an anti-zombie measure, you need to find out whether you're dealing with a Pratchett zombie or a Brooks/Romero type zombie. One key difference is that Pratchett zombies are smart. SCO? Not so much.:)
Say what? The big three US broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) all have three hours of prime-time, shown from 8-11 everywhere except the central time zone. This is the way its been done for decades, and nothing has changed. There's no "distant past" about it. Fox only produces two hours of prime-time, so Fox affiliates may show news at 10. The only broadcast stations that show "9pm news" are independents (or maybe affiliates of The CW--I don't really pay that much attention), and Fox affiliates in the central time zone.
"Film at 11" means the news footage is going to be shown during the 11 pm news broadcast. If the phrase doesn't make sense to you, you either live in the central time zone, outside the US, or don't pay much attention to broadcast television. All of which are reasonable excuses for ignorance, but not for posting nonsense.
I don't mind grammar nazis; what I do mind are people who espouse incorrect grammar based on ridiculous, made-up rules that don't actually apply to English.
fewer does refer to number among things that are counted [...] less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.
(Emphasis mine.)
As an obvious example, you will never hear someone say, "I made fewer than $50k last year," even though money is perfectly countable. You'll never hear it because it's ungrammatical, even though it follows your made-up rule. The actual rules are non-trivial, which is why M-W devotes a couple of pages to 'em.
The same with wikipedia, if they agreed to allow others to mirror their content, they wouldn't need to ask for donations.
Wikipedia does allow others to mirror their content! Which rather throws a spanner in your argument. As for Linux distros, the traffic is negligible; the free distros can get by on donations from big companies that are already paying for enough bandwidth to make the distro-related traffic a drop in the bucket. Debian, for example, has relied for years on hosting services provided by HP (which uses a lot of Debian internally). If something changed--if, for example, Debian became as popular as Wikipedia--you'd see Debian out there begging for funds too.
Except for all those asexual life-forms, like amoebae and bacteria--the vast majority of life on this planet.
100% fatality rate
Unless you're talking about the heat-death of the universe, then the 100% fatality thing is pretty much limited to sexual creatures. If you are talking about the heat-death of the universe, then carbon atoms are as close to being alive by your definition as E. Coli.
Hmm, that's a fair point. OTOH, if your virus were intended to target one or more GPL'd programs specifically (if, for example, MS decided to release a virus to go after Cygnus), then it could be considered an attempt to distribute a derivative work, just as the original NeXT Objective-C compiler was. NeXT carefully tried to separate their front end from the rest of GCC, and make the users link it in manually, but after their lawyers talked to the FSF lawyers, they quickly backed down and released their formerly binary-only front end under the GPL. Which is why GCC includes an Objective-C compiler today. On paper, it may look like NeXT had found a perfect way around the GPL, but the law takes intent into account, and it was clearly their intent to distribute a derivative work, even though technically all they distributed was their own work and a set of instructions.
Note that this could be a problem for anyone writing a virus to target GNU/Linux, at least if it were at all dependent on either the kernel or core GNU facilities. A POSIX-compliant or Single-Unix-Spec-compliant virus that just happened to be able to target Linux, though, would probably be ok. But since viruses often take advantage of flaws in an implementation, it would probably be a lot harder to create a successful virus that ignored implementation completely.
Heck, in the end, it's probably just easier and safer to go ahead and GPL your virus. There's no downside, and it may have unexpected benefits.:)
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have a good argument if the word problems in most textbooks weren't so incredibly stupid and utterly fail to show any relevance to real life. (If you don't already know this, you haven't read enough Richard Feynman.) Who cares at what exact minute to trains happen to pass each other? If you want relevant, ask 'em if they'll be able to make a connection between the two trains, or get stuck on the platform overnight.
Actually, for a commercial entity, the GPL (or other copyleft license) is really the best choice--for releasing their own code! It means that your competitors can't make and sell a version with proprietary enhancements and gain a competitive edge on you based on your own code. Any improvements made by your competitors have to be shared with you, meaning that both of you gain an advantage over any third competitor who isn't participating in the sharing.
Say what? Debian is the only major Linux vendor to offer you the option of using a BSD-licensed kernel! They've got absolutely no preference among free/libre licenses.
Then he'll get his wish--the next protest won't be about SOPA, but rather about the new bill! :)
That's nonsense. A normal month has 30 or 31 days. If you're paid monthly (or bi-monthly), you're basically getting paid for 2-3 days you didn't work in February. On a leap year, that merely reduces the number of days you're overpaid for by 1-2.
Their calendar ending is extremely significant! To anyone running a Mayan computer. Those things are all going to crash hard this year! It's going to be like Y2K all over! :)
You've got that backwards. The project was scheduled to be killed, which would have resulted in all the engineers on the project getting fired (or moved to other projects where they would displace other engineers, who would then get fired). As it is, they're keeping a skeleton staff. So open source saved jobs.
Furthermore, the fact that this project is going to continue in some form opens up the potential for many many more jobs at many other companies--if it's successful, people are going to be porting apps to it like mad. (Admittedly, that's a big if.)
You have a reasonable argument, but if it were purely about danger, the police would do more to enforce anti-tailgating laws.
I didn't say the US had laws like the UK used to--I said it had similar laws to what the UK has. According to the original poster, the UK no longer has the move-as-far-as-possible-from-the-meridian law, so saying that the US doesn't have such a law does nothing to invalidate my point.
I admit I glossed over the whole state-law thing, but to the best of my knowledge, the laws I actually mentioned are more common than not, so pointing out the distinction would have only complicated and confused matters. But perhaps passing on the right is allowed in more states than I thought, so I'll give you a point for that. But even in states where it is against the law, that law is generally ignored and unenforced, for the most part, which was my point.
Actually, US laws are pretty much the same as what you describe: the lane closest to the median is reserved for passing, and what you call "undertaking" is illegal. We also have a law requiring you to change lanes to allow someone to overtake, if you can safely do so. There are signs posted all over the place saying "Slower Traffic Keep Right" to remind people of this law (remember, right is farther from the median in the US).
The difference is that these laws are basically ignored by both drivers and police in the US.
See, to post your fact-filled response, you actually had to RTFA, and you had to take my silly post seriously. To post my silly joke, I only had to read the slashdot summary. I win! :)
BTW, check your math. It's between 2 and 100 times for Win v Linux, not between 2 and 10. 22,350 is more than 100 times greater than 200. Likewise, it's between 2 and 100 with Linux v BSD. Also, chroot is part of GNU coreutils, so with a stock, vanilla GNU/Linux system, the answer seems to be 605, which means the normal, default factor is 36 between Win and Linux, and 6 between Linux and BSD.
And I still haven't glanced at TFA, or made a serious suggestion anywhere. :)
So, we have our first solid metric: it's 220 times as hard to make Windows secure as it is for BSD or Linux.
(Xtifr runs and hides before the angry crowd of humorless astroturfers with mod points arrives.) :)
Do you know what "willful" means? The first definition is "said or done on purpose; deliberate". Which fits perfectly with PP's usage. You're probably thinking of the second definition ("obstinately bent on having one's own way"), but that's not the only, or even the most common, meaning.
It's really funny (bordering on ironic) how many self-appointed "grammar nazis" are completely ignorant of polysemy, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of common English nouns and verbs display it. It's even funnier how many self-appointed grammar nazis can't be arsed to pick up a dictionary or reputable usage guide.
Wow, you've sure got a lot of digits in your slashdot ID for someone who once had a bang path! :) ...!apple!darkside!xtifr
Let's face it, the universes and everything seems pretty improbable
Understanding statistics failure. You can't argue about probability based on a sample size of one.
I've heard two explanations--take your pick:
1) Central is an hour earlier than Eastern, and the eastern zone is the oldest-settled and most populous region of the US. By showing things an hour earlier in the central zone, they're actually showing them at the same time in both eastern and central, which is easier, especially if you have a mix of live and pre-recorded shows. (Plus, it greatly reduces the number of people who can have shows "spoiled" by phone calls from the east).
2) Central is more rural and agrarian, and farmers tend to get up earlier and go to bed earlier, so by broadcasting the shows an hour earlier, they get a larger audience than they would otherwise.
I find the first a little more plausible, but I'm really not sure.
You forgot: self-diagnosed "Aspie" with an unearned superiority complex.
Ironically, in my experience, the majority of self-diagnosed "Aspies" seem to be perfectly normal people who chose to focus on academics to the exclusion of social skills because they didn't have what it takes to master both. Nevertheless, geeks with social skills are, in my experience, the vast majority. For every John Nash, there are dozens of Richard Feynmans. Asocial geeks tend not to realize this because, well, because they don't get out much. (And because they watch too many Hollywood movies.) :)
IBM has already moved for summary judgement and the court has ruled that there are enough issues of law for the case to proceed.
No. First of all, this is a complex case with dozens of claims on both sides, and dozens of motions for summary judgment have been filed, but the one you're probably thinking of is IBM's motion to dismiss SCO's infringement claims. That has not been ruled on. The basis for the motion was two-fold: A) SCO was not sufficiently specific about where the infringement occurred, and B) SCO didn't own the code in the first place and had no standing to sue. Point A was used to throw out about 90% of SCO's alleged evidence, leaving approx. 300 lines of code, but the motion (and the trial) was then suspending pending the outcome of SCO v Novell. Once the trial resumes, the question of ownership is almost certainly going to be one of the first things looked at, and it's nearly certain that IBM will finally win their motion.
Second of all, you have the "issues of law" thing backwards. The judge decides issues of law, while a jury decides issues of fact. Issues of law are exactly what summary judgment is intended to resolve--and legal claims almost always involve both matters of law and fact. For the infringement, it seems like there will be no facts left in dispute--SCO doesn't own the code they claim was infringed, and thus, as a matter of law, has no standing to sue. (Although it's possible that those 300 lines of code will re-appear when it comes time to discuss IBM's Lantham Act claims, as SCO desperately tries to show that they had some basis for all the horrific public statements they made about IBM.)
Darl was just a hired gun all along, brought in by the real villains of the piece who have been doing their best to hide behind the curtain of the corporate veil, but almost certainly include Ralph Yarro as a (if not the) real mastermind. The fact that Canopy told Yarro to go away and take The SCO Group with him is pretty strong (albeit circumstantial) evidence that Yarro is deeply involved in the whole plot.
Darl just did what he was paid to do. Sure, he shouldn't get off scott-free, but trying to paint him as the villain who deserves all our fury is exactly what the real bad guys want.
Have you read Brooks? Set a zombie on fire, and now you're facing a flaming zombie, lurching around, trying to eat your brains, and, incidentally, setting everything around it on fire--possibly including you.
Before you try fire as an anti-zombie measure, you need to find out whether you're dealing with a Pratchett zombie or a Brooks/Romero type zombie. One key difference is that Pratchett zombies are smart. SCO? Not so much. :)
Say what? The big three US broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) all have three hours of prime-time, shown from 8-11 everywhere except the central time zone. This is the way its been done for decades, and nothing has changed. There's no "distant past" about it. Fox only produces two hours of prime-time, so Fox affiliates may show news at 10. The only broadcast stations that show "9pm news" are independents (or maybe affiliates of The CW--I don't really pay that much attention), and Fox affiliates in the central time zone.
"Film at 11" means the news footage is going to be shown during the 11 pm news broadcast. If the phrase doesn't make sense to you, you either live in the central time zone, outside the US, or don't pay much attention to broadcast television. All of which are reasonable excuses for ignorance, but not for posting nonsense.
Bzzt, thanks for playing!
I don't mind grammar nazis; what I do mind are people who espouse incorrect grammar based on ridiculous, made-up rules that don't actually apply to English.
Here's what the M-W Dictionary of English Usage has to say:
fewer does refer to number among things that are counted [...] less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.
(Emphasis mine.)
As an obvious example, you will never hear someone say, "I made fewer than $50k last year," even though money is perfectly countable. You'll never hear it because it's ungrammatical, even though it follows your made-up rule. The actual rules are non-trivial, which is why M-W devotes a couple of pages to 'em.
The same with wikipedia, if they agreed to allow others to mirror their content, they wouldn't need to ask for donations.
Wikipedia does allow others to mirror their content! Which rather throws a spanner in your argument. As for Linux distros, the traffic is negligible; the free distros can get by on donations from big companies that are already paying for enough bandwidth to make the distro-related traffic a drop in the bucket. Debian, for example, has relied for years on hosting services provided by HP (which uses a lot of Debian internally). If something changed--if, for example, Debian became as popular as Wikipedia--you'd see Debian out there begging for funds too.
Amusing, but...
sexually transmitted
Except for all those asexual life-forms, like amoebae and bacteria--the vast majority of life on this planet.
100% fatality rate
Unless you're talking about the heat-death of the universe, then the 100% fatality thing is pretty much limited to sexual creatures. If you are talking about the heat-death of the universe, then carbon atoms are as close to being alive by your definition as E. Coli.
Hmm, that's a fair point. OTOH, if your virus were intended to target one or more GPL'd programs specifically (if, for example, MS decided to release a virus to go after Cygnus), then it could be considered an attempt to distribute a derivative work, just as the original NeXT Objective-C compiler was. NeXT carefully tried to separate their front end from the rest of GCC, and make the users link it in manually, but after their lawyers talked to the FSF lawyers, they quickly backed down and released their formerly binary-only front end under the GPL. Which is why GCC includes an Objective-C compiler today. On paper, it may look like NeXT had found a perfect way around the GPL, but the law takes intent into account, and it was clearly their intent to distribute a derivative work, even though technically all they distributed was their own work and a set of instructions.
Note that this could be a problem for anyone writing a virus to target GNU/Linux, at least if it were at all dependent on either the kernel or core GNU facilities. A POSIX-compliant or Single-Unix-Spec-compliant virus that just happened to be able to target Linux, though, would probably be ok. But since viruses often take advantage of flaws in an implementation, it would probably be a lot harder to create a successful virus that ignored implementation completely.
Heck, in the end, it's probably just easier and safer to go ahead and GPL your virus. There's no downside, and it may have unexpected benefits. :)