technological progress beyond building ourselves more handheld gadgets to entertain ourselves with, which aren't going to help us much with upcoming resource and energy shortages.
These "handheld gadgets" gave us Li-Ion batteries, which made all-electric cars practical... That's pretty damn huge.
We need to be building big superconducting structures, vacuum tubes, maglev tracks, etc.
These kinds of things are called "prestige projects"... meaning, in-short, they're massively impractical, but SOUND impressive, and get lots of press.
Frankly, vocal proponents of maglevs are also preventing us from just developing traditional high-speed rail, which France has shown to be imminently practical, and still very fast. Instead, we've got more and more cars on the road, because a practical solution isn't flashy enough for people like you.
We don't NEED maglevs to space. Materials have reached the strengths needed for a space elevator, they just need more R&D, and THAT kind of fundamental materials research is where we should be putting our money. I guarantee you'll get more bang from it than you would building a maglev track.
The editing done by Topher Grace is typically referred to as "Polishing A Turd".
Hold on! Good editing can mean the difference between a masterpiece and a turd.
Ironically, the original cut of Star Wars (EP4) was the penultimate example of this... There are several people who will attest that the first edit was horrible.
Not much more info at that source, but it's out there should anyone wish to take the time to look for it.
Now, I admit I have a hard time believing EP1-3 can be recut to be decent, particularly using the theatrical release, and not all the raw footage available. But never-the-less, the point remains... editing isn't "polishing a turd", it's so fundamental that it can make or break even the best of films.
These labels are a total joke here - seems like every building and half the brands of cars have these stupid warning labels.
Since the law was passed, I was amazed to find the most mundane things like PIECES OF WOOD are known to cause cancer. Of course this is because of the chemicals used to treat them.
Does that make it a joke? I certainly don't think so... I've taken steps to limit my exposure in response, and would be change my buying habits to prefer products without that label, if it was possible to find any.
Clearly, Coke/Pepsi don't think it's a joke, or at least don't think the public at large will find it all that amusing... Hence the change in formula. I'd call that a real, positive effect, all around.
Admittedly, the labels on every building, everywhere, is a bit of a joke, at least because it's just a boilerplate message that doesn't require any specificity as to what the problem is.
These are all things that would be better done with a local app, perhaps via a ssh tunnel.
WTF is a local SSH tunnel?
Anyhow, I have no idea what you're disagreeing with... How would you suggest running these GUI apps over an SSH tunnel without this X11 port to Android?
There are simply NO NATIVE ANDROID APPS that can do what I've listed. X11 is strictly required. Before this port of X11, there were NO OPTIONS AT ALL, so I'm very happy to see it coming along.
One burning question: will we be able to get audible turn-by-turn directions if Apple moves to OSM?
Why don't you just go download the FREE MapQuest app for iPhone (or Android) ? It uses OSM, does navigation and POI only a bit worse than Google, uses TTS for the audible part (not as good as paid Nav apps, but still okay), etc.
So I don't really understand the question at all...
I benchmarked this about a year ago on a couple RHEL5 servers. A particular application wrote out a few MBytes of tmp files everytime the application was asked to sort some data... which was so often we were talking hundreds of megabytes... vastly more IO than/tmp on a normal system would ever see.
Anyhow, long story short, moving/tmp to tmpfs (RAM) made absolutely no performance improvement at all. In fact it was a small slowdown... I assumed this was because it was pushing some buffers/cache out of physical, but I admit the effect was small enough to just have been a margin of error.
This also agrees with some coding I did before, changing code from writing out temporary files (not in/tmp), to piping the data directly. After putting the time in on that, trying for any speed-up, I also found no measurable speed-up.
Long story short, I mount/tmp as async,noatime, and never give RAM disks a second though since. Without some real world benchmarks (Firefox start-up times, or something), I don't buy the premise that tiny bits of disk IO in temporary files is a bottleneck for anything.
We're right on the verge of moving off of petroleum, and having self driving cars... That's vastly better than a flying car.
But, flying cars may not be too far off. The much belated FAA upgrades are finally going to put in-place the technology needed to have self-regulating low-altitude airspace. From there we just need to keep reducing the weight of cars, and decrease the cost of making autogyro components.
Optical computers are growing ever closer, and in the mean-time, there's no shortage of dramatic advancements in traditional microprocessors, so I don't see the problem.
As for a pay raise, I suggest you go find a new company... Even as I keep hearing how bad the economy is, my salary keeps rising, significantly. Switching companies a couple times should do it... I don't see why people stay with a company, long-term, when corporate america has made it clear they will drop you the second they can replace you with someone else for 10% less money. Just go look around, you might find a better fit, where your skills aree simply worth much more.
one is a subcompact hatchback and the other a midsize truck.
Yes, but what happens when people start deciding they shouldn't have to pay for the same service on both devices? Or apps? Or just decide that they just don't need the "cargo room" of the "truck" and their phone can do everything their tablet can do, and want to save the not insignificant cost.
Plus, it used to be that phones had 2" screens, but that just keeps on growing. Dell even released a 5" tablet some time back, to pretty good reviews about how superior it was for one-handed operation compared to 7 or 10 inch tablets. Now, the largest phones are up to that same size, and the disctinction between small tablet and large phone is nonexistent.
the VNC protocol tends to be less bandwidth-intensive than raw X, and it preserves my session in case I get disconnected.
Now that we have X11 on Android, there's no reason an NX client can't (FINALLY) be ported to Android. NX completely blows away VNC on bandwidth, as well as responsiveness, redraw times, etc. It also preserves sessions like VNC, and has many features VNC lacks. Also, SSH is fundamentally built-in to NX, so you don't need to set up any port forwarding yourself.
Hell, I sometimes watch videos over X11 forwarding... Don't expect to ever see that work well with VNC.
What can you do with X that you can't do with ssh?
How about browing web pages on intranets? Text-mode web browsers suck. I love the UI of links2, and can't imagine why nobody else is copying the keyboard shortcuts it uses. However, I can't even get past the login prompt on most web pages. I love being able to pop out my Android slider wherever I am and SSH in and do real work, but not being able to get in to the company Wiki, where all my notes are, or fire up the Nagios web interface and just see what the problem is, feels extremely constraining... often I have to jump over to a laptop, just to look-up one line of info.
How about actually running Xterm? The cheap putty imitators do pretty well, but nothing else comes close to the features of the namesake vt terminal emulator. To be specific, I've had to do a lot of work with low-level details of terminal escape sequences to get tons of legacy (not VT100) programs working on modern systems, and XTerm was the one and only option that picks up all the different keyboard scancodes, can render all kinds of crazy escape sequences, and has special features like being able to send codes to change the font family & size, change the terminal's colors, etc. Quite simply, to run just about any of our applications at my company, you need to run the real, original XTerm. (Only thing even XTerm doesn't do is auto-scale the font/dpi when the window is resized like proprietary options, instead of increasing the rows/column count).
How about running NX client on your phone? Getting extremely good remote desktop performance, using all your desktop apps like you were there, and able to just disconnect and reconnect the session from your phone to/from other devices as needed?
How about being able to remote-in and run a REAL email app? You got a command-line replacement for Ooutlook I don't know about?
How about remotely running an IM app? Pidgin has a nice plugin that supports SIPE well, connecting me to my office from my puny phone or my android tablet like I'm there, and can pretend I'm working (from home) when I'm out on the beach, or driving around, running errands?
How about coupling it with a keyboard and just plain using any cheap old android tablet as a (wireless) display device for any of my headless machines, letting me do anything and everything, while walking around my house, or the office? That's the beauty of X11 after all. And NX just makes it more efficient...
Apparently you can't commit a crime against a rich person, unless you become one in the process.
You're way off. In this case the fact that he made a decent amount of money off of the fraud COMPLETELY undercuts his claim of this being a "freedom of information" situation, where he just reported on a known exploit, or some such.
We've heard enough cases here, of legitimate researchers facing unjustified prosecution at the behest of corporate interests, that those in the know have become highly suspicious of all such government actions. His substantial money-making just makes it clear he's certainly not in the same situation by any means.
Actually, much of the American military technology has been developed in Israel.
SOME has, but let's not go overboard. No matter how advanced you may think they are, we're talking about a very small population here. They CAN'T possibly have a very big impact.
Moreover, the 'gifts' to which you refer had to be spent on American companies. So the Israelis can't go and buy better equipment elsewhere much as they might like.
The total is actually estimated at 75%. And it's not as if that makes it cease to exist. These are still very real gifts to support Israel.
Try this one:
"There has been [US] economic aid to Israel every year since 1949"
For the past several years, these grants have totaled about 2.5 billion. That's not an insignificant percentage of their GDP. They can't just up and do without it. They've got significant debt and trade deficits already. And that's just the obvious, most overt aid the US provides.
The state of Israel is perfectly viable given its massive contribution to global technology, agriculture and health.
Your statement means absolutely nothing. It doesn't change the fact that they'd be bankrupt without US aid. And it's not as if this is MY personal opinion... This fact has been stated by a large number of analysts and officials.
I very much doubt I'll change your obviously closed mind on the subject
The fact that you don't like the facts I've listed, doesn't make me closed-minded. In fact all indications are that I am vastly better informed about the subject than you are.
It certainly isn't any Israelis shouting "Death to America"...
First of all, our support of Israel is the #1 reason there are so many Arabs that hate the US, so your claim is incredibly empty.
Additionally, Palestine is in Israel. I'm sure there's plenty of people there who hate the US. Worst of all, I can't say they're reasons are invalid, unlike most.
Which has what to do with the United States? If Israel truly believes that it's existence is threatened then they can do something about it themselves.
If Israel does "something about it themselves" they will do so with US aircraft, bombs, etc. Most of their advanced weapons were basically gifts from the US, and US funding has long been the only thing even keeping the state of Israel viable.
I've heard your complaints before, and it's irrelevant. Your figures are dishonest, anyhow.
If you don't want a smart phone, don't get one. You don't need to chime-in every time to point out how cheap you are, and how you don't understand why you might want a smart phone. 50% of the population does, and that number is sure to keep growing. Nobody is trying to force you to upgrade.
The price came down a couple years ago. You can get an Android slider for $99, and Virgin Mobile unlimited data (they've been threatening to cap it for some time) with about 300 minutes included for $35/month. Boost Mobile is $40-55/month. Other pre-paid services are nearly as cheap.
If you're paying $80/month for your cell phone service, you're probably an idiot, who is a slave to advertising and doesn't know how to shop around.
Absolutely everything you said is complete nonsense...
Skinny is fashionable now for the same reason being heavy was hundreds of years ago.
No. Fat was an indicator of weath... like a luxury/sports car. It was never actually considered attractive.
Fat is the opposite of attractive now because it's unhealthy. You don't pick an obese woman to marry these days because you don't want to find her dead at 45.
That's not why at all. Attractiveness is tied to ideal body ratios, and other biological indicators of fertility. You can be overweight and attractive if you're stomache is smaller than your hips & chest, but generally, obese means you're large in all the wrong places.
This problem of glorifying anorexia will go away when we solve the obesity epidemic.
This comment makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Anorexia was a problem decades ago, before obesity was an issue, and it will continue to be an issue long after it gets resolved.
Of course, I don't buy the 'thought crime' solution at all, but your theories on the subject aree completely nonsensical as well.
This is for one simple reason: most hackers don't need "BigData".
Perhaps if the typical hacker had a cluster of servers to play with, this would change.
"Most hackers" don't need a lot of things that are, never-the-less developed as successful open source projects. Anybody think there's a huge audience for DReaM?
Storage is getting big... Even a tiny shop can afford obscene amounts of storage. Each 2U server can have 6 x 2TB SATA (3.5") drives pretty inexpensively. As soon as you've got a dataset that needs more space than you can store on one of those, you'd benefit from thesee "big data" solutions, rather than the standby (more expensive) solution of "throw in a monster SAN".
And you don't even need that much infrastructure. The virtual servers (cloud) service providers aren't very expensive, particularly when you don't care about SLA, and will give you as big of a cluster "to play with" as you could want.
There is a famous law which restricts the freedom of others to restrict your freedom to speak your mind.
No such thing. The first amendment only says the government can't restrict your freedom of speech.
As a private citizen, I have every right to kick you off my property, shout over you, deface/remove your signs, fire you from your job if I don't like what you have to say, refuse to serve you as a customer, etc, etc., all things limiting your freedom of speech in a very real way that the first amendment doesn't prohibit at all.
It's a completely off-the-wall example, anyhow. The GPL doesn't try to bar you from stopping people from using the same open source code you got. No, it says YOU MUST CONTRIBUTE. It is a tax on coders.
This is probably very British of me but my immediate internal response to this was "150 year old castles? Leeds has a shopping centre that's over 100 years old!"
Castle doesn't mean what you think it means. Have you ever heard of "Hearst Castle"? We co-opted the term a long time ago to mean, well, whatever the hell we happen to want it to mean.
There was certainly no need for medieval-style castles in the US 150 years ago, or ever, for that matter... And in the western US, yes, there are tracts of empty desert as large as most of western europe, that never had permanent structures on it until modern technology came along. You can say we're lacking in history out here, or you can say it needs to start somewhere, and we're the ones making it as we go.
The GPL isn't "enforcing freedom" or some such... The code you copied will always be free, as is, forever, whatever the license.
What the GPL does is extract a tax... If you want to distribute modified versions, you have to pay the code tax... Sure, others before you paid the same tax, but that doesn't mean forcing you to pay it is "freedom". You can claim it's apropos, and a small price to pay if you want... But calling restrictions "freedom" is the most flagrant orwellian doublespeak crap I've ever heard.
Up next, laws that give you "more freedom" by taking your money and giving it to other people, ensuring that others have the freedom to have their own money taken from them in the future... I feel freer already.
Slashdot Mirror
You can go download a copy of wikipedia right now. Stick it on a dvd, throw it in some dark corner, and come back in 10 years.
These "handheld gadgets" gave us Li-Ion batteries, which made all-electric cars practical... That's pretty damn huge.
These kinds of things are called "prestige projects"... meaning, in-short, they're massively impractical, but SOUND impressive, and get lots of press.
Frankly, vocal proponents of maglevs are also preventing us from just developing traditional high-speed rail, which France has shown to be imminently practical, and still very fast. Instead, we've got more and more cars on the road, because a practical solution isn't flashy enough for people like you.
We don't NEED maglevs to space. Materials have reached the strengths needed for a space elevator, they just need more R&D, and THAT kind of fundamental materials research is where we should be putting our money. I guarantee you'll get more bang from it than you would building a maglev track.
Hold on! Good editing can mean the difference between a masterpiece and a turd.
Ironically, the original cut of Star Wars (EP4) was the penultimate example of this... There are several people who will attest that the first edit was horrible.
"The first cut of Star Wars," Burns' narrator says, "was an unmitigated disaster."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040913-692895,00.html
Not much more info at that source, but it's out there should anyone wish to take the time to look for it.
Now, I admit I have a hard time believing EP1-3 can be recut to be decent, particularly using the theatrical release, and not all the raw footage available. But never-the-less, the point remains... editing isn't "polishing a turd", it's so fundamental that it can make or break even the best of films.
Since the law was passed, I was amazed to find the most mundane things like PIECES OF WOOD are known to cause cancer. Of course this is because of the chemicals used to treat them.
Does that make it a joke? I certainly don't think so... I've taken steps to limit my exposure in response, and would be change my buying habits to prefer products without that label, if it was possible to find any.
Clearly, Coke/Pepsi don't think it's a joke, or at least don't think the public at large will find it all that amusing... Hence the change in formula. I'd call that a real, positive effect, all around.
Admittedly, the labels on every building, everywhere, is a bit of a joke, at least because it's just a boilerplate message that doesn't require any specificity as to what the problem is.
WTF is a local SSH tunnel?
Anyhow, I have no idea what you're disagreeing with... How would you suggest running these GUI apps over an SSH tunnel without this X11 port to Android?
There are simply NO NATIVE ANDROID APPS that can do what I've listed. X11 is strictly required. Before this port of X11, there were NO OPTIONS AT ALL, so I'm very happy to see it coming along.
Why don't you just go download the FREE MapQuest app for iPhone (or Android) ? It uses OSM, does navigation and POI only a bit worse than Google, uses TTS for the audible part (not as good as paid Nav apps, but still okay), etc.
So I don't really understand the question at all...
I benchmarked this about a year ago on a couple RHEL5 servers. A particular application wrote out a few MBytes of tmp files everytime the application was asked to sort some data... which was so often we were talking hundreds of megabytes... vastly more IO than /tmp on a normal system would ever see.
Anyhow, long story short, moving /tmp to tmpfs (RAM) made absolutely no performance improvement at all. In fact it was a small slowdown... I assumed this was because it was pushing some buffers/cache out of physical, but I admit the effect was small enough to just have been a margin of error.
This also agrees with some coding I did before, changing code from writing out temporary files (not in /tmp), to piping the data directly. After putting the time in on that, trying for any speed-up, I also found no measurable speed-up.
Long story short, I mount /tmp as async,noatime, and never give RAM disks a second though since. Without some real world benchmarks (Firefox start-up times, or something), I don't buy the premise that tiny bits of disk IO in temporary files is a bottleneck for anything.
We're right on the verge of moving off of petroleum, and having self driving cars... That's vastly better than a flying car.
But, flying cars may not be too far off. The much belated FAA upgrades are finally going to put in-place the technology needed to have self-regulating low-altitude airspace. From there we just need to keep reducing the weight of cars, and decrease the cost of making autogyro components.
Optical computers are growing ever closer, and in the mean-time, there's no shortage of dramatic advancements in traditional microprocessors, so I don't see the problem.
As for a pay raise, I suggest you go find a new company... Even as I keep hearing how bad the economy is, my salary keeps rising, significantly. Switching companies a couple times should do it... I don't see why people stay with a company, long-term, when corporate america has made it clear they will drop you the second they can replace you with someone else for 10% less money. Just go look around, you might find a better fit, where your skills aree simply worth much more.
Yes and no.
Yes.
No.
First link is short and answers all your questions.
Yes, but what happens when people start deciding they shouldn't have to pay for the same service on both devices? Or apps? Or just decide that they just don't need the "cargo room" of the "truck" and their phone can do everything their tablet can do, and want to save the not insignificant cost.
Plus, it used to be that phones had 2" screens, but that just keeps on growing. Dell even released a 5" tablet some time back, to pretty good reviews about how superior it was for one-handed operation compared to 7 or 10 inch tablets. Now, the largest phones are up to that same size, and the disctinction between small tablet and large phone is nonexistent.
But if slashdot editors just start posting stories about it, for free, they lose out on all that big slashvertisement money down the road...
Now that we have X11 on Android, there's no reason an NX client can't (FINALLY) be ported to Android. NX completely blows away VNC on bandwidth, as well as responsiveness, redraw times, etc. It also preserves sessions like VNC, and has many features VNC lacks. Also, SSH is fundamentally built-in to NX, so you don't need to set up any port forwarding yourself.
Hell, I sometimes watch videos over X11 forwarding... Don't expect to ever see that work well with VNC.
How about browing web pages on intranets? Text-mode web browsers suck. I love the UI of links2, and can't imagine why nobody else is copying the keyboard shortcuts it uses. However, I can't even get past the login prompt on most web pages. I love being able to pop out my Android slider wherever I am and SSH in and do real work, but not being able to get in to the company Wiki, where all my notes are, or fire up the Nagios web interface and just see what the problem is, feels extremely constraining... often I have to jump over to a laptop, just to look-up one line of info.
How about actually running Xterm? The cheap putty imitators do pretty well, but nothing else comes close to the features of the namesake vt terminal emulator. To be specific, I've had to do a lot of work with low-level details of terminal escape sequences to get tons of legacy (not VT100) programs working on modern systems, and XTerm was the one and only option that picks up all the different keyboard scancodes, can render all kinds of crazy escape sequences, and has special features like being able to send codes to change the font family & size, change the terminal's colors, etc. Quite simply, to run just about any of our applications at my company, you need to run the real, original XTerm. (Only thing even XTerm doesn't do is auto-scale the font/dpi when the window is resized like proprietary options, instead of increasing the rows/column count).
How about running NX client on your phone? Getting extremely good remote desktop performance, using all your desktop apps like you were there, and able to just disconnect and reconnect the session from your phone to/from other devices as needed?
How about being able to remote-in and run a REAL email app? You got a command-line replacement for Ooutlook I don't know about?
How about remotely running an IM app? Pidgin has a nice plugin that supports SIPE well, connecting me to my office from my puny phone or my android tablet like I'm there, and can pretend I'm working (from home) when I'm out on the beach, or driving around, running errands?
How about coupling it with a keyboard and just plain using any cheap old android tablet as a (wireless) display device for any of my headless machines, letting me do anything and everything, while walking around my house, or the office? That's the beauty of X11 after all. And NX just makes it more efficient...
How about an XMMS / Audacity remote control?
Because there's nothing illegal about making an unsound loan?
Misleading investors most certainly *is* a criminal offense, and it wasn't the loan officers responsible for that.
You're way off. In this case the fact that he made a decent amount of money off of the fraud COMPLETELY undercuts his claim of this being a "freedom of information" situation, where he just reported on a known exploit, or some such.
We've heard enough cases here, of legitimate researchers facing unjustified prosecution at the behest of corporate interests, that those in the know have become highly suspicious of all such government actions. His substantial money-making just makes it clear he's certainly not in the same situation by any means.
SOME has, but let's not go overboard. No matter how advanced you may think they are, we're talking about a very small population here. They CAN'T possibly have a very big impact.
The total is actually estimated at 75%. And it's not as if that makes it cease to exist. These are still very real gifts to support Israel.
Try this one:
"There has been [US] economic aid to Israel every year since 1949"
For the past several years, these grants have totaled about 2.5 billion. That's not an insignificant percentage of their GDP. They can't just up and do without it. They've got significant debt and trade deficits already. And that's just the obvious, most overt aid the US provides.
Your statement means absolutely nothing. It doesn't change the fact that they'd be bankrupt without US aid. And it's not as if this is MY personal opinion... This fact has been stated by a large number of analysts and officials.
The fact that you don't like the facts I've listed, doesn't make me closed-minded. In fact all indications are that I am vastly better informed about the subject than you are.
First of all, our support of Israel is the #1 reason there are so many Arabs that hate the US, so your claim is incredibly empty.
Additionally, Palestine is in Israel. I'm sure there's plenty of people there who hate the US. Worst of all, I can't say they're reasons are invalid, unlike most.
If Israel does "something about it themselves" they will do so with US aircraft, bombs, etc. Most of their advanced weapons were basically gifts from the US, and US funding has long been the only thing even keeping the state of Israel viable.
I've heard your complaints before, and it's irrelevant. Your figures are dishonest, anyhow.
If you don't want a smart phone, don't get one. You don't need to chime-in every time to point out how cheap you are, and how you don't understand why you might want a smart phone. 50% of the population does, and that number is sure to keep growing. Nobody is trying to force you to upgrade.
The price came down a couple years ago. You can get an Android slider for $99, and Virgin Mobile unlimited data (they've been threatening to cap it for some time) with about 300 minutes included for $35/month. Boost Mobile is $40-55/month. Other pre-paid services are nearly as cheap.
If you're paying $80/month for your cell phone service, you're probably an idiot, who is a slave to advertising and doesn't know how to shop around.
Absolutely everything you said is complete nonsense...
No. Fat was an indicator of weath... like a luxury/sports car. It was never actually considered attractive.
That's not why at all. Attractiveness is tied to ideal body ratios, and other biological indicators of fertility. You can be overweight and attractive if you're stomache is smaller than your hips & chest, but generally, obese means you're large in all the wrong places.
This comment makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Anorexia was a problem decades ago, before obesity was an issue, and it will continue to be an issue long after it gets resolved.
Of course, I don't buy the 'thought crime' solution at all, but your theories on the subject aree completely nonsensical as well.
Google's "big data" is just web pages. Start a spider, feed the output to Solr, and see if you can beat Google at web search.
"Most hackers" don't need a lot of things that are, never-the-less developed as successful open source projects. Anybody think there's a huge audience for DReaM?
Storage is getting big... Even a tiny shop can afford obscene amounts of storage. Each 2U server can have 6 x 2TB SATA (3.5") drives pretty inexpensively. As soon as you've got a dataset that needs more space than you can store on one of those, you'd benefit from thesee "big data" solutions, rather than the standby (more expensive) solution of "throw in a monster SAN".
And you don't even need that much infrastructure. The virtual servers (cloud) service providers aren't very expensive, particularly when you don't care about SLA, and will give you as big of a cluster "to play with" as you could want.
No such thing. The first amendment only says the government can't restrict your freedom of speech.
As a private citizen, I have every right to kick you off my property, shout over you, deface/remove your signs, fire you from your job if I don't like what you have to say, refuse to serve you as a customer, etc, etc., all things limiting your freedom of speech in a very real way that the first amendment doesn't prohibit at all.
It's a completely off-the-wall example, anyhow. The GPL doesn't try to bar you from stopping people from using the same open source code you got. No, it says YOU MUST CONTRIBUTE. It is a tax on coders.
Castle doesn't mean what you think it means. Have you ever heard of "Hearst Castle"? We co-opted the term a long time ago to mean, well, whatever the hell we happen to want it to mean.
There was certainly no need for medieval-style castles in the US 150 years ago, or ever, for that matter... And in the western US, yes, there are tracts of empty desert as large as most of western europe, that never had permanent structures on it until modern technology came along. You can say we're lacking in history out here, or you can say it needs to start somewhere, and we're the ones making it as we go.
The GPL isn't "enforcing freedom" or some such... The code you copied will always be free, as is, forever, whatever the license.
What the GPL does is extract a tax... If you want to distribute modified versions, you have to pay the code tax... Sure, others before you paid the same tax, but that doesn't mean forcing you to pay it is "freedom". You can claim it's apropos, and a small price to pay if you want... But calling restrictions "freedom" is the most flagrant orwellian doublespeak crap I've ever heard.
Up next, laws that give you "more freedom" by taking your money and giving it to other people, ensuring that others have the freedom to have their own money taken from them in the future... I feel freer already.