It is in the DoD's self interest to make a communications protocol be as resilient and secure as humanly possible. Secure and reliable communications are the cornerstone of the modern military. A built-in insecurity in a comm system can and will be exploited by an adversary just as readily (if not more so) as an unintentional one.
Humanity is indeed pretty fucked up... Politics and Religion (which are often the same thing) have caused more suffering than any plague or catastrophy.
<irony>
What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!
In form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!
</irony>
Exactly. If it's so great in India, why do so many Indians try and come to the USA? Maybe it's because of the fact that, despite all of our problems (and we do have a lot), the USA is still one of the best places in the world to live.
4 x 400GB in a RAID-5 would give 1.2TB of storage. Unfortunately most of the inexpensive IDE RAID cards don't do RAID-5. Still, 800GB of RAID-10 would be mighty sweet.
Forfieting moderation would be unfair to the moderator... they will have wasted their mod points modding something up which will now never be seen. If the original post was worthy of an up-mod, it should remain intact.
The problem with that theory is that Rudolph was spotted many times. However, the people who spotted him were other ultra-conservitive right-wing Christians who agreed with his idea that blowing up gay bars and abortion clinics is a good idea. Hiding out is a whole lot easier when you have complicit supporters.
Rudolph wasn't caught until a *cop* saw him and did his duty. It's entirely possible that there were even some sympathetic cops who put their religion before their sworn duty and looked the other way.
How can you steal something that's free? If using it in an unauthorized manner is "stealing", then it really wasn't free to begin with, was it?
If I take a keg of beer, glue a sign on it that says "free beer", and put it by the curb, I can't arrest someone for theft if they take the beer I gave away, put it in bottles, and sell it. I may not like it, but I gave up my right to tell people what they could do with the beer when I gave it away.
The big difference with software is that no matter how much you drink, you always have as much beer as you started with.
Yet another reason not to play a sports game. Unfortunately, they sell like hotcakes, so they wind up diverting development resources away from more interesting niche games.
I can think of numerous graphics manipulation programs that would work just fine with no graphical interface. Pretty much any kind of batch operation you'd want to do to an image file could be done more efficiently with a CLI. Imagine I have 500 TIFF files in a directory. For each of these images, I want to overlay a logo file to the lower-right hand corner, create a thumbnail, and convert the original files to jpeg format. You don't need to see the image to do any of these things. This could be done in under a minute with a command line tool; it might take hours to do by hand in a GUI environment.
Plus, having a command line tool makes it a whole lot easier to tell someone how to do something. For example if someone asks "how do I get the HR department shared files directory to show up as my S: drive every time I log on?" It's a lot easier to tell them "Hit start, run, and type '
net use S: \\fileserver\public\hr/persistent
'" than it is to walk them through the steps needed to do the same thing via the gui.
OK, so GPL has 4 freedoms. There are more freedoms than that. GPL does not address:
The freedom to profit from one's work
The freedom to keep secrets
The freedom to be an asshole
GPL explicitly or implicitly denies all these freedoms. Distributing software to help my neighbor is indeed a noble goal; however, selling software to feed my family is also a noble goal.
Let's say there's an open source program X. I extend X and create X++. If X is GPL, then the only way I can distribute X++ is if it is also GPL -- I'm forced to give away my additions, whether I want to or not. If X is BSD, then I am free to distribute X++ under any terms whatsoever, as long as I credit the original authors. Either way, X is still free -- nothing I add to X does anything to diminish it's freedom.
Any user is free to chose to use either X or X++. If I chose to distribute X++ in binary form only, that is my right because it is the fruit of my effort. If someone wants to use X++ but isn't willing to play by my rules, they are free to take X and re-create my work independently, and to distribute thier contribution under any terms they see fit. That's real freedom.
Some developers are disgusted at the idea of having their work used by someone else in a binary product where they can't see any changes which were made to it
Exactly the point. BSD is about relinquishing all control over your work. GPL is about retaining some control over your work. If you control something, it isn't really free, is it?
I suggest you re-read what I wrote. I made several factual observations, with no link between them:
Darl is a mormon, not a scientologist. This is an indisputable fact and a matter of public record.
There are similarities between the Church of Scientology and the Church of Latter Day Saints. This is also a factual observation, which I will enumerate later.
There are also differences between the CoS and CoLDS, some of which I already enumerated. These are also factual observations.
Mentioning facts does not constitute an ad hominim attack. I made observations, I did not draw conclusions, nor did I intentionally lead anyone to make them. Nowhere did I use the adjectives "many-wived" or "behorned"; you supplied those adjectives yourself. Nor did I draw any conclusions about Darl's credibility or actions being related in any way to his choice of religions; again, you supplied that subtext yourself. You are reacting emotionally because you feel your religious beliefs are being attacked. Stop putting words in my mouth, open your mind, and read the words which are actually being written without projecting your own insecurities on to them.
As to the similarities between Scientology and Mormonism. To name but a few:
Both are invented religions, owing thier genesis to the writings of a single individual. L Ron Hubbard wrote Dyanetics in 1950. Joseph Smith wrote the book of Mormon is 1830.
The holy writings of both are claimed to be the result of the personal revalations of their respective founders, yet there are surviving early drafts of this "revealed truth" which flatly contridict the final versions of "the truth"
The founders of both religions have serious credibility problems. Both had an extensive history of making false or misleading claims on the public record; claims which are indisputably contridicted by multiple independent sources. (EG, Hubbard's service record; Smith's claimed whereabouts when he had the "first vision" and his subsequent activities)
L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith were both known con men and petty criminals: J.S. was tried in 1826 for fraud; L. Ron pled guilty to petty theft and had numerous other brushes with the law for theft and financial chicanery.
Both Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard had expressed a desire to start their own religions in their personal correspondence predating their respective (highly convienient) bouts of "divine inspiration".
Both churches were hijacked after their founders' death by a highly placed insider who manipulated the organization for his personal benefit.
Both claim to be The One And Only True Path to Individual Salvation to the exclusion of all other belief systems
Both encourage hostility to ex-members.
The founders of both religions blatantly revised their own doctrine to justify their actions after having their adulterous relationships exposed.
I could go on all night drawing parallels between Joe Smith and L. Ron, but it boils down to the fact that they were both con men who were making it up as they went along, revising their beliefs as they did to suit their own purposes; and who both exhibited classic symptoms of mental illness (eg paranoia, hallucinations, megolomania, etc)
The mormon chuch has cleaned up it's act a lot since the days of Joe Smith and Brigham Young, but they still engage in an alarming number of cult-like behaviors.
Again, Mr. Anonomous Ad-Hominim Attack, you miss the point.
We are referring to a very specific definition of Freedom... the "Free as in speech" kind of freedom, not the "free as in beer" kind of freedom. To avoid the confusion which results from operator overloading, henceforth we will use the word "libre" for "free as in speech" and "gratis" to describe "free as in beer".
I stand by my definition: at the most basic level, freedom is the absence of restrictions of some form or another. Libre refers to the lack of a specific class of restrictions -- restrictions on behavior. Everything you mention is this type of restriction: bugs restrict what people can accomplish with the software; platform dependence restricts what computers people can use to run the software; internationalization (or the lack thereof) restricts who can understand the software. And so forth.
Gratis is irrelevant to this converation, although ultimately it too is a subset of libre -- attaching a financial cost to software is indeed yet another type of restriction.
I put my spoon on the windowsill and told it that it was free. Amazingly, it failed to walk away, hump the neighbor's fork, register to vote, start picketing for silverware rights, or exhibit any other behavior typically demonstratred by a free entity. Show me how a spoon can be free, in any sense of the word other than gratis, that is unrelated to it's use by a living creature. If you can demonstrate that a spoon can have freedom, then I'll accept that other inanimate objects can too.
All religions are inventions of man, and Mormonism just happens to be one of the younger ones
Which is exactly the point. Mormonism is an easy religion to debunk because, unlike most other religions, it's origins aren't lost in the mists of antiquity. The genesis of the mormon church is well documented from both within and without, making it possible to subject the claims and credibility of it's originator to intense scrutiny, using plenty of corroborating evidence.
Thanks -- informative post. I'll have to try it again, following your instructions. I'm always open to new tastes, although the cynic in me says that the difference will be that it'll taste like fresh lawn clippings instead of rancid ones:-)
Both are fabricated religions, created fairly recently in America, based on the writings of a single individual. Joseph Smith created the Mormon religion in 1830 when he authored The Book of Mormon. L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology with the publication of Dianetics in 1950.
Outside of their respective theologies, the main differentiation between the two organizations is that Scientology meets the 5 criteria for being a cult, while the current mainstream Church of Latter-Day Saints is no more (or less) cultlike than any other major evangelical Christian sect.
Code cannot be free in the same way that a spoon cannot be free -- both are inanimate objects which posess neither intelligence nor free will.
Freedom can only apply to creatures possessing free will, because freedom is the absence of restrictions on the exercise of free will. Where there is no free will, there can be no freedom. The only software which could possibly experience freedom is a self-aware AI program. Until sentient software exists, talking about code having freedom is a non sequitur.
Freedom, when referring to software, means what PEOPLE can do with that software, period. GPL places restrictions on the use of that code that BSD does not, therefore by definition, it is less free.
More restrictions == less freedom. It's a pretty fucking simple concept.
if you contribute to a GPL project, there's no way that contribution can end up in a non-GPL (and thus, non-free) project
Which is exactly why GPL is less free than BSD type licences. Freedom is, among other things, the absence of artificial constraints. The GPL has an artificial constraint (derivitive works must also be free), making it by definition less free than licences which lack those artificial constraints. Freedom includes the freedom to be a dick, the freedom to profit from one's work, and the freedom not to share.
BSD/MIT-style licences are inherently libertarian: they maximize individual liberty, and leave it up to the individual to decide whether or not to contribute their work to the public commons.
The GPL is inherently socalist: it maximizes social benefit by forcing individuals to contribute their work to the communal body of code.
Socialism isn't necessarily a bad thing, just be honest and admit what you are doing -- taking property rights away from the individual and giving them to society as a whole.
It is one thing to say "My code is free; therefore you may use it however you wish"; it is an entirely different thing to say "My code is free; but only if you use it the way I want you to."
Hopefully Spike isn't one of the ones that's affected -- it's the only channel in the list that shows anything worth watching. The rest of the stuff is pure crap.
It doesn't affect me anyway, since my TV fix is provided via Comcast. Any way to get Comcast to duke it out with viacom? The thought of not having to pay for a dozen channels of crap that I never watch anyway has a certian appeal.
Darl's a Mormon. There are a lot of similarities betwen the Mormon Church and the Church of Scientology. The big differences are that the mormon church is older, better respected, and has a slightly better grip on reality than the CoS. Oh, and they're less focused on fleecing the flock than the elronners.
the average profit margin for a text books is about %35
If textbook publishers are only turning a 35% profit on their books, they're either mismanaged as hell or they're playing accounting games to hide the real profits. Even assuming 100% markup by the bookstore, the publisher is still getting $50 for every $100 textbook sold; if they can't find more than $17.50 profit out of that then something smells fishy.
What's worse is when the professor uses your class as the beta test for his new book. That way you get to pay for the privilidge of proofreading his book for him.
I always hated taking classes where the professor wrote the book -- there was never any point in going to class, because everything they said in class was in the book verbatim. Call me idealistic, but I expect a professor to fill in the gaps the book leaves and to help me understand the difficult concepts.
Slashdot Mirror
It is in the DoD's self interest to make a communications protocol be as resilient and secure as humanly possible. Secure and reliable communications are the cornerstone of the modern military. A built-in insecurity in a comm system can and will be exploited by an adversary just as readily (if not more so) as an unintentional one.
<irony>
What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!
In form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!
</irony>
Exactly. If it's so great in India, why do so many Indians try and come to the USA? Maybe it's because of the fact that, despite all of our problems (and we do have a lot), the USA is still one of the best places in the world to live.
4 x 400GB in a RAID-5 would give 1.2TB of storage. Unfortunately most of the inexpensive IDE RAID cards don't do RAID-5. Still, 800GB of RAID-10 would be mighty sweet.
Forfieting moderation would be unfair to the moderator... they will have wasted their mod points modding something up which will now never be seen. If the original post was worthy of an up-mod, it should remain intact.
Rudolph wasn't caught until a *cop* saw him and did his duty. It's entirely possible that there were even some sympathetic cops who put their religion before their sworn duty and looked the other way.
There should be 3 things that make a post uneditable:
- Someone responds to the post
- Someone moderates the post
- A hard time limit passes
A time limit alone isn't good enough. Once someone responds or moderates, a post should be set in stone.If I take a keg of beer, glue a sign on it that says "free beer", and put it by the curb, I can't arrest someone for theft if they take the beer I gave away, put it in bottles, and sell it. I may not like it, but I gave up my right to tell people what they could do with the beer when I gave it away.
The big difference with software is that no matter how much you drink, you always have as much beer as you started with.
Yet another reason not to play a sports game. Unfortunately, they sell like hotcakes, so they wind up diverting development resources away from more interesting niche games.
Plus, having a command line tool makes it a whole lot easier to tell someone how to do something. For example if someone asks "how do I get the HR department shared files directory to show up as my S: drive every time I log on?" It's a lot easier to tell them "Hit start, run, and type '
'" than it is to walk them through the steps needed to do the same thing via the gui.- The freedom to profit from one's work
- The freedom to keep secrets
- The freedom to be an asshole
GPL explicitly or implicitly denies all these freedoms. Distributing software to help my neighbor is indeed a noble goal; however, selling software to feed my family is also a noble goal.Let's say there's an open source program X. I extend X and create X++. If X is GPL, then the only way I can distribute X++ is if it is also GPL -- I'm forced to give away my additions, whether I want to or not. If X is BSD, then I am free to distribute X++ under any terms whatsoever, as long as I credit the original authors. Either way, X is still free -- nothing I add to X does anything to diminish it's freedom.
Any user is free to chose to use either X or X++. If I chose to distribute X++ in binary form only, that is my right because it is the fruit of my effort. If someone wants to use X++ but isn't willing to play by my rules, they are free to take X and re-create my work independently, and to distribute thier contribution under any terms they see fit. That's real freedom.
- Darl is a mormon, not a scientologist. This is an indisputable fact and a matter of public record.
- There are similarities between the Church of Scientology and the Church of Latter Day Saints. This is also a factual observation, which I will enumerate later.
- There are also differences between the CoS and CoLDS, some of which I already enumerated. These are also factual observations.
Mentioning facts does not constitute an ad hominim attack. I made observations, I did not draw conclusions, nor did I intentionally lead anyone to make them. Nowhere did I use the adjectives "many-wived" or "behorned"; you supplied those adjectives yourself. Nor did I draw any conclusions about Darl's credibility or actions being related in any way to his choice of religions; again, you supplied that subtext yourself. You are reacting emotionally because you feel your religious beliefs are being attacked. Stop putting words in my mouth, open your mind, and read the words which are actually being written without projecting your own insecurities on to them.As to the similarities between Scientology and Mormonism. To name but a few:
- Both are invented religions, owing thier genesis to the writings of a single individual. L Ron Hubbard wrote Dyanetics in 1950. Joseph Smith wrote the book of Mormon is 1830.
- The holy writings of both are claimed to be the result of the personal revalations of their respective founders, yet there are surviving early drafts of this "revealed truth" which flatly contridict the final versions of "the truth"
- The founders of both religions have serious credibility problems. Both had an extensive history of making false or misleading claims on the public record; claims which are indisputably contridicted by multiple independent sources. (EG, Hubbard's service record; Smith's claimed whereabouts when he had the "first vision" and his subsequent activities)
- L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith were both known con men and petty criminals: J.S. was tried in 1826 for fraud; L. Ron pled guilty to petty theft and had numerous other brushes with the law for theft and financial chicanery.
- Both Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard had expressed a desire to start their own religions in their personal correspondence predating their respective (highly convienient) bouts of "divine inspiration".
- Both churches were hijacked after their founders' death by a highly placed insider who manipulated the organization for his personal benefit.
- Both claim to be The One And Only True Path to Individual Salvation to the exclusion of all other belief systems
- Both encourage hostility to ex-members.
- The founders of both religions blatantly revised their own doctrine to justify their actions after having their adulterous relationships exposed.
I could go on all night drawing parallels between Joe Smith and L. Ron, but it boils down to the fact that they were both con men who were making it up as they went along, revising their beliefs as they did to suit their own purposes; and who both exhibited classic symptoms of mental illness (eg paranoia, hallucinations, megolomania, etc)The mormon chuch has cleaned up it's act a lot since the days of Joe Smith and Brigham Young, but they still engage in an alarming number of cult-like behaviors.
We are referring to a very specific definition of Freedom... the "Free as in speech" kind of freedom, not the "free as in beer" kind of freedom. To avoid the confusion which results from operator overloading, henceforth we will use the word "libre" for "free as in speech" and "gratis" to describe "free as in beer".
I stand by my definition: at the most basic level, freedom is the absence of restrictions of some form or another. Libre refers to the lack of a specific class of restrictions -- restrictions on behavior. Everything you mention is this type of restriction: bugs restrict what people can accomplish with the software; platform dependence restricts what computers people can use to run the software; internationalization (or the lack thereof) restricts who can understand the software. And so forth.
Gratis is irrelevant to this converation, although ultimately it too is a subset of libre -- attaching a financial cost to software is indeed yet another type of restriction.
I put my spoon on the windowsill and told it that it was free. Amazingly, it failed to walk away, hump the neighbor's fork, register to vote, start picketing for silverware rights, or exhibit any other behavior typically demonstratred by a free entity. Show me how a spoon can be free, in any sense of the word other than gratis, that is unrelated to it's use by a living creature. If you can demonstrate that a spoon can have freedom, then I'll accept that other inanimate objects can too.
Thanks -- informative post. I'll have to try it again, following your instructions. I'm always open to new tastes, although the cynic in me says that the difference will be that it'll taste like fresh lawn clippings instead of rancid ones :-)
Outside of their respective theologies, the main differentiation between the two organizations is that Scientology meets the 5 criteria for being a cult, while the current mainstream Church of Latter-Day Saints is no more (or less) cultlike than any other major evangelical Christian sect.
Freedom can only apply to creatures possessing free will, because freedom is the absence of restrictions on the exercise of free will. Where there is no free will, there can be no freedom. The only software which could possibly experience freedom is a self-aware AI program. Until sentient software exists, talking about code having freedom is a non sequitur.
Freedom, when referring to software, means what PEOPLE can do with that software, period. GPL places restrictions on the use of that code that BSD does not, therefore by definition, it is less free.
More restrictions == less freedom. It's a pretty fucking simple concept.
BSD/MIT-style licences are inherently libertarian: they maximize individual liberty, and leave it up to the individual to decide whether or not to contribute their work to the public commons.
The GPL is inherently socalist: it maximizes social benefit by forcing individuals to contribute their work to the communal body of code.
Socialism isn't necessarily a bad thing, just be honest and admit what you are doing -- taking property rights away from the individual and giving them to society as a whole.
It is one thing to say "My code is free; therefore you may use it however you wish"; it is an entirely different thing to say "My code is free; but only if you use it the way I want you to."
Southpark isn't crap, but I can get that on DVD. As to the rest of the shows you list, yep, they're all crap as far as I'm concerned.
It doesn't affect me anyway, since my TV fix is provided via Comcast. Any way to get Comcast to duke it out with viacom? The thought of not having to pay for a dozen channels of crap that I never watch anyway has a certian appeal.
Darl's a Mormon. There are a lot of similarities betwen the Mormon Church and the Church of Scientology. The big differences are that the mormon church is older, better respected, and has a slightly better grip on reality than the CoS. Oh, and they're less focused on fleecing the flock than the elronners.
There's an upside to this: maybe now we can him arrested for armed robbery.
I always hated taking classes where the professor wrote the book -- there was never any point in going to class, because everything they said in class was in the book verbatim. Call me idealistic, but I expect a professor to fill in the gaps the book leaves and to help me understand the difficult concepts.