There are some points you make that are good. There are other points that are either lies or stupidity.
1) Bullshit. Anyone can join XFree86, who wield substantial influence.
2) X consortium tried to make X11R6.4 proprietary. They failed. Want to know why? Because they didn't want XFree to fork their own release, as they knew that everyone would just ignore the X consortium.
5) and 7) (which are the same point, really).
It will be as hard to push Berlin onto unwilling users as it is to push gtk+ / QT / whatever onto unwilling users.
Yes, you are biased on the subject. Please stop spreading lies about X.
Patriots don't work very well. There was lots of hype about them in the Gulf War, but they were still only shooting down a few SCUDs. They are also fairly short-range, and need quite a bit of prepping. They are no defence against nukes at all.
Just a minor point : USSR clones of American devices were not illegal. The USSR was a sovereign nation, and those strange American IP laws did not apply there.
Nukes are fairly clean ; you can live in a place a few hundred years after you nuked it, and it doesn't affect places on the other side of the planet mcuh.
No, obviously not. If you read my comment and the comment I was replying to, it should be quite obvious that it was merely a refutation of the other posters point that PNG can do everything GIF can, by providing a counterexample.
Obviously you didn't read my comment properly, otherwise you would have noticed that I said that the GPL prevents many things that aren't evil, but this is a regrettable but necessary side-effect of make preventing things that are evil.
If the GPL isn't valid, then that does not mean that GPLed code is public domain.
Instead, it means everyone who has taken advantage of the rights the GPL gives them (as opposed to copyright law, which gives users almost rights), could serve time in prison.
Yes you do. BSD licensed code still often has multiple copyright holders.
And remember, the only things the GPL seeks to prevent are evil things anyway. There are some side-effects, but they are just a regrettable consequence of trying to stop the proprietary software industry leeching code from free software.
Physical junk mail is not such a problem, because the companies that send it actually have to pay money to get it delivered.
If we weren't cracking down on e-mail spam like we have been doing for the past few years, the internet would currently be unusable due to fools abusing the mail system.
This is absolutely false. IMHO slavery is more free (as in speech, not beer) than anti-slavery. I can do anything I want in a country with slavery, including hiring slaves. However, I cannot restrict others freedoms by not allowing them to keep slaves.
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1) Bullshit. Anyone can join XFree86, who wield substantial influence.
2) X consortium tried to make X11R6.4 proprietary. They failed. Want to know why? Because they didn't want XFree to fork their own release, as they knew that everyone would just ignore the X consortium.
5) and 7) (which are the same point, really).
It will be as hard to push Berlin onto unwilling users as it is to push gtk+ / QT / whatever onto unwilling users.
Yes, you are biased on the subject. Please stop spreading lies about X.
They didn't filter out non-US email address, you complete and total moron.
Patriots don't work very well. There was lots of hype about them in the Gulf War, but they were still only shooting down a few SCUDs. They are also fairly short-range, and need quite a bit of prepping. They are no defence against nukes at all.
Just a minor point : USSR clones of American devices were not illegal. The USSR was a sovereign nation, and those strange American IP laws did not apply there.
I thought Plan 9 was from Bell Labs.
Yeah. Except it wasn't funny.
Nonsense. This project could well prove to destroy not just humanity, but the world!
Not so with dust.
*sigh*
Don't be stupid. IP addresses are like phone numbers : they aren't allocated to people, just devices.
Animated GIFs can be used very effectivley : see here for examples.
No, obviously not. If you read my comment and the comment I was replying to, it should be quite obvious that it was merely a refutation of the other posters point that PNG can do everything GIF can, by providing a counterexample.
Also please note that PNG cannot do animations (yet).
Debugging threads is a nightmare, anyway.
Yes. It was offtopic. If you do not know why, go find a clue.
Please stop lying. The Linux kernel is very generally very modular, especially with respect to filesystem/device drivers/network stacks.
Obviously you didn't read my comment properly, otherwise you would have noticed that I said that the GPL prevents many things that aren't evil, but this is a regrettable but necessary side-effect of make preventing things that are evil.
Free Software and Open Source are synonyms.
If the GPL isn't valid, then that does not mean that GPLed code is public domain.
Instead, it means everyone who has taken advantage of the rights the GPL gives them (as opposed to copyright law, which gives users almost rights), could serve time in prison.
And remember, the only things the GPL seeks to prevent are evil things anyway. There are some side-effects, but they are just a regrettable consequence of trying to stop the proprietary software industry leeching code from free software.
No. That's bullshit. Please stop lying.
If we weren't cracking down on e-mail spam like we have been doing for the past few years, the internet would currently be unusable due to fools abusing the mail system.
Furthermore, gcc2.9 will be based on the egcs source tree, so it's accurate to refer to egcs as gcc.
Ethernet stinks anyway. The only reason it is so popular is that it is cheap and plentiful.
This is absolutely false. IMHO slavery is more free (as in speech, not beer) than anti-slavery. I can do anything I want in a country with slavery, including hiring slaves. However, I cannot restrict others freedoms by not allowing them to keep slaves.