The nerd stereotype consists of people with high intelligence and low social skills.
Libertarianism is an ideology where you can logically deduce the correct standpoint from a few axioms (pleasing the intelligence of the nerd), and the most basic axioms is the importance of the individual over any kind of social structure (making the low social skills seem unimportant).
I personally find Libertarianism the easiest point of view to argue from (for the reasons mentioned above), but as I grow older I increasingly find the axioms at odds with the world I observe. Social structures are important, even for nerds, so I lean more and more towards socialism and conservatism, both of whom are build upon the importance of social institutions (just different institutions, the state vs. family + church + nation).
Picking on people for using name calling is both immature, and a clear sign that the speaker has no real counter-arguments.
Name calling is imply a way to show lack of respect. It is obvious that the previous speaker had no respect for MS Windows, so calling it Windoze was entirely appropriate in that context.
If what the AC said was obviously correct, it was a waste of time, as it was already obvious. Only stuff that are correct, but not obvious, is worth taking notice of.
If you distribute the DLL as part of a larger work, you will have a hard time convincing a judge that the larger work as a whole is not derived from the code used in the DLL. The mechanics of how you combine the components of the larger works will be of little interest to the judge. Your only chance would be to find help in the "mere aggregation" clause of the GPL, and argue that the DLL had nothing really to do with the rest of your product. As DLL's can't run stand-alone, that seems unlikely to success. Unless none of your code links with it, dynamically or otherwise.
If you don't distribute the DLL but relies on the user to get it otherwise, it will be the FSF (or other copyright owner) who will face an uphill battle convincing the judge that the larger work is really derived from the DLL. And more so, that you are bound by the GPL despite not distributing any code under the GPL.
> The only benefit would be that the FSF would then fight when someone uses it in an > "unauthorized" manner. If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically > disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
Because when you later discover a derivative of your software running on your new toaster, you will be able to further modify it.
Basically, having made (on thus being an expert on) popular copyleft software will improve your value as a programmer, compared to having made popular pd software, as you will more often have access to to the source of the derived products.
It is besides the point of this article, but Microsoft does distribute GPL'ed software as part of the their Unix services for Windows migration platform. It includes among other things GCC.
They don't seem to maintain it anymore though, so probably no GPLv3 stuff.
When you sell a mobile phone below cost, you are supposed to make up for the difference in the subscription fees. Which are mandatory to pay in the binding period even if you unlock the phone and use it on another net.
At least that is how it works with GSM phones in Denmark. You can unlock them and switch to another provider legally, but you have to continue to pay the subscription fee for the binding period. This is common, and accepted by all the service providers.
Also: The maximum binding period is six month, providers are obliged to tell the unlock key after that, and all advertisement must include the minimum total cost in the binding period (initial price plus subscription fee for six month) in order to make it easy to compare prices.
Good regulation does wonders to improve the efficiency of a market.
The Danish cartoons was deliberate trolling based on the religious taboo of depicting Mohammad. It succeeded beyond expectation.
This strip is not really about Islam, but about two individuals one of whom is "religion shopping". The description of Islam in the cartoon is vague enough not to offend any Muslims.
In Denmark, the phone companies are obliged to unlock their phones after 6 month, and I believe similar regulation is in existence in other EU countries.
> Non-scientists seem to have so much trouble understanding the ease with which a scientist > will happily admit to being wrong or being surprised or baffled or just plain shocked and > stunned.
Many non-scientist just view science as a new religion, one that just happens to be much better at delivering miracles that the older religions. So they expect scientists to act like priests, and utter absolute truths.
When discussing science versus religion, it is not the religious nuts I find most annoying, but those laypeople who believe in science as if it was a religion.
If you crave the Truth, go to a priest. Any of them will do, they all have an absolute truth to offer. But truth is no matter for science. What we can offer is predictions with a better track record than anyone else.
> Regarding Rat Park -- the Wikipedia article you linked to says it was rejected by the > top 2 science journals in the country.
I take it you are not into science. Trying to publish in Science or Nature is hybris, and doesn't say the paper is not good science. Just that it is not the top 0.01% science. That is, for every paper accepted in Science or Nature, 10000 papers go to "lesser" journals.
You remind me of around a zillion people who reject all talk about statistics as "damned lies", and instead relies on anecdotes (my grandmother smokes every day, and she is 90', so smoking can't be dangerous). Your anecdote just happened to be unusual irrelevant to the point being presented:
Point: Drugs have different addictiveness on different people. Rebuttal: I know one who was into experimentation who died of an overdose.
If you don't believe that drugs can affect people differently, look how alcohol affects people you know. Usually the who spectrum is covered, from non-functional alcoholics, to those who occasionally drink a glass of wine at social occasions.
BTW: "The government" both produce balanced reports and one sided scare campaigns (leaving out any "confusing" nuance), so it makes little send to talk about what "the government" wants you to believe.
I'd go for Adam Smith rather then the silly upstart you mentioned for the idea of capitalism, and that idea is that in a perfect market economy we will get the best and cheapest goods possible.
Unfortunately, the perfect market cannot exist, and deals like the one discussed are moving us further away from it. Exclusive deals and trusts always hurt everyone except for the parties directly involved, because they hurt the market.
Which is why Smith (and Rand) are wrong, and capitalism works best under some kind of independent control.
Nope. Just because you are not able to understand something doesn't mean we should drop it. The particular meme happens to both correct and useful.
> All property rights are "government-granted monopolies". Do you mind if I use your > car to go to the grocery store?
On the other hand, that is an analogy we should drop, not because it is old and tired, but because it is misleading. No real property rights denies you the right to drive an identical car to the grocery store. Only that particular car. So no monopoly in any useful (economical) sense of the word is involved that way.
> More than half of Slashdot readership is only interested in the articles those editors you hate so much. > Perhaps a third of you are 'The Community'
I suspect you overestimate the size of the "community" with one or two orders of magnitude.
Maybe one in ten sometimes reads the comments, and one in hundred ever writes a comment.
There are millions of people using IE on platforms not supported by Firefox?
> Someone who has no idea (or has no privlidges to install software) is not going to care about what > firefox is. They just want to browse the internet.
And you feel that people who can't install software or have heard of FireFox is the core demographics of/.?
The point is that when you find an error in Wikipedia, you can fix it.
Actually, I don't think the article really has a point, except to have fun. But every joke has some message as well, even if you have to make it up yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you are no fan of the Darwin Awards.
Yet, there are processors out there implementing the IA32 interface which are definitely not slow.
The nerd stereotype consists of people with high intelligence and low social skills.
Libertarianism is an ideology where you can logically deduce the correct standpoint from a few axioms (pleasing the intelligence of the nerd), and the most basic axioms is the importance of the individual over any kind of social structure (making the low social skills seem unimportant).
I personally find Libertarianism the easiest point of view to argue from (for the reasons mentioned above), but as I grow older I increasingly find the axioms at odds with the world I observe. Social structures are important, even for nerds, so I lean more and more towards socialism and conservatism, both of whom are build upon the importance of social institutions (just different institutions, the state vs. family + church + nation).
Picking on people for using name calling is both immature, and a clear sign that the speaker has no real counter-arguments.
Name calling is imply a way to show lack of respect. It is obvious that the previous speaker had no respect for MS Windows, so calling it Windoze was entirely appropriate in that context.
If what the AC said was obviously correct, it was a waste of time, as it was already obvious. Only stuff that are correct, but not obvious, is worth taking notice of.
If you distribute the DLL as part of a larger work, you will have a hard time convincing a judge that the larger work as a whole is not derived from the code used in the DLL. The mechanics of how you combine the components of the larger works will be of little interest to the judge. Your only chance would be to find help in the "mere aggregation" clause of the GPL, and argue that the DLL had nothing really to do with the rest of your product. As DLL's can't run stand-alone, that seems unlikely to success. Unless none of your code links with it, dynamically or otherwise.
If you don't distribute the DLL but relies on the user to get it otherwise, it will be the FSF (or other copyright owner) who will face an uphill battle convincing the judge that the larger work is really derived from the DLL. And more so, that you are bound by the GPL despite not distributing any code under the GPL.
> The only benefit would be that the FSF would then fight when someone uses it in an
> "unauthorized" manner. If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically
> disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
Because when you later discover a derivative of your software running on your new toaster, you will be able to further modify it.
Basically, having made (on thus being an expert on) popular copyleft software will improve your value as a programmer, compared to having made popular pd software, as you will more often have access to to the source of the derived products.
It is besides the point of this article, but Microsoft does distribute GPL'ed software as part of the their Unix services for Windows migration platform. It includes among other things GCC.
They don't seem to maintain it anymore though, so probably no GPLv3 stuff.
When you sell a mobile phone below cost, you are supposed to make up for the difference in the subscription fees. Which are mandatory to pay in the binding period even if you unlock the phone and use it on another net.
At least that is how it works with GSM phones in Denmark. You can unlock them and switch to another provider legally, but you have to continue to pay the subscription fee for the binding period. This is common, and accepted by all the service providers.
Also: The maximum binding period is six month, providers are obliged to tell the unlock key after that, and all advertisement must include the minimum total cost in the binding period (initial price plus subscription fee for six month) in order to make it easy to compare prices.
Good regulation does wonders to improve the efficiency of a market.
The Danish cartoons was deliberate trolling based on the religious taboo of depicting Mohammad. It succeeded beyond expectation.
This strip is not really about Islam, but about two individuals one of whom is "religion shopping". The description of Islam in the cartoon is vague enough not to offend any Muslims.
In Denmark, the phone companies are obliged to unlock their phones after 6 month, and I believe similar regulation is in existence in other EU countries.
> Non-scientists seem to have so much trouble understanding the ease with which a scientist
> will happily admit to being wrong or being surprised or baffled or just plain shocked and
> stunned.
Many non-scientist just view science as a new religion, one that just happens to be much better at delivering miracles that the older religions. So they expect scientists to act like priests, and utter absolute truths.
When discussing science versus religion, it is not the religious nuts I find most annoying, but those laypeople who believe in science as if it was a religion.
If you crave the Truth, go to a priest. Any of them will do, they all have an absolute truth to offer. But truth is no matter for science. What we can offer is predictions with a better track record than anyone else.
> Regarding Rat Park -- the Wikipedia article you linked to says it was rejected by the
> top 2 science journals in the country.
I take it you are not into science. Trying to publish in Science or Nature is hybris, and doesn't say the paper is not good science. Just that it is not the top 0.01% science. That is, for every paper accepted in Science or Nature, 10000 papers go to "lesser" journals.
You remind me of around a zillion people who reject all talk about statistics as "damned lies", and instead relies on anecdotes (my grandmother smokes every day, and she is 90', so smoking can't be dangerous). Your anecdote just happened to be unusual irrelevant to the point being presented:
Point: Drugs have different addictiveness on different people. Rebuttal: I know one who was into experimentation who died of an overdose.
If you don't believe that drugs can affect people differently, look how alcohol affects people you know. Usually the who spectrum is covered, from non-functional alcoholics, to those who occasionally drink a glass of wine at social occasions.
BTW: "The government" both produce balanced reports and one sided scare campaigns (leaving out any "confusing" nuance), so it makes little send to talk about what "the government" wants you to believe.
I'd go for Adam Smith rather then the silly upstart you mentioned for the idea of capitalism, and that idea is that in a perfect market economy we will get the best and cheapest goods possible.
Unfortunately, the perfect market cannot exist, and deals like the one discussed are moving us further away from it. Exclusive deals and trusts always hurt everyone except for the parties directly involved, because they hurt the market.
Which is why Smith (and Rand) are wrong, and capitalism works best under some kind of independent control.
> Can we drop this nonsensical meme.
Nope. Just because you are not able to understand something doesn't mean we should drop it. The particular meme happens to both correct and useful.
> All property rights are "government-granted monopolies". Do you mind if I use your
> car to go to the grocery store?
On the other hand, that is an analogy we should drop, not because it is old and tired, but because it is misleading. No real property rights denies you the right to drive an identical car to the grocery store. Only that particular car. So no monopoly in any useful (economical) sense of the word is involved that way.
They are mostly a service company that also sells hardware these days. And they are doing fine. It is not surprising if Sun wants to do the same.
I'm not surprised that the character traits of people who would make good CIA employees would also be attracted to Wikipedia.
And you, sir, are a first class asshole for comparing the Microsoft with the victims of racism.
They switched to the eclipse front end. Still use GCC back-end for native code compilation.
You don't want to do that if access to the data is important to you.
Maybe I should start checking who I'm replying to.
The 1:10:100 statistics is from old Usenet / arbitron numbers, I guess the younger generations are much more involved.
> More than half of Slashdot readership is only interested in the articles those editors you hate so much.
> Perhaps a third of you are 'The Community'
I suspect you overestimate the size of the "community" with one or two orders of magnitude.
Maybe one in ten sometimes reads the comments, and one in hundred ever writes a comment.
> You would rather exclude millions of people
/.?
There are millions of people using IE on platforms not supported by Firefox?
> Someone who has no idea (or has no privlidges to install software) is not going to care about what
> firefox is. They just want to browse the internet.
And you feel that people who can't install software or have heard of FireFox is the core demographics of
The point is that when you find an error in Wikipedia, you can fix it.
Actually, I don't think the article really has a point, except to have fun. But every joke has some message as well, even if you have to make it up yourself.