Drawing on my Anthropology degree, all modern computer languages are highly simplified languages.
I'm not sure they're all as simplified as you think...
The basic components are there (Verbs, nouns, etc.) but they are typically very limited (ever see a pronoun in C?).
Not in C, no, but Perl's $_ strikes me as a pronoun. (Indeed, the dropping of $_ from expressions where it is implied mirrors the dropping of implied subjects and objects in Japanese -- the so-called "zero pronoun".)
One might call AppleScript's "the result" a pronoun as well, even though it's a noun in English.
Object-oriented languages frequently have a personal pronoun, "self" or "this", by which an object may refer to itself. Again, these may not be pronouns in English, but they act as such in OOP languages that use them.
Also,
the sentence structure is *very* ridgid. (Unlike English which allows movement of objects and adjectives or even the
removal of the subject!)
Perl permits reordering of conditional statements, which has no programmatic effect but changes the emphasis of the statement when read by a human:
if ($foo) { bar(); } bar() if ($foo); bar() unless (! $foo); ($foo) && bar;
Also, Perl permits dropping of the object in many expressions where it can be assumed to be $_
(or @_ or @ARGV in the case of shift and the like), though this strikes me as more similar to the Japanese zero pronoun than to anything in English.
... is that Debian has sets of Web and FTP mirrors in eighteen different nations. If you are in Poland, for instance, you should be using www.pl.debian.org.
Hmmm.....he claims Linux is the most open project out there. FreeBSD is even more open. I don't have to wait to grab a kernel that Linus/Alan deem worthy of public comsumption.
On the contrary. The mode by which you access the code (CVS or FTP) does not make the project more or less open. Please feel free to
download a development-tree kernel whenever you like. (Note: The link is to the v2.4-test kernels, which are not mirrored on all the kernel mirrors.)
Honestly, there's just as much anime crap as there is anime non-crap, just like all other kinds of entertainment. I don't understand the concept of being an "anime fan".
I do not like the concept of the "anime fan". I am a fan of thought-provoking storylines and well-developed characters (at least in narrative medias). I don't care if it comes from anime, American TV, British TV or whatnot.
There are actually very few people who even claim to like all or even most genres of anime. I, for one, like primarily SF anime (like Lain, Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, etc.) and have little interest in martial-arts shows (like Ninja Scroll), and none in tentacle-porn shows (like Urotsukidoji), magical-girl shows (like Sailor Moon), kids' shows (like Pokémon) or several other genres.
Some people go for martial-arts anime, and often also like samurai movies. Some go for shoujo anime ("girls'" anime, usually romantic fantasy), and I can only presume that they read a lot of romance novels. Some watch hardly anything but shounen-ai (gay romance) and yaoi (gay porn). All these people are 'anime fans', because they are in the rather small sector of the Western population who watch the stuff at all; but they aren't likely to share the same favorite shows.)
(Incidentally, yes, there are adults who like Pokémon. From what I can tell, quite a few 'furry' fans are taken with it. I do not claim to understand this.)
Since I also read a lot of SF novels and stories, I suppose you could call me an SF fan more generally than an anime fan. Trouble is, it's much easier to find anime posters for one's walls than it is to find posters based on Phil Dick, C.J. Cherryh, or Fred Pohl books. ^_^
It is funny. Trouble is, Nadesico's humor is so often about anime stereotypes, it might not work for a new fan. (I mean, seriously, I don't see how the Gekigangar 3 sequences could be anything short of obnoxious if you don't grok otaku.)
Cowboy Bebop is consistently good stuff, surging sometimes ("Ballad of Fallen Angels") to the truly excellent. Fans of hard SF will appreciate the attention paid to little things like gravity and pseudo-gravity. Plus, the music's by Yoko Kanno, who cannot go wrong. (She also did the music for Escaflowne and Macross Plus, among others.)
If you like the kind of surreal, Gnostic SF exemplified by Philip K. Dick (or, for that matter, the Illuminatus! high-weirdness, recreational conspiracy theory kick), Serial Experiments Lain is not to be missed. If you still think X-Files is the cutting edge of weird TV... prepare for mindfsck. ^_^;
(Speaking of Phil Dick and anime, try Bubble Gum Crisis, which is based very loosely on the movie Blade Runner, which in turn is based very loosely on Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Precious little Dick survives the double adaptation, but BGC is quite independently amazing. The original BGC is a classic (1987); there's now been released a (somewhat controversial) remake, BGC 2040. Caution: There appears to be very little intersection between the fanbases of the original and the remake. I like the original; I can appreciate the modernization of 2040 but I just can't get into it.)
For reasons which are not entirely mysterious, the powers that be appear to have designated Neon Genesis Evangelion as the Best Anime Show Of All Time a couple of years ago, and this designation hasn't entirely worn off yet. While by no means up to the par of Lain or Cowboy Bebop in animation quality, and possessed of one of the worst cases of slow-start in a series I've ever seen, there's distinctly something in there which keeps people (including myself) coming back.
Like Ghostbusters? Try Blue Seed.
Ignore the anime of Ghost in the Shell. Masamune Shirow's excellent manga (comics) appear doomed never to quite survive being adapted to anime. Read the manga, though.
Others are upset about the lack of elegant integration that NEXTSTEP
provided (Services, universal color managment, copy-paste of fonts, etc.)
It's my experience that the current MacOS provides support for copy and paste of 'styled text', which includes font information. Is that what you're talking about?
(If you copy something from an application that uses styled text (such as SimpleText or AppleWorks) and paste it into another such application, styles are preserved. If you paste it into an application that only supports plain text (such as Alpha or NiftyTelnet SSH) it is converted into plain text; similarly, if you copy text from a plain-text program and paste into a styled-text program, it is pasted with the current style.)
I don't see as Apple would abandon this feature in MacOS X.
The softco's argument could be: 'The user used an old copy of Microsoft Word 2.0. This stopped them needing to buy
a copy of Word 2000. This denied us a sale.'
It is unreasonable to count old versions as competitors but not to count competitors as competitors. That is to say, a bootleg Word 2.0 denies WordPerfect a sale just as much as it denies Word2k a sale.
Since the GPL is freely transferable, am I the only one who doesn't think that license shipments have anything to do with Linux growth or sales?
Exactly. If they count as a measure of installed base the number of people who are licensed to install Windows on their computers, then it seems only reasonable that they should count the number of people who are licensed to install Linux or BSD. Last I heard, that number stood at six billion and rising....
It does feel good seeing MS Office premium locked in a plastic box at best buy with a $799 pricetag on it, knowing you only paid $20
Actually, you're paying the balance in your tuition -- your university is cutting into its budget in order to give you cheap Windows and to deliver market-share to Microsoft. (At a state university, actually, you and your fellow citizens are paying the balance through higher taxes.)
In short, Microsoft has conned your university administration (or your state's taxpayers) into paying a "Windows Tax" on all students, regardless of whether they actually use Windows or not.
I don't know the correct English term for it but it's known as "wet van de remmende
voorsprong" in Dutch. If you are the first with a big (technological) innovation, you will be left
behind in the second generation of that innovation.
Sounds to me like what we'd call "the good being the enemy of the best" -- once you have a system that is marginally good enough, you have trouble finding reason to upgrade or improve it.
Re:Nice turn of phrase, that
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Geek Flavor
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Which OTO? There are at least three at last count.
"Skip ahead" and "skip back" widgets or keystrokes. Fast scrolling commands that slow down or pause (barely noticeably, but long enough to glimpse a title) when you pass a chapter or section title.
(One of the ironies of benchmarks: at one point, it seems it was fashionable to benchmark Windows text and graphics display speed by timing how long it took to scroll through a document by holding the down-arrow button on the scrollbar. When the Windows-centric trade press tried to apply this to the Macintosh, they started reporting that the Mac was ridiculously slow. Why? Well, on MacOS, the speed of scrolling that way is deliberately slowed down, to make it easier to see what's going on; if you want to scroll quickly, you yank the scroll thumb or click in the scrollbar.)
2) Make it easier to read. Despite all the hype recently surrounding e-books, they still strain your eyes after a few hours.
I count myself extremely lucky to have been provided one of those fancy SGI flat-screen monitors at my workplace, and in other venues I use a laptop. LCD monitors are essentially perfectly sharp and are significantly less eyestrain-inducing than blurry CRTs. If you must use a CRT, use a Trinitron.
3) Figure out how to display the manual without flipping away from a fullscreen game, something that will never be possible due to the nature of the beast.
Have a 'help' keystroke that shrinks the regular game view off to one side and displays a help window -- sort of like the way TV stations shrink the credits to half size these days so they can display the previews.
Of course, the obvious solution is just to make the learning curve shallower
Damn straight. The early Ultima games were entirely keyboard-driven, with a command on practically every key -- but the commands were mnemonic by letters, unlike those in a lot of modern games which expect you to think of your keyboard as a grid of labeled arcade-style buttons. Duhh... which key means 'fire tertiary weapon' and which is 'raise cloak' again?
Using a program requires loading it into RAM, which is considered copying.
Copyright law is concerned with copying a work for distribution. It doesn't bar you from copying a work for your own use in certain ways, such as the "time shifting" and "space shifting" involved in taping a broadcast television program, or copying a CD to tape so you can play it in your car's tape deck, or copying a video game ROM to your computer so you can play it on an emulator. See the Sony VCR suit and the Sony v. Connectix emulation suit for this principle. (Giving out copies of the tape or ROM to your friends is, of course, a violation.)
I suspect that the loading of software into RAM is a "space shifting", just as emulation is. You don't need to be licensed to do this; you have a right to do it based on the fact that you legally obtained a copy of the software. You do, after all, have the basic right to use your own property.
"If I make up my own stories, but base them on another work, my new work belongs to me." False. Copyright law is quite explicit that the making of what are called "derivative works" -- works based or derived from another copyrighted work -- is the exclusive province of the owner of the original work.
That distributing unauthorized derivative works is a copyright violation in no way means that the owner of the original work owns copyright over any derivative works produced. Just because I can't legally sell you my "Star Trek" story doesn't mean that Paramount can legally use it without my permission. This is, for instance, why series producers (such as Babylon 5's Straczynski, who made a fuss of it on USENET) try to avoid reading any fanfic for their series -- because if they later produced an episode similar to a fanfic story they read, they could be accused of copyright violation.
In any event, your screed has zero bearing on GPLed code, which was the subject under discussion. Why? Well, GPL authorizes the production and distribution of derivative works, under the condition that the derivative works be GPLed as well, and that source be made available.
Summary: Yes, copyright permits the original work's owner to forbid others from distributing derivative works. No, copyright does not grant the owner the copyright over derivative works. In any case, it doesn't matter for GPLed works, so quit flaming.
Re:It doesn't look like this will happen but..
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Akopia Buys Minivend
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Can someone buy a GPL program and then change the license agreement?
Only on the code written by the person from whom they bought it.
If I were to (for instance) buy Perl from Larry Wall, I would only have the right to change the license on the lines of code which he actually wrote -- because only those are his to sell me. He doesn't own, and therefore cannot sell, the copyright on any lines of code someone else wrote. Therefore, the other people's lines (which probably equal the vast majority of the code, in the case of Perl!) would remain licensed to me only under GPL and/or the Perl Artistic License -- and I would not be able to change the license on them.
Furthermore, I would not be able to revoke GPL/Artistic on any of the code, even Larry's, from anyone who already has it or who receives it from someone who already has it. They already have the irrevocable right to redistribute it under the current license's terms. If they don't like me, they can fork it off and do their own thing, regardless of what I say.
Effectively, this means that once a GPLed project has a good number of contributors other than the original author, the license can't be changed without going around and getting consent from everyone who ever submitted a patch.
Therefore, it seems to me rather disingenuous to "sell" a GPLed project. What's being sold? Only the right to relicense the seller's code (and the seller's code only) under different (non-GPL) terms. However, in a free-software project with outside contributors, that code may no longer constitute a working product or even a useful codebase.
(By the way: The GPL is not a "license agreement". A "license agreement" is a work of deception perpetrated by software companies who claim you need a "license to use" something you obtained legitimately. You do not; you already have the right to use what is yours. You only need a license to do something which would, lacking a license, violate copyright: in other words, to copy and redistribute. (Giving a copy of W2K to your friend is a copyright violation simply because of Microsoft's copyright, not because of any "agreement".)
GPL grants you the right to copy and redistribute GPLed software under certain terms -- rights which you would not otherwise have. You do not need to "accept" GPL in order to receive these rights. If you redistribute GPLed software in violation of the GPL's terms, you are not breaking an "agreement" with the author; you're simply breaking copyright law, because you were not licensed to redistribute the software in such a way. That's all.)
That said, I was also shown a video of sorting algorithms in CS class. The only thing that made the video worth watching was that the algorithms made all sorts of weird noises.
Would that be Sorting Out Sorting, produced on some archaic DEC machine?
Coerced: As in, "you're not cool if you don't wear our clothes," or "everyone wears our clothes; you don't want to be left out," or "this logo isn't marketing, it's fashion. You want to be fashionable, don't you?" This coersion sometimes manifests in the phenomenon known as "peer pressure."
Not everything that you dislike, or that is unpleasant to you, is coercion. Here are some examples of coercion:
"Give me fifty cents or I will beat you up."
"We're going to knock your house down to build a bypass."
"If you grow this plant, we will put you in jail."
"Have sex with me or I will shoot you."
"Work on my plantation or I will whip you, chop your feet off, shove a stick up your rectum, and hang you."
"Give us money to build our baseball stadium or we will put you in jail for tax evasion."
Here are some examples of things that are not coercion, even though they may be unpleasant:
"If you want a glass of this lemonade I made, you must give me fifty cents."
"Since you sold me your house, I'm going to knock it down to build a bypass."
"If you yell at me again I'm leaving you."
"Since you didn't fulfill your side of our agreement, I'm not going to fulfill mine."
"If you don't wear Thomas Fuckalmighty brand jeans, I'm not going to hang out with you."
You are not required to be friends with trendoids who value brands higher than people. There is nobody threatening to tie you down and attack you with a dentist's drill if you don't spend all your money on shoddy clothing with day-glow logos stuck all over it. That is your choice. Either you choose to value the kinds of things you get by purchasing Thomas Fuckalmighty brand jeans, in which case you buy them, or you choose not to value those things. This is not coercion.
If you want people to think of you as the kind of person who buys T-shirts for $50, then go ahead and buy T-shirts for $50.
(FWIW, at the moment I think I'm wearing exactly one logo: the fake-leather Wrangler patch above the ass of my jeans. I'd remove that if I didn't think it would make them fall apart or something.)
I don't see how Microsoft's stupidity amounts to a reason to get the government involved. The more Microsoft tightens its fist, the more (computer) systems will slip through its fingers. Users who find that they can't reinstall Windows or upgrade their computers will be all the more likely to upgrade their computers away from Windows and to more responsibly-distributed operating systems.
Government regulation of the software industry, intended to restrict the Microsofts of the world, is all too likely to affect free software in unexpected ways. (By way of comparison, consider how regulations on business, intended to control the behavior of large corporations, make it harder for individuals to start up their own small businesses.) When you create a law, you enable government to restrict a field of action: and this restriction will be used against people in ways that you may not have expected.
(Who would have guessed, when racial hate-crime laws started to be passed in the United States, that the majority of people prosecuted under them would be members of racial minorities? And yet a black person who assaults a white person is much more likely to be prosecuted for a "hate crime" than vice versa. Laws intended to combat racism have instead been used to further institutionalize it.)
Have some faith in the people. If Microsoft makes Windows any more of a pain in the ass than it already is, people will indeed convert away from it in increasing numbers. With the resurrection of Apple and the rise of Linux-based OSes, Microsoft can no longer safely expect to be the only starfish in the sea -- so if it continues to behave like that, it will find itself floundering on the shore rather quickly.
If you insist on involving government in the process of Microsoft's obsolescence and demise, then do it as follows: convince government agencies, legislators, and the like to prefer alternatives to Microsoft products. Americans -- is your state government involved in the suit against Microsoft? Call up your Attorney General's office and ask them if they're still using Windows, and if so, why. (MS Office is not likely the reason, as most lawyers use WordPerfect.)
Unlike billboard vandalism and rioting, the creation and distribution of free software is a productive activity. As such, it doesn't even show up on the radar of many of today's radicals, who are more interested in smashing the existing system than in building anything new. It's my suggestion that mild-mannered, bourgeois Linus Torvalds is far more effectively radical than any spray-can-wielding Adbuster -- and that it is an effect of the nihilism of radicalism that many anticorporatists have ignored free software.
Too much of the current radical mentality is oriented towards nihilism and violence: even professedly nonviolent radicals speak (or shriek) of "smashing" or "destroying" (rather than "reforming") the regime of which they disapprove. Because of the intensity of their utopian vision, they can see little or nothing in the current state of the world that is worth preserving. From such a view, peaceful and productive reform may seem pointless or even reactionary: a refusal to act "by any means necessary".
(I consider myself an anticorporatist only in that I object to government granting special privileges to corporations, and to the use of these privileges to evade responsibility for human rights violations and the like. I enthusiastically support free trade and investment ("capitalism", falsely so-called), on the grounds, discussed by von Mises, that socialist command economy cannot work. I consider corporate favoritism by government to be a form, not of free trade, but of socialism, as it represents government entanglement in the economy. "Corporatism" was originally the name of the form of command economy favored by the Italian Fascists: the control of the economy by government, for the ostensible benefit of the people, through the conjoinment of government and corporate management.)
Free software has been a significant force for progress and reform in the world. It has been essential to the creation of the Internet, which has dramatically increased the ability of individuals to publish their views to a global audience -- a privilege formerly reserved for the Hearsts and Turners of the world. Free software, in the form of email, netnews, and the Web, has enabled people to criticize governments and corporations, to call for reform, and to organize. Free software has also helped keep proprietary-software makers more honest, by giving users an alternative.
However, free software doesn't break anything. Linus, Alan, Theo, Bruce, Eric, Richard, Larry, Guido, Ian, and company are not found smashing store windows to destroy copies of Windows 2000, nor are they found spray-painting Microsoft billboards. Yet when they do get noticed by radical publications such as Salon, they are discussed in terms of the damage their work may do to Microsoft, not in terms of the productivity it engenders.
Smashing stuff isn't really radical. People have been smashing stuff they don't like since the cave days. Giving people new ways to speak, to work, and to live -- that's radical.
So you're saying that with out capitalism we would all be living in famine and poverty.
Well, yes! How'd you like to move to North Korea? How about pre-reunification East Germany? In the former case you get to play "noble savage" in the ruins of the former industrial center of Korea (while eking out survival on the basis of free-market South Korean food and Western loans); in the latter you'd have gotten to smell the People's Glorious Coal-Smoking Power Plant all day, every day. How about Stalinist Russia? Stalin killed more people through "agricultural collectivization" (i.e. planned famine) than Hitler killed with Zyklon-B.
If pollution is homicide, as many environmentalists (rightly) claim... then Communism is murder with malice aforethought.
Slayers is good too, but the AOVs should probably be avoided.
The OVAs (known in the USA as Slayers: Dragon Slave and Slayers: Explosion Array) are truly horrendous, and constitute the only anime I have ever bought which I could not stand to watch all the way through. Slayers: The Movie, though, is good stuff.
If you like Slayers, you might like Ruin Explorers (aka Fam & Ihrie), which is another D&D-esque, humorous fantasy.
Cowboy Bebop is definitely the most amazing thing to come down the pike recently. The music is by Yoko Kanno, who also did the music for Macross Plus and Escaflowne. Yoko Kanno's music kicks, if you will pardon the expression, approximately six metric tons of ass.
Serial Experiments Lain... well, I like it, but a lot of people can't deal with the surrealism and allegory. It wouldn't be too far off to say that in terms of weirditude, Lain picks up where the Evangelion series left off. Lain is heavily allegorical and makes many references to Gnostic religious ideas, and may make a good deal more sense -- especially around the ending -- if you are passingly familiar with Gnosticism.
(Can anyone explain the popularity of anime series based on Christian heresies? Christianity is not exactly common in Japan -- IIRC, about 2% of Japanese people in Japan consider themselves Christian -- and yet they make shows like Eva and Lain.)
Neon Genesis Evangelion is, naturally, mandatory. If you like Eva already, read Neon Exodus Evangelion and Evangelion: R -- two rather well-done fanfic series for Eva. (Warning: Some people do not like NXE because they are of the opinion that the character D. J. Croft is a "self-insert" character. He isn't. The authors have been very clear on this. NXE is not Undocumented Features.)
Continuing on with the recommendations... The Ghost in the Shell anime is relatively pointless; read the manga instead. Shirow appears to be doomed to bad anime interpretations of his manga. FWIW, Shirow removed two pages from the American edition of the manga, so that it would not have to be labeled adults-only; they are available here. Warning: graphic sexual content.
In other areas... if you're just amused by the whole Pokemon thing, check out Punkemon.
FWIW, the relevant quote in Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus is as follows:
In our view the copyright statutes, while protecting the owner of the copyright in his right to multiply and sell his production, do not create the right to impose, by notice, such as is disclosed in this case, a limitation at which the book shall be sold at retail by future purchasers, with whom there is no privity of contract.
Slashdot Mirror
One might call AppleScript's "the result" a pronoun as well, even though it's a noun in English.
Object-oriented languages frequently have a personal pronoun, "self" or "this", by which an object may refer to itself. Again, these may not be pronouns in English, but they act as such in OOP languages that use them.
Perl permits reordering of conditional statements, which has no programmatic effect but changes the emphasis of the statement when read by a human:if ($foo) { bar(); }
bar() if ($foo);
bar() unless (! $foo);
($foo) && bar;
Also, Perl permits dropping of the object in many expressions where it can be assumed to be $_ (or @_ or @ARGV in the case of shift and the like), though this strikes me as more similar to the Japanese zero pronoun than to anything in English.
... is that Debian has sets of Web and FTP mirrors in eighteen different nations. If you are in Poland, for instance, you should be using www.pl.debian.org.
Some people go for martial-arts anime, and often also like samurai movies. Some go for shoujo anime ("girls'" anime, usually romantic fantasy), and I can only presume that they read a lot of romance novels. Some watch hardly anything but shounen-ai (gay romance) and yaoi (gay porn). All these people are 'anime fans', because they are in the rather small sector of the Western population who watch the stuff at all; but they aren't likely to share the same favorite shows.)
(Incidentally, yes, there are adults who like Pokémon. From what I can tell, quite a few 'furry' fans are taken with it. I do not claim to understand this.)
Since I also read a lot of SF novels and stories, I suppose you could call me an SF fan more generally than an anime fan. Trouble is, it's much easier to find anime posters for one's walls than it is to find posters based on Phil Dick, C.J. Cherryh, or Fred Pohl books. ^_^
Cowboy Bebop is consistently good stuff, surging sometimes ("Ballad of Fallen Angels") to the truly excellent. Fans of hard SF will appreciate the attention paid to little things like gravity and pseudo-gravity. Plus, the music's by Yoko Kanno, who cannot go wrong. (She also did the music for Escaflowne and Macross Plus, among others.)
If you like the kind of surreal, Gnostic SF exemplified by Philip K. Dick (or, for that matter, the Illuminatus! high-weirdness, recreational conspiracy theory kick), Serial Experiments Lain is not to be missed. If you still think X-Files is the cutting edge of weird TV ... prepare for mindfsck. ^_^;
(Speaking of Phil Dick and anime, try Bubble Gum Crisis, which is based very loosely on the movie Blade Runner, which in turn is based very loosely on Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Precious little Dick survives the double adaptation, but BGC is quite independently amazing. The original BGC is a classic (1987); there's now been released a (somewhat controversial) remake, BGC 2040. Caution: There appears to be very little intersection between the fanbases of the original and the remake. I like the original; I can appreciate the modernization of 2040 but I just can't get into it.)
For reasons which are not entirely mysterious, the powers that be appear to have designated Neon Genesis Evangelion as the Best Anime Show Of All Time a couple of years ago, and this designation hasn't entirely worn off yet. While by no means up to the par of Lain or Cowboy Bebop in animation quality, and possessed of one of the worst cases of slow-start in a series I've ever seen, there's distinctly something in there which keeps people (including myself) coming back.
Like Ghostbusters? Try Blue Seed.
Ignore the anime of Ghost in the Shell. Masamune Shirow's excellent manga (comics) appear doomed never to quite survive being adapted to anime. Read the manga, though.
And so it goes ....
(If you copy something from an application that uses styled text (such as SimpleText or AppleWorks) and paste it into another such application, styles are preserved. If you paste it into an application that only supports plain text (such as Alpha or NiftyTelnet SSH) it is converted into plain text; similarly, if you copy text from a plain-text program and paste into a styled-text program, it is pasted with the current style.)
I don't see as Apple would abandon this feature in MacOS X.
In short, Microsoft has conned your university administration (or your state's taxpayers) into paying a "Windows Tax" on all students, regardless of whether they actually use Windows or not.
Which OTO? There are at least three at last count.
(One of the ironies of benchmarks: at one point, it seems it was fashionable to benchmark Windows text and graphics display speed by timing how long it took to scroll through a document by holding the down-arrow button on the scrollbar. When the Windows-centric trade press tried to apply this to the Macintosh, they started reporting that the Mac was ridiculously slow. Why? Well, on MacOS, the speed of scrolling that way is deliberately slowed down, to make it easier to see what's going on; if you want to scroll quickly, you yank the scroll thumb or click in the scrollbar.)
I count myself extremely lucky to have been provided one of those fancy SGI flat-screen monitors at my workplace, and in other venues I use a laptop. LCD monitors are essentially perfectly sharp and are significantly less eyestrain-inducing than blurry CRTs. If you must use a CRT, use a Trinitron. Have a 'help' keystroke that shrinks the regular game view off to one side and displays a help window -- sort of like the way TV stations shrink the credits to half size these days so they can display the previews. Damn straight. The early Ultima games were entirely keyboard-driven, with a command on practically every key -- but the commands were mnemonic by letters, unlike those in a lot of modern games which expect you to think of your keyboard as a grid of labeled arcade-style buttons. DuhhI suspect that the loading of software into RAM is a "space shifting", just as emulation is. You don't need to be licensed to do this; you have a right to do it based on the fact that you legally obtained a copy of the software. You do, after all, have the basic right to use your own property.
In any event, your screed has zero bearing on GPLed code, which was the subject under discussion. Why? Well, GPL authorizes the production and distribution of derivative works, under the condition that the derivative works be GPLed as well, and that source be made available.
Summary: Yes, copyright permits the original work's owner to forbid others from distributing derivative works. No, copyright does not grant the owner the copyright over derivative works. In any case, it doesn't matter for GPLed works, so quit flaming.
If I were to (for instance) buy Perl from Larry Wall, I would only have the right to change the license on the lines of code which he actually wrote -- because only those are his to sell me. He doesn't own, and therefore cannot sell, the copyright on any lines of code someone else wrote. Therefore, the other people's lines (which probably equal the vast majority of the code, in the case of Perl!) would remain licensed to me only under GPL and/or the Perl Artistic License -- and I would not be able to change the license on them.
Furthermore, I would not be able to revoke GPL/Artistic on any of the code, even Larry's, from anyone who already has it or who receives it from someone who already has it. They already have the irrevocable right to redistribute it under the current license's terms. If they don't like me, they can fork it off and do their own thing, regardless of what I say.
Effectively, this means that once a GPLed project has a good number of contributors other than the original author, the license can't be changed without going around and getting consent from everyone who ever submitted a patch.
Therefore, it seems to me rather disingenuous to "sell" a GPLed project. What's being sold? Only the right to relicense the seller's code (and the seller's code only) under different (non-GPL) terms. However, in a free-software project with outside contributors, that code may no longer constitute a working product or even a useful codebase.
(By the way: The GPL is not a "license agreement". A "license agreement" is a work of deception perpetrated by software companies who claim you need a "license to use" something you obtained legitimately. You do not; you already have the right to use what is yours. You only need a license to do something which would, lacking a license, violate copyright: in other words, to copy and redistribute. (Giving a copy of W2K to your friend is a copyright violation simply because of Microsoft's copyright, not because of any "agreement".)
GPL grants you the right to copy and redistribute GPLed software under certain terms -- rights which you would not otherwise have. You do not need to "accept" GPL in order to receive these rights. If you redistribute GPLed software in violation of the GPL's terms, you are not breaking an "agreement" with the author; you're simply breaking copyright law, because you were not licensed to redistribute the software in such a way. That's all.)
Here are some examples of things that are not coercion, even though they may be unpleasant:
You are not required to be friends with trendoids who value brands higher than people. There is nobody threatening to tie you down and attack you with a dentist's drill if you don't spend all your money on shoddy clothing with day-glow logos stuck all over it. That is your choice. Either you choose to value the kinds of things you get by purchasing Thomas Fuckalmighty brand jeans, in which case you buy them, or you choose not to value those things. This is not coercion.
If you want people to think of you as the kind of person who buys T-shirts for $50, then go ahead and buy T-shirts for $50.
(FWIW, at the moment I think I'm wearing exactly one logo: the fake-leather Wrangler patch above the ass of my jeans. I'd remove that if I didn't think it would make them fall apart or something.)
Government regulation of the software industry, intended to restrict the Microsofts of the world, is all too likely to affect free software in unexpected ways. (By way of comparison, consider how regulations on business, intended to control the behavior of large corporations, make it harder for individuals to start up their own small businesses.) When you create a law, you enable government to restrict a field of action: and this restriction will be used against people in ways that you may not have expected.
(Who would have guessed, when racial hate-crime laws started to be passed in the United States, that the majority of people prosecuted under them would be members of racial minorities? And yet a black person who assaults a white person is much more likely to be prosecuted for a "hate crime" than vice versa. Laws intended to combat racism have instead been used to further institutionalize it.)
Have some faith in the people. If Microsoft makes Windows any more of a pain in the ass than it already is, people will indeed convert away from it in increasing numbers. With the resurrection of Apple and the rise of Linux-based OSes, Microsoft can no longer safely expect to be the only starfish in the sea -- so if it continues to behave like that, it will find itself floundering on the shore rather quickly.
If you insist on involving government in the process of Microsoft's obsolescence and demise, then do it as follows: convince government agencies, legislators, and the like to prefer alternatives to Microsoft products. Americans -- is your state government involved in the suit against Microsoft? Call up your Attorney General's office and ask them if they're still using Windows, and if so, why. (MS Office is not likely the reason, as most lawyers use WordPerfect.)
Too much of the current radical mentality is oriented towards nihilism and violence: even professedly nonviolent radicals speak (or shriek) of "smashing" or "destroying" (rather than "reforming") the regime of which they disapprove. Because of the intensity of their utopian vision, they can see little or nothing in the current state of the world that is worth preserving. From such a view, peaceful and productive reform may seem pointless or even reactionary: a refusal to act "by any means necessary".
(I consider myself an anticorporatist only in that I object to government granting special privileges to corporations, and to the use of these privileges to evade responsibility for human rights violations and the like. I enthusiastically support free trade and investment ("capitalism", falsely so-called), on the grounds, discussed by von Mises, that socialist command economy cannot work. I consider corporate favoritism by government to be a form, not of free trade, but of socialism, as it represents government entanglement in the economy. "Corporatism" was originally the name of the form of command economy favored by the Italian Fascists: the control of the economy by government, for the ostensible benefit of the people, through the conjoinment of government and corporate management.)
Free software has been a significant force for progress and reform in the world. It has been essential to the creation of the Internet, which has dramatically increased the ability of individuals to publish their views to a global audience -- a privilege formerly reserved for the Hearsts and Turners of the world. Free software, in the form of email, netnews, and the Web, has enabled people to criticize governments and corporations, to call for reform, and to organize. Free software has also helped keep proprietary-software makers more honest, by giving users an alternative.
However, free software doesn't break anything. Linus, Alan, Theo, Bruce, Eric, Richard, Larry, Guido, Ian, and company are not found smashing store windows to destroy copies of Windows 2000, nor are they found spray-painting Microsoft billboards. Yet when they do get noticed by radical publications such as Salon, they are discussed in terms of the damage their work may do to Microsoft, not in terms of the productivity it engenders.
Smashing stuff isn't really radical. People have been smashing stuff they don't like since the cave days. Giving people new ways to speak, to work, and to live -- that's radical.
If pollution is homicide, as many environmentalists (rightly) claim ... then Communism is murder with malice aforethought.
If you like Slayers, you might like Ruin Explorers (aka Fam & Ihrie), which is another D&D-esque, humorous fantasy.
Cowboy Bebop is definitely the most amazing thing to come down the pike recently. The music is by Yoko Kanno, who also did the music for Macross Plus and Escaflowne. Yoko Kanno's music kicks, if you will pardon the expression, approximately six metric tons of ass.
Serial Experiments Lain ... well, I like it, but a lot of people can't deal with the surrealism and allegory. It wouldn't be too far off to say that in terms of weirditude, Lain picks up where the Evangelion series left off. Lain is heavily allegorical and makes many references to Gnostic religious ideas, and may make a good deal more sense -- especially around the ending -- if you are passingly familiar with Gnosticism.
(Can anyone explain the popularity of anime series based on Christian heresies? Christianity is not exactly common in Japan -- IIRC, about 2% of Japanese people in Japan consider themselves Christian -- and yet they make shows like Eva and Lain.)
Neon Genesis Evangelion is, naturally, mandatory. If you like Eva already, read Neon Exodus Evangelion and Evangelion: R -- two rather well-done fanfic series for Eva. (Warning: Some people do not like NXE because they are of the opinion that the character D. J. Croft is a "self-insert" character. He isn't. The authors have been very clear on this. NXE is not Undocumented Features.)
Continuing on with the recommendations ... The Ghost in the Shell anime is relatively pointless; read the manga instead. Shirow appears to be doomed to bad anime interpretations of his manga. FWIW, Shirow removed two pages from the American edition of the manga, so that it would not have to be labeled adults-only; they are available here. Warning: graphic sexual content.
In other areas ... if you're just amused by the whole Pokemon thing, check out Punkemon.