He could start by changing the company's grading system from an "individual selection" to a "group selection" system since the individual selection fosters competition and group selection fosters cooperation.
Sure they can. They just don't have an implicit rule for evaluating an integer as a boolean. Like Larry Wall says, there is no general way to convert a scalar to an array. Java designers would say, there is no general way to convert an integer to a boolean. So if you like C's implicit rule for integer to boolean conversion (i != 0), then use it but be explicit about it.
The paper is written around one idea, simplifying the internal structure of X. However, it is against the simplicity of X by claiming xlib's level of abstraction too low.
Let me take a crack at interpreting that last sentence. X server is simple because the abstraction of its lib is very low. (Hmm, and you say the paper is written by a confused state of mind.)
Also, I think you've misjudged the scope of the paper. It isn't about just simplifying the internal structure of the X server; it's about simplifying not only the display server but also its clients. Indeed, the reason we have so many different widget libraries (GTK, KDE, etc) is because X's lib is too low level.
I'm glad I never fought for freedom because some oppressors would inevitably try to come and take it away again. And that would make me seriously pissed off.
If the mere thought of protecting your freedoms (digital or otherwise) presents so much of a burden to you that it prevents you from making a contribution, you probably don't have the wherewithal to make a significant contribution anyway.
Yeah, and unix is source compatible with other unixes, right? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Just because they should be compatible, doesn't mean they are in every respect. It's necessary to be prudent when making this big of a jump in architecture.
Re:Should the GPL be used to legitimize theft?
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Who is the publisher and who is the theif?
SCO is the publisher. IBM is the alleged thief.
Did the thief publish under such a license? Oh well.
I can understand arguing that the publisher, the copyright holder, who published under the GPL gets what he deserves, but are you arguing that the thief's publication is legitimate? If so, some rogue employee would have GPL'd Windows by now. (Also, the GPL does not allow this behavior; it must be licensed by the copyright holder.)
The primary cause of SCO's wierd predicament really isn't the GPL.
But it is. Because what I'm hearing from this community is, "so what if IBM stole their code and inserted it somewhere in GNU/Linux; they mistakenly published it under the GPL, so they forfeit their code and copyright." This has nothing to do with trade secrets. This is a full on attempt to bring the GPL into a court case SCO wants to lose, because the win will have a chilling effect on businesses that want to use the GPL.
It's easy to [prevent] the GPL from gobbling up your IP [like] pack-man: just don't release anything under the GPL or, if you do, make damn sure that you know what it is that you're releasing.
You make it sound so easy. You forgot to add, "Ensure that no unscrupulous third-party has inserted your code anywhere in GNU/Linux." Unfortunately, GNU/Linux is 30 million lines of source code (Wheeler 1).
Should the GPL be used to legitimize theft?
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Here's an analogy I used yesterday to try and make a point at why this is non-obvious, and how the GPL muddies the waters.
Imagine, I'm a publisher of books. I find someone has stolen work out of one of the books I own and publish. However, I'm a publisher of the thief's book; does that mean I've implicitly condoned his behavior? Is his theft legitimized by my publishing of it? That is the question we're grappling with.
The GPL throws a big wrench in this analogy, because one could interpret that publishing the code in question does legitimize its theft. I do not think that should be the case, and I do not believe that is the spirit of the GPL.
We don't want to turn the GPL into a trap that companies believe will catch them unaware. SCO has unquestionable not acted in good faith by failing to point out the offending pieces of code, but SCO is going to be case that businesses refer to when they consider using GPL'd works. And if Microsoft can demonstrate that SCO was caught with its pants down and lost its "intellectual property" due to the "pac-man like nature" of the GPL, it bodes very badly for Free Software.
If operator overloading is defining a new language, then so is writing new functions.
I disagree. New functions are just that--they're new. They do not override any preconceived notions about what they're supposed to do. Operators, however, do have preconceived notions. Imagine if we applied the same reasoning to English and said, "the conjunctions 'and' and 'or' sometimes behave differently depending on the nouns they're chaining together." All of a sudden the sentence that reads, "Beer and dogs aren't pretty," is not comprehensible unless one refers to the dictionary, where it reads:
Beer, n.
1. A fermented liquor made from any malted grain, but
commonly from barley malt, with hops or some other
substance to impart a bitter flavor. and:
1. drenched or to steep in moisture; to wet thoroughly;
to soak; to saturate with water or other liquid;
to immerse.
Now the sentence means, Dogs drenched in beer aren't pretty. Significantly different from the first.
I agree that overloading operators is more powerful for the code writer, but any reading of it will generally suffer, since it relies on knowing every other object's behavior.
For some strange reason, the original artist/author is always scared of these copycats instead of fearing plagiarism (which is the real threat).
Had you said obscurity rather than plagiarism I would have thought better of you (See O'reilly's article). Copycats and plagiarists actually bolster a works popularity and create a sort of strange scarcity e.g. there are 100 copycats of a work, but only one original. In Japanese anime companies they don't let their lawyers run their business, and the artists take this 'copying' or derivative work as a compliment. I'm not making the claim that copyright should be abolished in leiu of this. I only wish to present a society's outlook that comes at this from an entirely different perspective that doesn't automatically try to supress works just because it might have the legal foundation to, but asks whether that is really in its best interest.
Oh, you mean the gay love story. Seriously, the directors of the documentary had their own agenda with that film. They focused purely on the two founder's "relationship." Later you see the directors holding hands and telling you what inspired them to capture this same sex relationship and mask it as a documentary of the dot.com boom.
p.s. I have nothing against gays. I was just disappointed that this love story was misrepresented as a dot.com documentary.
Anonymous voting does not mean the it's a secret ballot. It only means that it can't be traced back to you. Would you trust the fate of your vote on a ballot you can't read? How do you know it came out right?
As for your database solution, sure they can check the electronic tally, but how does that equate with checking the validity of it? You've solved nothing, and the fact that you think putting it in a proprietary database shows you've learned nothing.
What scares me is the fact that Electronic Gambling Machines have more oversight than these Electronic Voting Machines. Gambling institutions that provide electronic gaming are subject to random searches where the eeproms will popped out and verified that no tampering has been committed.
However, when it comes to protecting the foundation of democracy we can't even be given access to the source code as it is a "trade secret." Here's an example of this privatization of democracy:
In the West Virginia case [where an election supervisor, a candidate, a prosecutor, a county commissioner, election workers and the voting machine vendor were all sued by a group of candidates who believed that they had been cheated in the election], although the criminal charges were dropped, the judge had not allowed the jury to see a demonstration by the plaintiff's attorneys' computer expert, Wayne Nunn, PhD, a project scientist for Union Carbide who had designed multimillion-dollar computer networks.
After a nine-hour examination of the CES (now Business Records Corporation) computer system in question and in the presence of the CES president, the system's programmer, and others,
"Nunn, with one punch card, added ten thousand votes to the total of one of the candidates in a mock race for president". [ The New Yorker , November 7 th 1988, p. 68]
Nunn subsequently gave a deposition under cross-examination and revealed seven ways in which the system could be deliberately caused to miscount votes, including by manipulation of the toggle switch on the front of the machine to alter vote totals and by inserting a set of secret Trojan Horse commands into the source-code software as described earlier. So it can be done. But can it be detected and prosecuted?
A methodical expert analysis of the company's source-code could have been the key to determining the existence of fraud, but CES officials asked presiding Judge Charles H. Haden II, of the United States District Court, to block Nunn from inspecting their code on the basis that it was a "trade secret". Ultimately, the judge ordered that Nunn alone be allowed to view it, but without the computer he needed for a proper system analysis.
Nevertheless, he discovered "trap doors", "wait loops", and Christmas trees" which could all serve the same end of undetectable vote fraud. According to the New Yorker's Ronnie Dugger, after viewing the code for several hours,
"Nunn was prepared to testify that a ?debugger' in the BT-76 program, while enabling a programmer to make repairs in the program, was also a Trojan Horse; Haden excluded such testimony".
Nunn was allowed to testify that "he had concluded that the program had been altered during the counting".
The jury was also barred from seeing Nunn demonstrate how he could alter the vote count.
The case of Wayne Nunn being allowed to examine the proprietary source-code of the CES system is an extraordinary exception. The fact is that very few individuals outside of the computer vendors have ever been allowed to inspect the source-code of that or any other election equipment company. This was confirmed by Eva Waskell, the director of the Elections Project at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in a 1993 report entitled "Overview of Computers and Electors".
Many court cases involving allegations of fraud were brought against vendors of electronic systems. There were no convictions. Was there ever any proof of tampering presented? No. Part of the reason for this may be that during the litigation the plaintiffs were never given access to the vote tabulating program, and hence there was no opportunity for anyone to establish evidence to either prove or disprove the allegations. [Emphasis added]
We should point out that even if the court allowed the plaintiff's experts to inspect the source-code, there would be no proof that the code provided to the court was, in fact, the selfsame code used in the particular election in question. Federal election officials say that a few states are mandating that the source-code be placed in escrow so that it could be examined in the event of a particularly "fishy" election result.
"I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said. "This flies directly in the face of what the framers of the Constitution had in mind, but is it unconstitutional?" Although the Supreme Court did not find retroactive copyright extension unconstitutional, there is no doubt that Congress strayed from the spirit of constitution. Copyright has become extremely unbalanced and biased towards monied interests. Many of whom have made their most valuable content off of the ever shrinking public domain.
Congress has a responsibility to right this situation and the Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 107) is a step in the right direction. I hope you will co-sponsor the DMCRA and show your support for the public's rights in digital media.
I find the fact that the FBI warning isn't skippable on my DVDs disturbing. A message pops up on my television from my DVD player that my DVD is disallowing me from jumping to the main menu. My DVD player is *disallowing* me to fast forward. No where else do we suffer being controlled by our own devices. Imagine if CD players imposed such bizarre rules such as forcing you to listen to something as obnoxious as the this before you could play the disc, "The following music you are about to listen to is copyrighted material. Any unauthorized copying of this material is a felony offense."
What microsoft is doing is more akin to the phone company, a legally acknowledged monopoly, that blocks you from calling a competitor of theirs. Except in microsoft's case, they reroute the call to a mock phone company which provides different rates and services intentionally meant to dissaude people from switching to that competitor.
It's anti-competive. It's illegal. And this is a fair punishment.
Slashdot Mirror
He could start by changing the company's grading system from an "individual selection" to a "group selection" system since the individual selection fosters competition and group selection fosters cooperation.
How do you deal with contributors to your GPL'd projects?
{{(another 'cool thing') about 'GNU guile' } is
{'most recent version' supports
(clarification (clarify 'SRFI-105'
(developed 'Readable Lisp S-expressions Project')
"curly-infix-expressions"))}}
Sure they can. They just don't have an implicit rule for evaluating an integer as a boolean. Like Larry Wall says, there is no general way to convert a scalar to an array. Java designers would say, there is no general way to convert an integer to a boolean. So if you like C's implicit rule for integer to boolean conversion (i != 0), then use it but be explicit about it.
He's so utterly consistent, I like to think of him as the modern day Socrates.
I did the same thing for myself. Why pay the cost of dynamic pages if they are static to the server?
Mine has a makefile at its heart too. Makes me feel all fuzzy.
The paper is written around one idea, simplifying the internal structure of X. However, it is against the simplicity of X by claiming xlib's level of abstraction too low.
Let me take a crack at interpreting that last sentence. X server is simple because the abstraction of its lib is very low. (Hmm, and you say the paper is written by a confused state of mind.)
Also, I think you've misjudged the scope of the paper. It isn't about just simplifying the internal structure of the X server; it's about simplifying not only the display server but also its clients. Indeed, the reason we have so many different widget libraries (GTK, KDE, etc) is because X's lib is too low level.
I'm glad I never fought for freedom because some oppressors would inevitably try to come and take it away again. And that would make me seriously pissed off.
If the mere thought of protecting your freedoms (digital or otherwise) presents so much of a burden to you that it prevents you from making a contribution, you probably don't have the wherewithal to make a significant contribution anyway.
Yeah, and unix is source compatible with other unixes, right? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Just because they should be compatible, doesn't mean they are in every respect. It's necessary to be prudent when making this big of a jump in architecture.
I especially liked the death of christ. Thanks, again.
Can we get it in the Jargon file atleast?
The actual statement, "Linux is a copy of Unix. There is very little new stuff in Linux," was made by Larry McVoy apparently, on Jan, 4 2003.
0 3/ Jan/1000.html
http://lists.insecure.org/lists/linux-kernel/20
Who is the publisher and who is the theif?
SCO is the publisher. IBM is the alleged thief.
Did the thief publish under such a license? Oh well.
I can understand arguing that the publisher, the copyright holder, who published under the GPL gets what he deserves, but are you arguing that the thief's publication is legitimate? If so, some rogue employee would have GPL'd Windows by now. (Also, the GPL does not allow this behavior; it must be licensed by the copyright holder.)
The primary cause of SCO's wierd predicament really isn't the GPL.
But it is. Because what I'm hearing from this community is, "so what if IBM stole their code and inserted it somewhere in GNU/Linux; they mistakenly published it under the GPL, so they forfeit their code and copyright." This has nothing to do with trade secrets. This is a full on attempt to bring the GPL into a court case SCO wants to lose, because the win will have a chilling effect on businesses that want to use the GPL.
It's easy to [prevent] the GPL from gobbling up your IP [like] pack-man: just don't release anything under the GPL or, if you do, make damn sure that you know what it is that you're releasing.
You make it sound so easy. You forgot to add, "Ensure that no unscrupulous third-party has inserted your code anywhere in GNU/Linux." Unfortunately, GNU/Linux is 30 million lines of source code (Wheeler 1).
Here's an analogy I used yesterday to try and make a point at why this is non-obvious, and how the GPL muddies the waters.
Imagine, I'm a publisher of books. I find someone has stolen work out of one of the books I own and publish. However, I'm a publisher of the thief's book; does that mean I've implicitly condoned his behavior? Is his theft legitimized by my publishing of it? That is the question we're grappling with.
The GPL throws a big wrench in this analogy, because one could interpret that publishing the code in question does legitimize its theft. I do not think that should be the case, and I do not believe that is the spirit of the GPL.
We don't want to turn the GPL into a trap that companies believe will catch them unaware. SCO has unquestionable not acted in good faith by failing to point out the offending pieces of code, but SCO is going to be case that businesses refer to when they consider using GPL'd works. And if Microsoft can demonstrate that SCO was caught with its pants down and lost its "intellectual property" due to the "pac-man like nature" of the GPL, it bodes very badly for Free Software.
I disagree. New functions are just that--they're new. They do not override any preconceived notions about what they're supposed to do. Operators, however, do have preconceived notions. Imagine if we applied the same reasoning to English and said, "the conjunctions 'and' and 'or' sometimes behave differently depending on the nouns they're chaining together." All of a sudden the sentence that reads, "Beer and dogs aren't pretty," is not comprehensible unless one refers to the dictionary, where it reads:
Now the sentence means, Dogs drenched in beer aren't pretty. Significantly different from the first.
I agree that overloading operators is more powerful for the code writer, but any reading of it will generally suffer, since it relies on knowing every other object's behavior.
Remember their first computer was $666.00. Now an album from them costs $9.99. See the relation?
For some strange reason, the original artist/author is always scared of these copycats instead of fearing plagiarism (which is the real threat).
Had you said obscurity rather than plagiarism I would have thought better of you (See O'reilly's article). Copycats and plagiarists actually bolster a works popularity and create a sort of strange scarcity e.g. there are 100 copycats of a work, but only one original. In Japanese anime companies they don't let their lawyers run their business, and the artists take this 'copying' or derivative work as a compliment. I'm not making the claim that copyright should be abolished in leiu of this. I only wish to present a society's outlook that comes at this from an entirely different perspective that doesn't automatically try to supress works just because it might have the legal foundation to, but asks whether that is really in its best interest.
No, you'd use xpath silly. For instance, I made myself a simple XSLT and shell script that uses Xalan to easily get access to different XML elements.
/etc/passwd.xml /etc/passwd.xml
$ xpath
usage: xpath [-sx] match-path file.xml [output file]
-s value-of
-x copy-of
$ xpath -s "/users/user[@name='shane']/@passwd"
foo
$ xpath -x "/users/user[@name='shane']"
<user name="shane" passwd="foo" home-dir="/home/shane"/>
Oh, you mean the gay love story. Seriously, the directors of the documentary had their own agenda with that film. They focused purely on the two founder's "relationship." Later you see the directors holding hands and telling you what inspired them to capture this same sex relationship and mask it as a documentary of the dot.com boom.
p.s. I have nothing against gays. I was just disappointed that this love story was misrepresented as a dot.com documentary.
Anonymous voting does not mean the it's a secret ballot. It only means that it can't be traced back to you. Would you trust the fate of your vote on a ballot you can't read? How do you know it came out right?
As for your database solution, sure they can check the electronic tally, but how does that equate with checking the validity of it? You've solved nothing, and the fact that you think putting it in a proprietary database shows you've learned nothing.
However, when it comes to protecting the foundation of democracy we can't even be given access to the source code as it is a "trade secret." Here's an example of this privatization of democracy:
"I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said. "This flies directly in the face of what the framers of the Constitution had in mind, but is it unconstitutional?" Although the Supreme Court did not find retroactive copyright extension unconstitutional, there is no doubt that Congress strayed from the spirit of constitution. Copyright has become extremely unbalanced and biased towards monied interests. Many of whom have made their most valuable content off of the ever shrinking public domain.
Congress has a responsibility to right this situation and the Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 107) is a step in the right direction. I hope you will co-sponsor the DMCRA and show your support for the public's rights in digital media.
Thank you for your time.
Here's the comment I made to the EFF:
I find the fact that the FBI warning isn't skippable on my DVDs disturbing. A message pops up on my television from my DVD player that my DVD is disallowing me from jumping to the main menu. My DVD player is *disallowing* me to fast forward. No where else do we suffer being controlled by our own devices. Imagine if CD players imposed such bizarre rules such as forcing you to listen to something as obnoxious as the this before you could play the disc, "The following music you are about to listen to is copyrighted material. Any unauthorized copying of this material is a felony offense."
What microsoft is doing is more akin to the phone company, a legally acknowledged monopoly, that blocks you from calling a competitor of theirs. Except in microsoft's case, they reroute the call to a mock phone company which provides different rates and services intentionally meant to dissaude people from switching to that competitor.
It's anti-competive. It's illegal. And this is a fair punishment.