I don't know about the US but in Europe it would look a lot like product tying, which is illegal, and done by a quite likely soon to be convicted monopolist to boot (in Europe that is, in the US they already are convicted) which probably wouldn't help them enforce this clause.
"Um, the idea of controlling quality and maintaining old code isn't what Open Source or Free Software have traditionally been about at all."
They aren't the direct causes but they are ancilry causes.
Free Software as a political/philosophical movement (that is, since RMS started GNU as opposed to the way it existed before that without people realising what it was) is about freedom to modify and redistribute the code. and freedom from having one company/person dictate what you can and cannot do with the software (like with the NDA RMS would have had to sign to be able to see the source of the printer driver).
However, the freedom to modify the software and to redistribute it, which are THE primary reasons behind free software, implies the idea for controlling quality given that you seldom modify software to degrade its quality (product activation, spyware... notwithstanding but these are found in proprietary software as there is no incentive to include them in free software) but modify it to remove bugs or add features which improve free software. So controlling quality is one of the things that free software about, just something that is subsumed as one of the reasons we want freedom to modify the software.
As for maintaining old code (or at least the possibility of doing so), it is similarly part of free software as one of the reasons for the need to be able to modify the source as some people may need to keep odl system runing. For example, many COBOL programs have been in use for decades, only being modified enough to get them running on new mainframes. Do you think it is easier to port them with or without the source?
As for Open Source as a political/marketing movement (as started by ESR and Bruce Perens around 1997) controlling quality is THE idea behind it as Open Source was founded as a way to sway companies to Free Software by using a more business friendly name, toning down the Freedom rethoric and using an "OSS leads to better quality" argumentation.
So I would say "controlling quality and maintaining old code" is part of what Free Software and Open Source have always been about as your software cannot meet the respective definitions of these movements without allowing it and these are qualities scarcely found outside these movements.
"I was thinking that he had the reforged sword king's sword when they met the riders of Rohan."
I was very surprised to see it forged in ROTK because I thought it had been reforged in FOTR but when checking the EE of FOTR it isn't there, they go from the council to Aragorn visiting his mother's grave to Bilbo giving Sting/the mithril vest to Frodo to the departure.
After checking the battle scenes in Moria and against the orcs at the breaking of the fellowship I realise that while the blade of Aragorn's sword is similar to Narsil's the handle/guard is much different, very slim whereas Narsil's was very imposing so it has to be a different sword.
The funny thing was, at the cinema, when I saw the scene where they reforge the sword I thought "that doesn't make any sense, it already was in FOTR" not realising that my mind had recreated the scene from my knowledge of the book.
"It was when I was waiting for a bus in Birmingham, on the street where Tolkien lived as a child, that I realised what LotR was all about. Just looking around at a suburb of Britain's second largest city and making a mental comparison to what it looked like before the first world war, it was obvious what the man was thinking about."
I keep reading similar theories in each LOTR story on/. but Tolkien himself in the foreword to the second edition said:
"As for inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical"
"The prime motive was the desire of the tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them"
You are close to right when you say:
"The Scouring of the Shire is the destruction of your own favourite place"
for he says:
"It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten"
But I think that go wrong when you say "by the madness of industrialisation". He says "the economic situation was entirely different" where he would have used a much more telling expression if he was so much against it and used the scouring of the shire as an allegory.
It really bother me to keep seeing these Tolkien-was-a-luddite posts (which is what they are close to be) without anything to back it up but an interpretation of the author's intention that he clearly denied.
"In the book I thought that Denethor was not yet poisoned by Sauron at that point" [i.e. when boromir departs on his journey to Rivendell]
I personnally think he was already under Sauron's influence for two reasons:
1. If he was not yet under his influence then there wouldn't be much time (a year or two as opposed to a decade or two) for Sauron to erode his confidence.
2. While recounting to the council his visit to Gondor after looking for Gollum he says that Denethor thniks the future to be much darker than the past. Despair created by Sauron was a major part of Denethor's will breaking and this seems to indicate that he was at least looking gloomily to the future, thus indicating that Sauron was already working on breaking his spirit.
Of course it is rather tenuous but I do think that Denethor was under Sauron's influence way before Boromir left for Rivendell.
"Eventually SCO is going to have to show their hand."
They were supposed to do that two weeks ago in the IBM case, we will see the results of that in a little more than a week during the hearing that will determine whether SCO complied with the motion to compel discovery.
Replace patent with copyright and contemplate the fallacy of your argument.
Violating a patent is as illegal as violating a copyright and neither need to be laws to make this illegal, they only need laws that violating them is illegal.
You seem to be confusing illegality with criminality, copyright and patent violations are tried in a civil court, by another company or another human prosecuting you (or you prosecuting them), and not in a criminal court, where the goverment would prosecute you.
When you block Spammers you are using your own hardware and are just refusing passage to people (e-mails in that case) you don't like. How is that the same as invading countries hosting the organisers of 9/11 (and since when has Iraq had anything direct to do with 9/11).
And if every country encouraging terrorism (whether hosting or training terrorists) should be invaded then when is the US going to be invaded?
Lisp is not COMPILED; it is COMPILABLE, big difference here.
A Lisp implementation without a REPL available during development would be cripple enough so as to question its Lisp credential, a Lisp implementation without compilation available is without the shadow of a doubt still Lisp.
IANA and IANAL but replace "financial institution" with "law firm" or "hospital" and see lawyer-client privilege or doctor-client confidentiality go out of the window.
Now ask your friend if he really wants to have his lawyer-client privilege with his clients questions using the same logic and how would he fight it?
4) 20 or 40 years ago they constructed things differently and I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 or 40 years we have some people with 40-80 years old machines but nobody with 10-20 years old machines (i.e. machines being constructed today).
I have to disagree with that definition given that before the current craze with virtual machines an interpreted language (or interpreted mode for multi-modes languages) was a language whose program's source code was given to an interpreter (like Lisp or Basic) and so matches your definition of Scripting. Also just in what way is the bytecode interpreted? Translated from bytecode to machine code, yes, but interpreted?
As for a scripting language, it was mostly used for languages in which you were supposed to glue programs and create small utilities that way (like a shell script) but didn't even think of the possibility of writing a full-blown application using them.
However with the advent of Perl and Python which are considered scripting languages yet have enough power to write fairly complicated applications the boundaries between scripting and full-blown programming languages is fading.
Of course they were not the first to do that, you noted OCaml but almost any functional programming language would have done as an example, especially Lisp due to its anciant roots (the first Lisp was defined in 1958, making it one of the oldest family of languages still in use today) and the fact that it is generally interpreted at development time and compiled (either to bytecode or to machine code) when development is finished (or at least, when you start profiling and optimising your program).
It is Perl's nad Python's popularity that forced mainstream computing to ask themselves these questions but they are nothing new or important, they are just artificial distinctions fulfilling our innate need to put things in categories even if they are too complex and don't fit.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring the case issue it would also match wIndowS.
I don't know about the US but in Europe it would look a lot like product tying, which is illegal, and done by a quite likely soon to be convicted monopolist to boot (in Europe that is, in the US they already are convicted) which probably wouldn't help them enforce this clause.
"Um, the idea of controlling quality and maintaining old code isn't what Open Source or Free Software have traditionally been about at all."
They aren't the direct causes but they are ancilry causes.
Free Software as a political/philosophical movement (that is, since RMS started GNU as opposed to the way it existed before that without people realising what it was) is about freedom to modify and redistribute the code. and freedom from having one company/person dictate what you can and cannot do with the software (like with the NDA RMS would have had to sign to be able to see the source of the printer driver).
However, the freedom to modify the software and to redistribute it, which are THE primary reasons behind free software, implies the idea for controlling quality given that you seldom modify software to degrade its quality (product activation, spyware... notwithstanding but these are found in proprietary software as there is no incentive to include them in free software) but modify it to remove bugs or add features which improve free software. So controlling quality is one of the things that free software about, just something that is subsumed as one of the reasons we want freedom to modify the software.
As for maintaining old code (or at least the possibility of doing so), it is similarly part of free software as one of the reasons for the need to be able to modify the source as some people may need to keep odl system runing. For example, many COBOL programs have been in use for decades, only being modified enough to get them running on new mainframes. Do you think it is easier to port them with or without the source?
As for Open Source as a political/marketing movement (as started by ESR and Bruce Perens around 1997) controlling quality is THE idea behind it as Open Source was founded as a way to sway companies to Free Software by using a more business friendly name, toning down the Freedom rethoric and using an "OSS leads to better quality" argumentation.
So I would say "controlling quality and maintaining old code" is part of what Free Software and Open Source have always been about as your software cannot meet the respective definitions of these movements without allowing it and these are qualities scarcely found outside these movements.
(you (might (be (a (prime (candidate (to (become (a (Lisp (programmer)))))))))))
If they did the complete history of the ring in real time it would take a few thousand years, most of which would be spent underground with Gollum.
"I was thinking that he had the reforged sword king's sword when they met the riders of Rohan."
I was very surprised to see it forged in ROTK because I thought it had been reforged in FOTR but when checking the EE of FOTR it isn't there, they go from the council to Aragorn visiting his mother's grave to Bilbo giving Sting/the mithril vest to Frodo to the departure.
After checking the battle scenes in Moria and against the orcs at the breaking of the fellowship I realise that while the blade of Aragorn's sword is similar to Narsil's the handle/guard is much different, very slim whereas Narsil's was very imposing so it has to be a different sword.
The funny thing was, at the cinema, when I saw the scene where they reforge the sword I thought "that doesn't make any sense, it already was in FOTR" not realising that my mind had recreated the scene from my knowledge of the book.
"And the fact that it was THE sword would explain it's effectiveness against the black riders on weathertop."
In the book Strider uses "flaming brands of wood in each hand" because the riders fear the fire, not the useless shard of Narsil.
He and Glorfindel also use fire to force the riders in the ford of Bruinen, thus trapping them between the raging water and the fire.
"It was when I was waiting for a bus in Birmingham, on the street where Tolkien lived as a child, that I realised what LotR was all about. Just looking around at a suburb of Britain's second largest city and making a mental comparison to what it looked like before the first world war, it was obvious what the man was thinking about."
I keep reading similar theories in each LOTR story on
"As for inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical"
"The prime motive was the desire of the tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them"
You are close to right when you say:
"The Scouring of the Shire is the destruction of your own favourite place"
for he says:
"It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten"
But I think that go wrong when you say "by the madness of industrialisation". He says "the economic situation was entirely different" where he would have used a much more telling expression if he was so much against it and used the scouring of the shire as an allegory.
It really bother me to keep seeing these Tolkien-was-a-luddite posts (which is what they are close to be) without anything to back it up but an interpretation of the author's intention that he clearly denied.
"In the book I thought that Denethor was not yet poisoned by Sauron at that point" [i.e. when boromir departs on his journey to Rivendell]
I personnally think he was already under Sauron's influence for two reasons:
1. If he was not yet under his influence then there wouldn't be much time (a year or two as opposed to a decade or two) for Sauron to erode his confidence.
2. While recounting to the council his visit to Gondor after looking for Gollum he says that Denethor thniks the future to be much darker than the past. Despair created by Sauron was a major part of Denethor's will breaking and this seems to indicate that he was at least looking gloomily to the future, thus indicating that Sauron was already working on breaking his spirit.
Of course it is rather tenuous but I do think that Denethor was under Sauron's influence way before Boromir left for Rivendell.
Like the Simpsons would say "It's funny because it's true".
"Eventually SCO is going to have to show their hand."
They were supposed to do that two weeks ago in the IBM case, we will see the results of that in a little more than a week during the hearing that will determine whether SCO complied with the motion to compel discovery.
Unless he uses garbage collection
Replace patent with copyright and contemplate the fallacy of your argument.
Violating a patent is as illegal as violating a copyright and neither need to be laws to make this illegal, they only need laws that violating them is illegal.
You seem to be confusing illegality with criminality, copyright and patent violations are tried in a civil court, by another company or another human prosecuting you (or you prosecuting them), and not in a criminal court, where the goverment would prosecute you.
she might, ny making you pay for it until you reconsider your position.
No, the Universe is closed source, that is why we have to reverse engineer it with this thng called science.
When you block Spammers you are using your own hardware and are just refusing passage to people (e-mails in that case) you don't like. How is that the same as invading countries hosting the organisers of 9/11 (and since when has Iraq had anything direct to do with 9/11).
And if every country encouraging terrorism (whether hosting or training terrorists) should be invaded then when is the US going to be invaded?
Except that it is a fund for end users, and the redhat found is for developers, nothing for distributors apparently.
"Is it just me or is SCO going out of their mind? This is getting insane."
:)"
"It's just you. No one else at slashdot thinks SCO is going out of their mind.
Indeed, they can't go out of their mind anymore than you can go out of your house when you are in deep space.
Lisp is not COMPILED; it is COMPILABLE, big difference here.
A Lisp implementation without a REPL available during development would be cripple enough so as to question its Lisp credential, a Lisp implementation without compilation available is without the shadow of a doubt still Lisp.
"I've come into contact with Chicago gang members and I'd like to see a lot more of them imprisoned :)"
Hmm, so you admit your link to the Chicago underworld; maybe the FBI should investigate YOU.
IANA and IANAL but replace "financial institution" with "law firm" or "hospital" and see lawyer-client privilege or doctor-client confidentiality go out of the window.
Now ask your friend if he really wants to have his lawyer-client privilege with his clients questions using the same logic and how would he fight it?
"A LOT of things that we are now using in 2.6 are not in 2.0."
Dude, if you patched Linux 2.0 with all the things that we are now using in 2.6 it wouldn't be 2.0 anymore... but 2.6.
Support is not about adding new features (that's what upgrades are about), it is about removing old bugs.
I think a (my)knee-to-(their)crotch approach would be more efficient in preventing the (pro)creation of more spammers.
4) 20 or 40 years ago they constructed things differently and I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 or 40 years we have some people with 40-80 years old machines but nobody with 10-20 years old machines (i.e. machines being constructed today).
I have to disagree with that definition given that before the current craze with virtual machines an interpreted language (or interpreted mode for multi-modes languages) was a language whose program's source code was given to an interpreter (like Lisp or Basic) and so matches your definition of Scripting. Also just in what way is the bytecode interpreted? Translated from bytecode to machine code, yes, but interpreted?
As for a scripting language, it was mostly used for languages in which you were supposed to glue programs and create small utilities that way (like a shell script) but didn't even think of the possibility of writing a full-blown application using them.
However with the advent of Perl and Python which are considered scripting languages yet have enough power to write fairly complicated applications the boundaries between scripting and full-blown programming languages is fading.
Of course they were not the first to do that, you noted OCaml but almost any functional programming language would have done as an example, especially Lisp due to its anciant roots (the first Lisp was defined in 1958, making it one of the oldest family of languages still in use today) and the fact that it is generally interpreted at development time and compiled (either to bytecode or to machine code) when development is finished (or at least, when you start profiling and optimising your program).
It is Perl's nad Python's popularity that forced mainstream computing to ask themselves these questions but they are nothing new or important, they are just artificial distinctions fulfilling our innate need to put things in categories even if they are too complex and don't fit.