This guy takes a pretty obvious statement -- that certain ideas are unpopular at some times and popular at others -- and confuses this with fashion.
He uses Galileo as an example as an example of someone who expressed unfashionable ideas. But Galileo was starting a new fashion. He popularized and provided evidence for a new truth of which the world was unaware and generally unprepared to accept.
The difference between Galileo's writings and an unfashionable idea is that Galileo expressed a TRUE statement. Many unfashionable statements are unfashionable precisely because they are wrong.
There's a time and place for non-conformism, and this isn't it.
At least three of the four innermost, rocky planets in our own Solar System appear to have had sigificant amounts of water in the distant past. Earth has kept hers while Venus and Mars seem to have lost nearly all of their water. So, judging from our own Solar System water appears to be common. Now we have a planetary formation model which produces rocky worlds with water which we didn't have before.
And why do you think this is not grounded in reality? Such a model should produce predictions of element abundances as a function of distance from the central star which we might one day test with observation. Why do you think this is pompous?
Where's the consideration? There isn't one. It's a pure grant of rights with stipulations/conditions.
A contract only exists if the parties have the legal right to contract. A contract with a minor is voidable by the minor party of the contract. However, the GPL is enforcable against a minor.
IBM does not have to respond to any more of SCO's interrogatories until and unless SCO coughs up and SCO's motion to compel is heard in late January.
Also, SCO admitted that IBM didn't put any Sys V code in Linux. They are claiming that IBM misappropriated Unixware trade secrets they learned in the Monteray project. They are also claiming that IBM had a contractual obligation to keep RCU, and NUMA technologies confidential. Expect that argument to be thoroughly demolished by IBM's crack legal team as opposed to SCO's crack-smoking legal team.
A big win for IBM in this legal chessgame.
You say "Groupthink" like it's a bad thing
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 1
When a group of people share common values and interests, they often agree on a lot of things. CHallange the conventional wisdom, and lots of people will jump on you. Do it deliberately and you are a troll.
That's how communities are. Those same shared values is what *makes* a community. Get used to it.
Trolls are somehow threatened by this and in some kind of a contrarian, knee-jerk reaction, they'll post anything which goes the opposite way.
If you have a real point to make, make it. If the community finds it insightful, it will get responded to and moderated up. If the community rejects it, GO FIND ANOTHER COMMUNITY WHERE YOU FIT IN BETTER.
Global warming is good science. People who work with this stuff as a career (and who don't have ulterior motives because they are funded by the oil and gas companies) find that there really is a lot of good, real evidence for it.
The case of the temperatures in the 1600s isn't as cut and dried as you think. The critics misunderstood the data.
It's really quite well established scientifically that human activity has affected recent global temperatures. Just because we don't have reliable satellite data going back sevral hundred years dosn't mean we shouldn't us what information w do have.
The reason is there's something called the carbon cycle and it describes how carbon moves from plants to animals to the atmosphere and oceans and back into plants. Any methane in the atmosphere got there because an animal ate plants. Those plants got that carbon from the atmosphere. All that has happened is that carbon which was originally in the atmosphere got back there where it will eventually be degraded back into carbon dioxide and water by completely natural processes -- processes which speed up when methane concentrations increase.
Methane is a big smoke screen for the REAL problem -- we are digging up HUGE amounts of carbon out of the earth and burning it as fossil fuels. Methane dosn't hold a candle to the REAL problem, it just distracts attention from it.
Google is the perfect candidate to sue. They aren't using a Red Hat kernel -- that would get their suit consolidated with Red Hat's in DE in a second. They are probably using several of the technologies that SCO is targeting.
Plus they are their own distributor. They take the kernel.org source, mix in their own custom patches and compile a kernel and distribute it among lots of machines. There's no Red Hat or Suse or Debian that they can point their finger at.
In another sense, this plays into SCO's FUD machine. Google is not a typical "end-user". Google has a potential liability precisely because they modify and copy the kernel. A company which pays Red Hat a per CPU fee for Linux and support and uses the RH supplied binary kernels does not have the same kind of potential liability. In that case, SCO's claim is only against Red Hat and not a true end-user.
Geeks do, but your average surfer does not. They go clickly clickly on the results returned by the search engine or clicky clicky on the link someone emailed them or clicky clicky on the link from some other website.
Most users don't even *know* that you can type stuff in the Address field.
You don't seem to have any real comprehension of orbital mechanics, do you? Let me try explain it in small words of a few sylables each.
Just because they share an orbital resonance with Neptune dosn't mean that they are all in the same place. They are spread out in a roughly donut shaped region. (Pluto is on an inclined orbit which crosses Neptune's.) If you are "flying by" from inside to out, you are moving faster than the orbital speed at that distance. That means that you will soon be further from the sun and heading out. To get from there to another point in that torus, you are going to have to expend some serious delta-v to get back *down* to it. Planetary missions don't have the weight budget to to carry that kind of manuvering capability. It's too heavy.
In any kind of cheap (in weight) orbital approach, you either get one shot at a given radius from the sun which you can place prettu accurately to get close to something or you can settle for something that repeatedly gets you back to your area of interest, but not necessarially close to anything and on orbital timescales.
There could conceivably be an eccentric orbit that takes a probe around Neptune periodically, then above the ecliptic and out until it comes back to Neptune below the ecliptic and slingshots around again that would stay within this torus. But you would have to chance that something interesting wound be within visible range every time you went out. Each orbit would probably be of a year or more duration with no guarantee of actually seeing more than one thing up close.
I think he understands better than most people exactly why free software is on solid legal ground, so I think he'd be a fine person on the witness stand.
He's been subponeaed which means that they just want to talk to him about what he knows. They'll porobably ask him what he found with his comparator.
He will never be on the stand to testify about the validity of the GPL. That is a question of law, not a fact to be established by witnesses. The GPL will have its fate decided on the basis of legal briefs, not witnesses.
Clearly, the best way to get a remote backdoor is by making two changes, each of which is insufficient to garner attention but which, taken together, constitute the entire exploit.
The complementary step would be to try to get the priviledge elevator installed in some system component so that together they could be used as a remote bakdoor when a vulnerable kernel was running a compromised service.
Time to examine recent paches to common daemons like Apache, Samba and ftpd to see if there's anything which might take advantage of such a hole.
Applications written for Linux do not require glibc. There are compilers other than GNU's and they have their own libraries. When I was programming for MS-DOS, I had Microsoft, Intel and Borland compilers to choose from. Each of them had their own C libraries. I wasn't fooled into thinking I was writing for different operating systems.
You can write glibc-less programs even with gcc. You can make system calls directly. You can use dietlibc or roll your own libc.
We got into this "What is an Operating System" debate when the Microsoft Antitrust suit was going on. At the time, the principal definition of an OS was a program for providing services to other programs. We recognized that an OS frequently shipped with useful utilities.
Linux *is* the OS. GNU provides some utilities, though I wouldn't always call them useful.
GNU screwed up the maintenance of gcc so badly that someone had to fork the project to fix it. Eventually the fork became accepted as the official gcc. Similarly, a Red Hat employee is the chief maintainer of of glibc.
GNU is just an umbrella organization where it's convenient to have the copyrights held.
Frankly, I prefer busybox to many of the GNU commandline utilities. I despise info for it's emacsisms and wish they would just maintain man pages.
They couldn't figure out how to make money selling Linux, so the new management sought a new strategy -- make money whenever someone else sells Linux.
As a result, they're not interested in any outcome which dosn't give them a cut. They want to monetize Linux so that they are the toll takers.
It's like the story of the goose that laid the Golden Egg. Any attempt by SCO to exact a toll on Linux installations will cause implementers to move to BSD. Like the Internet, Free Software will route around any attempt to collect royalties. Collecting a toll will kill Linux, but the code will live on.
Not that SCO's legal arguments will put them in a position to collect the royalties they covet. Their legal arguments are as incompetent as they are laughable. Their derivative works ideas are contrary to copyright law as interpreted on this planet. They don't understand how they are bound by the GPL becuase they distributed Linux under it for years and made their IPO on the strength of Linux's promise. Plus, IBM's undead lawyers will be drinking their blood over patents.
The problem I take it is that if they are e/e-bar collisions they are essentially at rest with respect to us the observes rather than e/e-bar collisions at an appropriate orbital speed for their distance from the galactic center. The energies should be spread from the e/e-bar value by an amount which represents the dispersion of velocities rather than a sharp peak.
I assumed they meant by that that they were seeing some other anniliation with a different mass.
Plus, there's no reason for there to be this number of e/e-bar anniliations in these locations unless there's some weird physics going on.
There have been two leading candidates for dark matter: WIMPs and MACHOs. Each camp have had their proponents.
WIMPS: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. Neutrinos on steriods. Since they only interact through the weak and gravitational forces, they are by definintion dark in EM. But, we haven't found any in colliders.
MACHOs: MAssive Cosmic Halo Objects. You're describing MACHOs. Ordinary, cold, dark matter. But there's probably too much of it to be this. It should have been swept up into stars.
Frankly, I think that the energy levels detected will prove to be not what we're seeking here. It's too much of a coincidence that it is the e/e-bar annilation energy. OTOH, if there were a WILP which did have such a mass, we'd probably never see it thinking we were looking at e/e-bar reactions.
Remember the SCO slide show from August when they showed an example of code they said was illegally copied from SysV into the Linux kernel? The malloc reimplimentation?
Well, SGI contributed that code to the IA-64 architecture.
To Linux Developers Concerned about the Linksys/Cisco GPL Violations:
We are in ongoing negotiating with Linksys/Cisco about this issue. Information from Andrew Miklas and others has been very helpful to us in our negotiations, and we encourage others to share with us any technical information about this or any other GPL violation.
This isn't the first GPL violation we have dealt with; we've been actively enforcing the GPL for over ten years. Our usual practice is not to publicly announce details of ongoing violation negotiations, because we find that private negotiation yields quicker and better cooperation. By building a relationship with violators where we are helping them to come into compliance, we avoid having to fight in court, and are able to spend less resources per violation. Our number one goal in any GPL violation case is to get proper and full compliance with the license; everything else is secondary.
GPL violations sometimes take time to resolve. We wish that we could force resolution quicker, but we haven't found a way to do that. We have, however, discovered a variant of Brooks's Law: adding more lawyers to a GPL violation usually makes it take longer. Lawyers are reluctant to admit to mistakes, because they fear it could be used against them. Engineers and product managers are typically interested in fixing mistakes, so we try our best to work with them first before escalating to legal teams on both sides. Such escalation has happened on this violation, so it will take additional time to resolve the matter.
In addition, we are leading a coalition of many copyright holders in the WRT54G, as Linux is only one part of a large body of GPL'ed software in the product. We formed this coalition because, having done enforcement cases for a product with a broad range of copyright holders before, we have found that separate enforcement actions and/or law suits from individual copyright holders make attainment of compliance more difficult.
We will continue to do everything necessary to obtain full compliance on this and any other products where violations can be confirmed. On this particular violation, we will keep the community informed when issues come up that impact the rights of everyone whose work is being distributed by Cisco or any of its subsidiaries.
If you are a copyright holder on software in the WRT54G, or any other Cisco product, you are welcome join this coalition. Please email for details.
Sincerely,
David Turner, GPL Compliance Engineer, FSF Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, FSF
Slashdot Mirror
This guy takes a pretty obvious statement -- that certain ideas are unpopular at some times and popular at others -- and confuses this with fashion.
He uses Galileo as an example as an example of someone who expressed unfashionable ideas. But Galileo was starting a new fashion. He popularized and provided evidence for a new truth of which the world was unaware and generally unprepared to accept.
The difference between Galileo's writings and an unfashionable idea is that Galileo expressed a TRUE statement. Many unfashionable statements are unfashionable precisely because they are wrong.
There's a time and place for non-conformism, and this isn't it.
At least three of the four innermost, rocky planets in our own Solar System appear to have had sigificant amounts of water in the distant past. Earth has kept hers while Venus and Mars seem to have lost nearly all of their water. So, judging from our own Solar System water appears to be common. Now we have a planetary formation model which produces rocky worlds with water which we didn't have before.
And why do you think this is not grounded in reality? Such a model should produce predictions of element abundances as a function of distance from the central star which we might one day test with observation. Why do you think this is pompous?
Where's the consideration? There isn't one. It's a pure grant of rights with stipulations/conditions.
A contract only exists if the parties have the legal right to contract. A contract with a minor is voidable by the minor party of the contract. However, the GPL is enforcable against a minor.
Yes, but is my sig the "truly marvelous" sig which it references or just a bad typo? The ambiguous self-reference amuses me.
IBM does not have to respond to any more of SCO's interrogatories until and unless SCO coughs up and SCO's motion to compel is heard in late January.
Also, SCO admitted that IBM didn't put any Sys V code in Linux. They are claiming that IBM misappropriated Unixware trade secrets they learned in the Monteray project. They are also claiming that IBM had a contractual obligation to keep RCU, and NUMA technologies confidential. Expect that argument to be thoroughly demolished by IBM's crack legal team as opposed to SCO's crack-smoking legal team.
A big win for IBM in this legal chessgame.
When a group of people share common values and interests, they often agree on a lot of things. CHallange the conventional wisdom, and lots of people will jump on you. Do it deliberately and you are a troll.
That's how communities are. Those same shared values is what *makes* a community. Get used to it.
Trolls are somehow threatened by this and in some kind of a contrarian, knee-jerk reaction, they'll post anything which goes the opposite way.
If you have a real point to make, make it. If the community finds it insightful, it will get responded to and moderated up. If the community rejects it, GO FIND ANOTHER COMMUNITY WHERE YOU FIT IN BETTER.
It's as simple as that.
Global warming is good science. People who work with this stuff as a career (and who don't have ulterior motives because they are funded by the oil and gas companies) find that there really is a lot of good, real evidence for it.
The case of the temperatures in the 1600s isn't as cut and dried as you think. The critics misunderstood the data.
It's really quite well established scientifically that human activity has affected recent global temperatures. Just because we don't have reliable satellite data going back sevral hundred years dosn't mean we shouldn't us what information w do have.
The reason is there's something called the carbon cycle and it describes how carbon moves from plants to animals to the atmosphere and oceans and back into plants. Any methane in the atmosphere got there because an animal ate plants. Those plants got that carbon from the atmosphere. All that has happened is that carbon which was originally in the atmosphere got back there where it will eventually be degraded back into carbon dioxide and water by completely natural processes -- processes which speed up when methane concentrations increase.
Methane is a big smoke screen for the REAL problem -- we are digging up HUGE amounts of carbon out of the earth and burning it as fossil fuels. Methane dosn't hold a candle to the REAL problem, it just distracts attention from it.
Google is the perfect candidate to sue. They aren't using a Red Hat kernel -- that would get their suit consolidated with Red Hat's in DE in a second. They are probably using several of the technologies that SCO is targeting.
Plus they are their own distributor. They take the kernel.org source, mix in their own custom patches and compile a kernel and distribute it among lots of machines. There's no Red Hat or Suse or Debian that they can point their finger at.
In another sense, this plays into SCO's FUD machine. Google is not a typical "end-user". Google has a potential liability precisely because they modify and copy the kernel. A company which pays Red Hat a per CPU fee for Linux and support and uses the RH supplied binary kernels does not have the same kind of potential liability. In that case, SCO's claim is only against Red Hat and not a true end-user.
Geeks do, but your average surfer does not. They go clickly clickly on the results returned by the search engine or clicky clicky on the link someone emailed them or clicky clicky on the link from some other website.
Most users don't even *know* that you can type stuff in the Address field.
You don't seem to have any real comprehension of orbital mechanics, do you? Let me try explain it in small words of a few sylables each.
Just because they share an orbital resonance with Neptune dosn't mean that they are all in the same place. They are spread out in a roughly donut shaped region. (Pluto is on an inclined orbit which crosses Neptune's.) If you are "flying by" from inside to out, you are moving faster than the orbital speed at that distance. That means that you will soon be further from the sun and heading out. To get from there to another point in that torus, you are going to have to expend some serious delta-v to get back *down* to it. Planetary missions don't have the weight budget to to carry that kind of manuvering capability. It's too heavy.
In any kind of cheap (in weight) orbital approach, you either get one shot at a given radius from the sun which you can place prettu accurately to get close to something or you can settle for something that repeatedly gets you back to your area of interest, but not necessarially close to anything and on orbital timescales.
There could conceivably be an eccentric orbit that takes a probe around Neptune periodically, then above the ecliptic and out until it comes back to Neptune below the ecliptic and slingshots around again that would stay within this torus. But you would have to chance that something interesting wound be within visible range every time you went out. Each orbit would probably be of a year or more duration with no guarantee of actually seeing more than one thing up close.
I think he understands better than most people exactly why free software is on solid legal ground, so I think he'd be a fine person on the witness stand.
He's been subponeaed which means that they just want to talk to him about what he knows. They'll porobably ask him what he found with his comparator.
He will never be on the stand to testify about the validity of the GPL. That is a question of law, not a fact to be established by witnesses. The GPL will have its fate decided on the basis of legal briefs, not witnesses.
The "Politically Correct" distribution.
Instead, give me "Tastes Better, Less GNU" distribution.
Clearly, the best way to get a remote backdoor is by making two changes, each of which is insufficient to garner attention but which, taken together, constitute the entire exploit.
The complementary step would be to try to get the priviledge elevator installed in some system component so that together they could be used as a remote bakdoor when a vulnerable kernel was running a compromised service.
Time to examine recent paches to common daemons like Apache, Samba and ftpd to see if there's anything which might take advantage of such a hole.
I saw Linus staring up at me from the cover of Wired at the newstand this morning with "Leader of the Free World" written across his face.
He looked stoned.
Applications written for Linux do not require glibc. There are compilers other than GNU's and they have their own libraries. When I was programming for MS-DOS, I had Microsoft, Intel and Borland compilers to choose from. Each of them had their own C libraries. I wasn't fooled into thinking I was writing for different operating systems.
You can write glibc-less programs even with gcc. You can make system calls directly. You can use dietlibc or roll your own libc.
We got into this "What is an Operating System" debate when the Microsoft Antitrust suit was going on. At the time, the principal definition of an OS was a program for providing services to other programs. We recognized that an OS frequently shipped with useful utilities.
Linux *is* the OS. GNU provides some utilities, though I wouldn't always call them useful.
GNU screwed up the maintenance of gcc so badly that someone had to fork the project to fix it. Eventually the fork became accepted as the official gcc. Similarly, a Red Hat employee is the chief maintainer of of glibc.
GNU is just an umbrella organization where it's convenient to have the copyrights held.
Frankly, I prefer busybox to many of the GNU commandline utilities. I despise info for it's emacsisms and wish they would just maintain man pages.
Three things really: Revenue. Royalties. Cash.
They couldn't figure out how to make money selling Linux, so the new management sought a new strategy -- make money whenever someone else sells Linux.
As a result, they're not interested in any outcome which dosn't give them a cut. They want to monetize Linux so that they are the toll takers.
It's like the story of the goose that laid the Golden Egg. Any attempt by SCO to exact a toll on Linux installations will cause implementers to move to BSD. Like the Internet, Free Software will route around any attempt to collect royalties. Collecting a toll will kill Linux, but the code will live on.
Not that SCO's legal arguments will put them in a position to collect the royalties they covet. Their legal arguments are as incompetent as they are laughable. Their derivative works ideas are contrary to copyright law as interpreted on this planet. They don't understand how they are bound by the GPL becuase they distributed Linux under it for years and made their IPO on the strength of Linux's promise. Plus, IBM's undead lawyers will be drinking their blood over patents.
The problem I take it is that if they are e/e-bar collisions they are essentially at rest with respect to us the observes rather than e/e-bar collisions at an appropriate orbital speed for their distance from the galactic center. The energies should be spread from the e/e-bar value by an amount which represents the dispersion of velocities rather than a sharp peak.
I assumed they meant by that that they were seeing some other anniliation with a different mass.
Plus, there's no reason for there to be this number of e/e-bar anniliations in these locations unless there's some weird physics going on.
There have been two leading candidates for dark matter: WIMPs and MACHOs. Each camp have had their proponents.
WIMPS: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. Neutrinos on steriods. Since they only interact through the weak and gravitational forces, they are by definintion dark in EM. But, we haven't found any in colliders.
MACHOs: MAssive Cosmic Halo Objects. You're describing MACHOs. Ordinary, cold, dark matter. But there's probably too much of it to be this. It should have been swept up into stars.
Frankly, I think that the energy levels detected will prove to be not what we're seeking here. It's too much of a coincidence that it is the e/e-bar annilation energy. OTOH, if there were a WILP which did have such a mass, we'd probably never see it thinking we were looking at e/e-bar reactions.
The Google Calculator is your friend.
1 US gallon = 768 US teaspoons
Remember the SCO slide show from August when they showed an example of code they said was illegally copied from SysV into the Linux kernel? The malloc reimplimentation?
Well, SGI contributed that code to the IA-64 architecture.
Thanks for linking to my own Yahoo post. I couldn't have linked that post since I wrote it about an hour after I wrote this ./ post.
They have the pump part worked out, but they can't dump. They need to find a bigger idiot and so far the suckers aren't biting.