Could be worse. You could live in Canada under Harper *and* Alberta under Redford. Talk about absolute rule by fear. Reminds me of elections in communist countries.
Umm, no. If they have never intentionally released their product under a source code license such as the GPL, then asking them for the source code is silly. Repeat after me. A GPL violation does not force the company to release their code under the GPL. I am not a lawyer but I've spent a lot of time studying the GPL and how it works with copyright law.
A judge can and should punish them monetarily for existing distribution, and prevent further distribution of the product so long as a license compliance issue exists. This all said, I think users calling on companies to open their source because of a GPL violation, particularly when the product is a core proprietary product is harmful to the GPL specifically, and to open source in general. It perpetuates the lie I spoke of.
We should point out violations, however, and point companies at the remedies I listed. At least one of the remedies is required for further distribution, but any one will do.
Just as an aside, whenever some commercial entity finds itself in violation of the GPL, people start talking like they expect the code to magically be revealed and gifted to the community. This perpetuates the lie that the GPL is viral and can "infect" closed-source code. The reality is far different. If a company is found to be in violation of the GPL, they find themselves in a copyright violation situation. This means that they must a) stop further distribution and b) potentially be held liable for monetary damages resulting from the distribution. They absolutely don't have to release their code. However if they want to continue to distribute and sell their product they will have to do one of three things: 1) remove infringing code, 2) license the infringing code under acceptable terms, possibly by paying a licensing fee to the copyright holder, or 3) release their derivative code under the GPL.
That's too bad. Your own biases prevented you from reading and thinking about some very thoughtful comments on why locally-controlled education can be a really bad thing for a lot of very good reasons. While I don't necessarily agree with all of the GP's arguments, they are good ones, and they need to be thought through. He's certainly right that Greece and Spain's austerity measures are going to be hugely harmful to their future as their education systems are gutted. We seem to be headed full steam in this direction as well.
And in the meantime I'm quite happily using the ESR version of Firefox with no plans to ever use the fly-by-night version. That said, version 10ESR is quite a bit slower than 3.6, the last ESR. Progress for you.
You're right. A whole bunch of pork-barrel Republicans also see this as negative. I remember the sarcastic comments Republican congressmen made last test flight when they said, "congratulations to Space-X for doing what NASA did 50 years ago." Such ironic comments given Republicans' supposed private enterprise leanings, but easy to understand when you realize that NASA funding traditionally hasn't been about exciting science so much as a means of funneling large amounts of corporate welfare back into the home states of congressmen.
And really if you look back on the last 30 years of the space age, a lot has been accomplished by NASA. But almost all of the exciting science did not involve NASA's crown jewel space flight vehicles such as the Shuttle or Saturn 5 at all, but rather remote probes to the outer solar system, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and of course Earth, almost all launched on privately-made (though some designed with NASA's help) rockets like the Atlas, Delta, and so forth. Hubble is the one example I can I think of a scientific triumph that involved the Space Shuttle. Though with the money spent on the shuttle flights to fix and upgrade Hubble, I think they could have built and launched a couple of hubbles. I also think the Space Station is a success, and really was the purpose for which the Shuttle was built. However design by committee to do too many other things poorly means the Shuttle and the Space Station have cost orders of magnitude more than they should have. Had NASA developed a heavy lift rocket along the lines of the Saturn 5 I think the space station could have been lifted and built much more cheaply, and we probably would not have had a gap in manned flight that we now have.
The Space Shuttle was a fantastic vehicle, and a historic one, but it didn't do any of what it was designed to do that well, at least as far as economics go. Now that the program has ended and we can look back on it, we can safely say that from a program goals and outcomes point of view, the Shuttle was a costly lesson.
As for private rockets, as the other poster said, all rockets have always been developed under contract with NASA by private companies. As was said, Boeing has built a lot of rockets used to launch satellites over the years. The difference here is that NASA is only contracting the end result with Space-X (rocket launches). They did not have a hand in the rocket's design. This is a good thing I think. Space-X is still being held to NASA's strict standards for testing and reliability, but they aren't influenced by pork-barrel spending requirements, or being forced to design it a certain way (say with a solid rocket first stage). This is a very good thing and I hope it starts to spell the end of using NASA by Congress as simply a means of funneling tax dollars to specific subcontractors in specific states. Another real difference here is that Space-X is among the first companies thinking to build man-rated rockets, and feeling like they can do it economically and for less cost than the Russians, and certainly several orders of magnitude cheaper and more efficiently than NASA's own post-shuttle designs.
These hold downs are pretty amazing. If you've ever watched recent shuttle launch videos you can see the top of the shuttle lurch a couple of feet laterally when the SSME's light up. It's pretty spectacular. I believe that the SRBS light a couple of seconds before liftoff, so the entire thing is held down for a second or two, even after SRBs lit.
The main difference between the Shuttle and the Falcon 9 as far as launch abort goes is that the SRBs cannot be shut down. As soon as they light, the launch has to happen. The SSMEs of course could shut down after ignition, and in fact did so on an occasion or two. Normally this would happen about T-6 seconds or so, unlike the T-0 shutdown of the falcon 9.
According to Michael Geist, C-11 is a mixed bag, some good, some bad. Almost all of the demands of the copyright lobby were soundly rejected by committee. However other things that are bad remain, including legislation on digital locks.
But yes, I agree whole-heartedly about the state of affairs. The Conservative Republican party of Canada is arrogant and power hungry. I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between interviews with Canadian federal ministers and Republican congressmen, both in tone and content.
Their local affiliate in Alberta, the PC party, isn't much better by any means. Both at the federal level and provincial level, they win by promoting fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Unfortunately the masses seem to go along with this over and over again, all the while complaining about how corrupt things are. Either we have election fraud on a massive scale or else it's mass ignorance or fear or something. It doesn't help that the opposition self-destructed.
Another open source project, that is open source software and hardware, is the neat and cheep little single-channel analyzer, the Nano v2. For basic uses (measuring PPM signals on an arduino board for example), it works very well and is a deal for under $90. I bought mine to work on radio control things so I can example the PPM signal streams coming off the CPU, and the signals going out the servos. In particular I make sure that the head tracking channels are being properly mixed into the PPM stream at the radio end for flying airplanes with first-person video and a head-tracking camera (using gyros).
Without a full staff of patent examiners, how is the patent office to know whether a patent filed is a stupid software patent or not? Bad patents were being filed before the court ruling. Having an overworked and understaffed patent office isn't helping in this regard. So whether we allow software patents or not, we do in fact need more federal employees in the patent office who are well qualified.
Any lawyer who says the GPL could infect your code is incompetent. More likely you are simply misunderstanding him. There's nothing magical about the GPL. It's no different than a license that Microsoft would give you access to Windows 7 source code under as far as how copyright law sees it. Either you follow the terms or you don't, and then you find yourself paying damages. If a company is unable to determine the difference between public domain and free software, then I fear for the company.
The key point here: Anyone who says the GPL can "infect" your code and make you open source your code is lying, plain and simple.
Shipping a product with a GPL violation *does* place you in a damages situation, as described in the copyright act. And Developers or the FSF regularly do sue for GPL compliance because they know companies using the GPL'd code want to keep using the code, thus they need to comply with the license as nothing else in law grants them rights to use the code.
However companies who slip in GPL code could very well replace the code, or if it was worth enough, buy a proprietary license. This is just as you would do if you were found to be violating the copyright of someone's proprietary code. In fact, linksys could have bought a license for busybox if it so chose. Buying a license for linux is more problematic because despite what SCO says, no one person has a right to license the kernel under something other than the GPLv2. In fact some GPL'd code could never be relicensed because the copyright holders cannot all be found and asked.
Please explain how you think the GPL is magically different than any other copyright license? The copyright act certainly does not have provision for infecting the copyrighted property of others.
Ahem. The hazards of relying on a spell-checker. That should be "spreading" not "streaming," though in today's media world maybe the latter verb works.
Also, I should say that while there is such thing as a public domain, and there is code out there given to the public domain, most code, open source or not, free or not, is not in the public domain, and should be treated with proper care and caution, consulting your lawyers when there are questions. As a matter of policy, companies should treat open source code when developing software the same as code from any proprietary source. Licenses must be checked and terms abided by. Perhaps all companies are cavalier with their copyright compliance. Or maybe some are just with open source because it's "free." In the old days copyright violation was pretty hard to detect. Now, since open source code can be actually looked at by others, its signature can be found in binaries readily. Maybe only now are companies finally being caught for treating copyright with such contempt.
Whoops you just showed how ignorant you are of copyright law. If some intern puts in GPL code into your app, and you don't wish to GPL your app, then you are in a copyright violation situation. At this point you are liable for damages. But this would be the same situation as when your intern puts in code from any other unauthorized and unlicensed source. You have 3 options, after settling the damages part: 1. Remove the offending code. 2. GPL the rest of the code so as to comply with the license, or 3. purchase a commercial license for the offending code in terms you negotiate that are better for you.
Please stop streaming the lie that GPL can magically infect your proprietary code. It's companies that lie and then get caught that end up in a world of hurt when they've shipped out a product with thousands of units and then find themselves in a copyright violation situation. At that point I have no sympathy for them. They know the law, and they know that copyright gives them zero access to other peoples' code, except under license from the copyright holder.
I have zero sympathy for SAAS providers whining about the inability to use GPLv3 in their for-profit service. If they want to use a GPLv3 app, negotiate a commercial license for the code. Whining about the GPL being so restrictive just tells me they want to continue to be able to leach off of free software developers. If the software is so useful, pay the GPL developers!
This was rated +5, Funny, right? Oh wait... are you serious? Look, corporations don't pay income taxes of any kind. Every last penny of income tax is passed on to me and you, the customers/consumers. So in reality taxing corporations is a bizarre form of consumption tax. I think a strong case can be made for eliminating corporate income tax in general, but closing personal income tax loopholes where individuals can hide income and assets in corporations. Trying to make Apple pay their "fair share," isn't going to generate that much revenue for the government or revitalize the economy. Of republican tax breaks won't do that either.
I've got very tired of receiving phone calls from relatives about apparent major update after major update for firefox and thunderbird. So I've installed Firefox 10.0.3ESR and Thunderbird 10.0.3ESR for everyone. Still gets updates, but they are minor version updates that can install automatically and unintrusively. So far so good. I don't need to be on the cutting edge of javascript technology, nor do most people. At least for the next year or two version 10 ESR will work great. In fact I just barely upgraded from Firefox 3.6 to 10ESR on my old fedora box after running it for nearly two years without any major problems with web sites. 10ESR is noticeably slower and more bloated than 3.6, but alas that's the prices of progress I suppose.
You're welcome to choose whatever license you wish for your own code of course. But your talk of "[enforcing] Richard Stallman's restrictive ideals" is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worse. GPL was never about being free to distribute the code in any way you want with the code but rather the developer of the code being free, and guaranteeing derivative developers the same freedom. If you don't agree with the GPL, then write your own dang code, negotiate a more suitable license, or leave it alone. It's that simple. You don't need to go off on a FUD tangent about so-called freedoms that you never had a right to under copyright law in the first place.
After so may years of GPL articles you'd think people would actually understand it by now (it's very simple), but apparently now.
I think everyone should be banned from being able to use the word "freedom" unless they are defining what it means. I think its become the strawman argument of the 21st century. One man's freedom is another man's prison.
It doesn't matter what license the source code is under. If you're going to use it and distribute it to your customers, you better be dang sure your lawyer has vetted your right to use and distribute the code and that you are following the terms of said license in the first place. This is just as true for so-called open source as it is for proprietary code that you've licensed. I don't understand why people such as yourself make such a distinction between the GPL and other licenses. If MS produced a utility or DLL you want to use and distribute, you have to know its license conditions just as well as the GPL's conditions. Why is this concept so hard for so many companies to grasp? Complying with the GPL is not hard. If your company has a hard time with that, then yes you are right. You should be avoiding the GPL.
As for your viewpoint about alienation, how is breaking the law and seeking redress justifying the means? Do you treat proprietary licensed code as cavalierly as you do open source?. It's their code. If you don't want to use it in accordance with their license, then get code from somewhere else or write your own code. Plain and simple. Companies getting caught by busybox GPL enforcement just shows how companies are abusing open source software and trying to get a free ride just because they can download the source for free. Since busybox is GPLv2, compliance by these companies is as simple as posting the source tarball on their web site. And actually the GPL only says you have to produce the source code to the GPL'd derivative product on demand.
There are a few examples of this screen out there but I think the reason it's so hard to get a hold of is that the current Pixel Qi screen, well, kind of sucks. The color saturation, contrast, etc just aren't that great. Turns out the screen isn't that good at any of the things it was hyped to be: good color inside, good b&w outside.
The only practical way to obtain hypersonic speeds is to go suborbital, and that really enters the realm of rockets as heat shields are very heavy.
I think the developers of the SR-71 could have predicted these failures. The SR-71 _only_ went Mach 4 or so, at altitudes of greater than 60,000 feet or so. And at full speed the plane was so hot that pilots couldn't touch the canopy of the cockpit (I think the skin temps were at least a 1000 degrees pick your unit) and the plane lengthened by some considerable amount. To handle those speeds special materials were developed and required, which we haven't really exceeded to this day. Given the temperatures produced at Mach 20 in an atmosphere, even thin (think rocket reentry), building control surfaces and heat shields light enough to actually fly is very very difficult, if not impossible. The shuttle had heat tiles to withstand the atmospheric heating but hey were somewhat heavy and the shuttle didn't really fly during reentry so much as plow through the air belly down until the shuttle slowed down to lower mach numbers and in thicker air. And the failure of any heat shield at these Mach numbers will always lead to total destruction of the vehicle as this test and the Columbia tragedy proved.
All this said, having materials that could allow a craft to actually fly under under such conditions as reentry poses would actually be a real boon to space flight I think, but I doubt we will ever find materials that can provide this.
All American rockets today that can deliver payload to orbit are made by private companies. They just happen to be under contract for government agencies like the air force, or even NASA. None of these rockets are man-rated, though, which is something SpaceX is gunning for in a big way. I'm definitely excited. Even if they are the only ones who can do it for a while, that's okay too. It's unlikely that a monopoly situation will lead to prices any higher than they are now!
If this is a reason you prefer a language like python over C, then you should be aware that python does the exact same thing, since python doesn't have variables in the C sense, only names. if you rebind a to b, then any change to the list represented by either name will show up in the other since they are the same list.
One of the few things I can say that school did for me was to teach me programming language theory. names, variables, binding, late binding, early binding, pass by value, pass by reference, pass by object, etc. This helped me to comprehend the array dilemma you mentioned, and also helps me understand python's scheme.
Indeed. You'd think a slashdot editor would be up on his ISS knowledge!:) The escape capsules are definitely tested and found efficacious every few months or so when the crew is rotated. In fact they cannot stay at the space station for more than 6 months or so. That was the whole reason they were thinking of abandoning the station back when Soyuz was grounded last year. That and the fact they didn't want to land the soyuz escape capsules in the dead of winter.
Space-X's rocket is hardly a paper rocket. It actually exists, has been fired several times, and has had two test flights that were fairly successful. Later this year a test flight will carry actual cargo to the space station. Space-X is in my estimation only about 2 years away from being able to do regular cargo runs to the space station. Their human-rated Dragon capsule is also coming along nicely. Their design looks good, and by combining the escape system with the maneuvering system they've managed to reduce weight and increase reliability and safety over the systems used by the old Apollo program and the current Soyuz program. In about 6 years they will be able to fly astronauts to the space station (really).
I'm very excited about what they are doing. I hope that NASA and the government support them because they really are doing good work, and doing things that NASA can't (if because it's pulled 8 ways by different levels of government). Right now it looks like Space-X is really our only chance to get humans into space. Why waste more money on paper rockets like constellation, or even the Orion capsule at this stage.
There are other companies like Boeing, Bigelow, and others that are in the running too. They should be supported, and given NASA contracts where appropriate.
I find the skepticism, particularly on the part of Republicans, to private space flight be very puzzling. Their sarcastic congratulations to Space-X for doing what NASA did 50 years ago was really grating. I'd think that they'd be very excited that a private company is having success. Granted all rockets these days are made by private companies, but they are typically funded in large part by government (air force, NASA, etc).
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Could be worse. You could live in Canada under Harper *and* Alberta under Redford. Talk about absolute rule by fear. Reminds me of elections in communist countries.
Umm, no. If they have never intentionally released their product under a source code license such as the GPL, then asking them for the source code is silly. Repeat after me. A GPL violation does not force the company to release their code under the GPL. I am not a lawyer but I've spent a lot of time studying the GPL and how it works with copyright law.
A judge can and should punish them monetarily for existing distribution, and prevent further distribution of the product so long as a license compliance issue exists. This all said, I think users calling on companies to open their source because of a GPL violation, particularly when the product is a core proprietary product is harmful to the GPL specifically, and to open source in general. It perpetuates the lie I spoke of.
We should point out violations, however, and point companies at the remedies I listed. At least one of the remedies is required for further distribution, but any one will do.
Just as an aside, whenever some commercial entity finds itself in violation of the GPL, people start talking like they expect the code to magically be revealed and gifted to the community. This perpetuates the lie that the GPL is viral and can "infect" closed-source code. The reality is far different. If a company is found to be in violation of the GPL, they find themselves in a copyright violation situation. This means that they must a) stop further distribution and b) potentially be held liable for monetary damages resulting from the distribution. They absolutely don't have to release their code. However if they want to continue to distribute and sell their product they will have to do one of three things: 1) remove infringing code, 2) license the infringing code under acceptable terms, possibly by paying a licensing fee to the copyright holder, or 3) release their derivative code under the GPL.
That's too bad. Your own biases prevented you from reading and thinking about some very thoughtful comments on why locally-controlled education can be a really bad thing for a lot of very good reasons. While I don't necessarily agree with all of the GP's arguments, they are good ones, and they need to be thought through. He's certainly right that Greece and Spain's austerity measures are going to be hugely harmful to their future as their education systems are gutted. We seem to be headed full steam in this direction as well.
And in the meantime I'm quite happily using the ESR version of Firefox with no plans to ever use the fly-by-night version. That said, version 10ESR is quite a bit slower than 3.6, the last ESR. Progress for you.
You're right. A whole bunch of pork-barrel Republicans also see this as negative. I remember the sarcastic comments Republican congressmen made last test flight when they said, "congratulations to Space-X for doing what NASA did 50 years ago." Such ironic comments given Republicans' supposed private enterprise leanings, but easy to understand when you realize that NASA funding traditionally hasn't been about exciting science so much as a means of funneling large amounts of corporate welfare back into the home states of congressmen.
And really if you look back on the last 30 years of the space age, a lot has been accomplished by NASA. But almost all of the exciting science did not involve NASA's crown jewel space flight vehicles such as the Shuttle or Saturn 5 at all, but rather remote probes to the outer solar system, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and of course Earth, almost all launched on privately-made (though some designed with NASA's help) rockets like the Atlas, Delta, and so forth. Hubble is the one example I can I think of a scientific triumph that involved the Space Shuttle. Though with the money spent on the shuttle flights to fix and upgrade Hubble, I think they could have built and launched a couple of hubbles. I also think the Space Station is a success, and really was the purpose for which the Shuttle was built. However design by committee to do too many other things poorly means the Shuttle and the Space Station have cost orders of magnitude more than they should have. Had NASA developed a heavy lift rocket along the lines of the Saturn 5 I think the space station could have been lifted and built much more cheaply, and we probably would not have had a gap in manned flight that we now have.
The Space Shuttle was a fantastic vehicle, and a historic one, but it didn't do any of what it was designed to do that well, at least as far as economics go. Now that the program has ended and we can look back on it, we can safely say that from a program goals and outcomes point of view, the Shuttle was a costly lesson.
As for private rockets, as the other poster said, all rockets have always been developed under contract with NASA by private companies. As was said, Boeing has built a lot of rockets used to launch satellites over the years. The difference here is that NASA is only contracting the end result with Space-X (rocket launches). They did not have a hand in the rocket's design. This is a good thing I think. Space-X is still being held to NASA's strict standards for testing and reliability, but they aren't influenced by pork-barrel spending requirements, or being forced to design it a certain way (say with a solid rocket first stage). This is a very good thing and I hope it starts to spell the end of using NASA by Congress as simply a means of funneling tax dollars to specific subcontractors in specific states. Another real difference here is that Space-X is among the first companies thinking to build man-rated rockets, and feeling like they can do it economically and for less cost than the Russians, and certainly several orders of magnitude cheaper and more efficiently than NASA's own post-shuttle designs.
These hold downs are pretty amazing. If you've ever watched recent shuttle launch videos you can see the top of the shuttle lurch a couple of feet laterally when the SSME's light up. It's pretty spectacular. I believe that the SRBS light a couple of seconds before liftoff, so the entire thing is held down for a second or two, even after SRBs lit.
The main difference between the Shuttle and the Falcon 9 as far as launch abort goes is that the SRBs cannot be shut down. As soon as they light, the launch has to happen. The SSMEs of course could shut down after ignition, and in fact did so on an occasion or two. Normally this would happen about T-6 seconds or so, unlike the T-0 shutdown of the falcon 9.
According to Michael Geist, C-11 is a mixed bag, some good, some bad. Almost all of the demands of the copyright lobby were soundly rejected by committee. However other things that are bad remain, including legislation on digital locks.
But yes, I agree whole-heartedly about the state of affairs. The Conservative Republican party of Canada is arrogant and power hungry. I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between interviews with Canadian federal ministers and Republican congressmen, both in tone and content.
Their local affiliate in Alberta, the PC party, isn't much better by any means. Both at the federal level and provincial level, they win by promoting fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Unfortunately the masses seem to go along with this over and over again, all the while complaining about how corrupt things are. Either we have election fraud on a massive scale or else it's mass ignorance or fear or something. It doesn't help that the opposition self-destructed.
Another open source project, that is open source software and hardware, is the neat and cheep little single-channel analyzer, the Nano v2. For basic uses (measuring PPM signals on an arduino board for example), it works very well and is a deal for under $90. I bought mine to work on radio control things so I can example the PPM signal streams coming off the CPU, and the signals going out the servos. In particular I make sure that the head tracking channels are being properly mixed into the PPM stream at the radio end for flying airplanes with first-person video and a head-tracking camera (using gyros).
Without a full staff of patent examiners, how is the patent office to know whether a patent filed is a stupid software patent or not? Bad patents were being filed before the court ruling. Having an overworked and understaffed patent office isn't helping in this regard. So whether we allow software patents or not, we do in fact need more federal employees in the patent office who are well qualified.
No it is FUD. Because it is untrue.
Any lawyer who says the GPL could infect your code is incompetent. More likely you are simply misunderstanding him. There's nothing magical about the GPL. It's no different than a license that Microsoft would give you access to Windows 7 source code under as far as how copyright law sees it. Either you follow the terms or you don't, and then you find yourself paying damages. If a company is unable to determine the difference between public domain and free software, then I fear for the company.
The key point here: Anyone who says the GPL can "infect" your code and make you open source your code is lying, plain and simple.
Shipping a product with a GPL violation *does* place you in a damages situation, as described in the copyright act. And Developers or the FSF regularly do sue for GPL compliance because they know companies using the GPL'd code want to keep using the code, thus they need to comply with the license as nothing else in law grants them rights to use the code.
However companies who slip in GPL code could very well replace the code, or if it was worth enough, buy a proprietary license. This is just as you would do if you were found to be violating the copyright of someone's proprietary code. In fact, linksys could have bought a license for busybox if it so chose. Buying a license for linux is more problematic because despite what SCO says, no one person has a right to license the kernel under something other than the GPLv2. In fact some GPL'd code could never be relicensed because the copyright holders cannot all be found and asked.
Please explain how you think the GPL is magically different than any other copyright license? The copyright act certainly does not have provision for infecting the copyrighted property of others.
Ahem. The hazards of relying on a spell-checker. That should be "spreading" not "streaming," though in today's media world maybe the latter verb works.
Also, I should say that while there is such thing as a public domain, and there is code out there given to the public domain, most code, open source or not, free or not, is not in the public domain, and should be treated with proper care and caution, consulting your lawyers when there are questions. As a matter of policy, companies should treat open source code when developing software the same as code from any proprietary source. Licenses must be checked and terms abided by. Perhaps all companies are cavalier with their copyright compliance. Or maybe some are just with open source because it's "free." In the old days copyright violation was pretty hard to detect. Now, since open source code can be actually looked at by others, its signature can be found in binaries readily. Maybe only now are companies finally being caught for treating copyright with such contempt.
Whoops you just showed how ignorant you are of copyright law. If some intern puts in GPL code into your app, and you don't wish to GPL your app, then you are in a copyright violation situation. At this point you are liable for damages. But this would be the same situation as when your intern puts in code from any other unauthorized and unlicensed source. You have 3 options, after settling the damages part: 1. Remove the offending code. 2. GPL the rest of the code so as to comply with the license, or 3. purchase a commercial license for the offending code in terms you negotiate that are better for you.
Please stop streaming the lie that GPL can magically infect your proprietary code. It's companies that lie and then get caught that end up in a world of hurt when they've shipped out a product with thousands of units and then find themselves in a copyright violation situation. At that point I have no sympathy for them. They know the law, and they know that copyright gives them zero access to other peoples' code, except under license from the copyright holder.
I have zero sympathy for SAAS providers whining about the inability to use GPLv3 in their for-profit service. If they want to use a GPLv3 app, negotiate a commercial license for the code. Whining about the GPL being so restrictive just tells me they want to continue to be able to leach off of free software developers. If the software is so useful, pay the GPL developers!
You may be right. And of course there are other arguments for eliminating corporate taxes. Some good ones are in this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/10/why-we-should-eliminate-the-corporate-income-tax/65351/
This was rated +5, Funny, right? Oh wait... are you serious? Look, corporations don't pay income taxes of any kind. Every last penny of income tax is passed on to me and you, the customers/consumers. So in reality taxing corporations is a bizarre form of consumption tax. I think a strong case can be made for eliminating corporate income tax in general, but closing personal income tax loopholes where individuals can hide income and assets in corporations. Trying to make Apple pay their "fair share," isn't going to generate that much revenue for the government or revitalize the economy. Of republican tax breaks won't do that either.
I've got very tired of receiving phone calls from relatives about apparent major update after major update for firefox and thunderbird. So I've installed Firefox 10.0.3ESR and Thunderbird 10.0.3ESR for everyone. Still gets updates, but they are minor version updates that can install automatically and unintrusively. So far so good. I don't need to be on the cutting edge of javascript technology, nor do most people. At least for the next year or two version 10 ESR will work great. In fact I just barely upgraded from Firefox 3.6 to 10ESR on my old fedora box after running it for nearly two years without any major problems with web sites. 10ESR is noticeably slower and more bloated than 3.6, but alas that's the prices of progress I suppose.
You're welcome to choose whatever license you wish for your own code of course. But your talk of "[enforcing] Richard Stallman's restrictive ideals" is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worse. GPL was never about being free to distribute the code in any way you want with the code but rather the developer of the code being free, and guaranteeing derivative developers the same freedom. If you don't agree with the GPL, then write your own dang code, negotiate a more suitable license, or leave it alone. It's that simple. You don't need to go off on a FUD tangent about so-called freedoms that you never had a right to under copyright law in the first place.
After so may years of GPL articles you'd think people would actually understand it by now (it's very simple), but apparently now.
I think everyone should be banned from being able to use the word "freedom" unless they are defining what it means. I think its become the strawman argument of the 21st century. One man's freedom is another man's prison.
It doesn't matter what license the source code is under. If you're going to use it and distribute it to your customers, you better be dang sure your lawyer has vetted your right to use and distribute the code and that you are following the terms of said license in the first place. This is just as true for so-called open source as it is for proprietary code that you've licensed. I don't understand why people such as yourself make such a distinction between the GPL and other licenses. If MS produced a utility or DLL you want to use and distribute, you have to know its license conditions just as well as the GPL's conditions. Why is this concept so hard for so many companies to grasp? Complying with the GPL is not hard. If your company has a hard time with that, then yes you are right. You should be avoiding the GPL.
As for your viewpoint about alienation, how is breaking the law and seeking redress justifying the means? Do you treat proprietary licensed code as cavalierly as you do open source?. It's their code. If you don't want to use it in accordance with their license, then get code from somewhere else or write your own code. Plain and simple. Companies getting caught by busybox GPL enforcement just shows how companies are abusing open source software and trying to get a free ride just because they can download the source for free. Since busybox is GPLv2, compliance by these companies is as simple as posting the source tarball on their web site. And actually the GPL only says you have to produce the source code to the GPL'd derivative product on demand.
There are a few examples of this screen out there but I think the reason it's so hard to get a hold of is that the current Pixel Qi screen, well, kind of sucks. The color saturation, contrast, etc just aren't that great. Turns out the screen isn't that good at any of the things it was hyped to be: good color inside, good b&w outside.
The only practical way to obtain hypersonic speeds is to go suborbital, and that really enters the realm of rockets as heat shields are very heavy.
I think the developers of the SR-71 could have predicted these failures. The SR-71 _only_ went Mach 4 or so, at altitudes of greater than 60,000 feet or so. And at full speed the plane was so hot that pilots couldn't touch the canopy of the cockpit (I think the skin temps were at least a 1000 degrees pick your unit) and the plane lengthened by some considerable amount. To handle those speeds special materials were developed and required, which we haven't really exceeded to this day. Given the temperatures produced at Mach 20 in an atmosphere, even thin (think rocket reentry), building control surfaces and heat shields light enough to actually fly is very very difficult, if not impossible. The shuttle had heat tiles to withstand the atmospheric heating but hey were somewhat heavy and the shuttle didn't really fly during reentry so much as plow through the air belly down until the shuttle slowed down to lower mach numbers and in thicker air. And the failure of any heat shield at these Mach numbers will always lead to total destruction of the vehicle as this test and the Columbia tragedy proved.
All this said, having materials that could allow a craft to actually fly under under such conditions as reentry poses would actually be a real boon to space flight I think, but I doubt we will ever find materials that can provide this.
All American rockets today that can deliver payload to orbit are made by private companies. They just happen to be under contract for government agencies like the air force, or even NASA. None of these rockets are man-rated, though, which is something SpaceX is gunning for in a big way. I'm definitely excited. Even if they are the only ones who can do it for a while, that's okay too. It's unlikely that a monopoly situation will lead to prices any higher than they are now!
If this is a reason you prefer a language like python over C, then you should be aware that python does the exact same thing, since python doesn't have variables in the C sense, only names. if you rebind a to b, then any change to the list represented by either name will show up in the other since they are the same list.
One of the few things I can say that school did for me was to teach me programming language theory. names, variables, binding, late binding, early binding, pass by value, pass by reference, pass by object, etc. This helped me to comprehend the array dilemma you mentioned, and also helps me understand python's scheme.
Indeed. You'd think a slashdot editor would be up on his ISS knowledge! :) The escape capsules are definitely tested and found efficacious every few months or so when the crew is rotated. In fact they cannot stay at the space station for more than 6 months or so. That was the whole reason they were thinking of abandoning the station back when Soyuz was grounded last year. That and the fact they didn't want to land the soyuz escape capsules in the dead of winter.
Space-X's rocket is hardly a paper rocket. It actually exists, has been fired several times, and has had two test flights that were fairly successful. Later this year a test flight will carry actual cargo to the space station. Space-X is in my estimation only about 2 years away from being able to do regular cargo runs to the space station. Their human-rated Dragon capsule is also coming along nicely. Their design looks good, and by combining the escape system with the maneuvering system they've managed to reduce weight and increase reliability and safety over the systems used by the old Apollo program and the current Soyuz program. In about 6 years they will be able to fly astronauts to the space station (really).
I'm very excited about what they are doing. I hope that NASA and the government support them because they really are doing good work, and doing things that NASA can't (if because it's pulled 8 ways by different levels of government). Right now it looks like Space-X is really our only chance to get humans into space. Why waste more money on paper rockets like constellation, or even the Orion capsule at this stage.
There are other companies like Boeing, Bigelow, and others that are in the running too. They should be supported, and given NASA contracts where appropriate.
I find the skepticism, particularly on the part of Republicans, to private space flight be very puzzling. Their sarcastic congratulations to Space-X for doing what NASA did 50 years ago was really grating. I'd think that they'd be very excited that a private company is having success. Granted all rockets these days are made by private companies, but they are typically funded in large part by government (air force, NASA, etc).