I guess you're talking about desensitisation? Well, for one agoraphobia is the one of the most difficult phobias to treat by desensitisation (60-80% initial success, 50% relapse). Secondly, all behavioural therapy is culturally biassed (by the therapist). Then there is the problem of desensitising someone who considers himself as far more ill than just phobic (aboriginals are desert people)...
Well, you're not the only one pissed of about the poor state of psychology, a lot of psychologists themselves are too. What they are pissed of about is bluntness of the scientific method in studying the human mind, and about null hypothesis testing in particular. Because of an arbitrary number in science (> 5% correlation == insignificant), psychology has been bogged down in "ritualistic, mindless use of statistics" and has virtually grinded to a halt. Almost all statistics that are locally very significant become insignificant during global peer review, very likely because human behaviour is much influenced by local conditions such as culture (implicating you can't treat an australian aboriginy for agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) the same way you would treat a chinese urbanite, for instance).
Re:Let's have a little poll.
on
Testing Relativity
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If string theory is borne out, it will only be because it's the most ridiculous kludge you can imagine - epicycles all over again.
Nope, it will be phlogiston theory all over, not epicycles.
Phlogiston was covered in a real theory, IOW phlogiston explained (wrongly) how the burning process occurs and why some stuff burns and other stuff doesn't. Epicycles OTOH where never a theory, epicycles didn't try explain to the crazy motions of geocentric orbits but only to accurately describe them.
Even Ptolemy himself knew that epicycles where fundamentally wrong for two reasons: 1) the earth is not exactly at the center of the planets, suns and moons orbits (the center of the orbit is the halfway point between the earth and the equant); and 2) a planet on an epicycle would crash into it's own "heavenly" or "crystalline" sphere on which it was supposed to be mounted. IOW Ptolemy knew that epicycles wheren't compatible with Aristotle's theory nor with Pythagoras'; but he still affirmed that those theories were correct.
But to learn the fundamental skill of coding in assembler, I would consider it far less complex than any high-level language. You have a few hundred instructions (of which under a dozen make up 99% of your code). Compare that to C, where you have literally thousands of standard library functions, a good portion of which you need to understand to write any non-trivial program.
If you only count mnemonics in an assembly language, you should only count keywords in a higher language (this of course means ignoring operators and syntax). The thousands of library functions are generally wrappers for os-calls you're going to have to make also to write a non-trivial program in assembly.
With every task you're going to accomplish, you'll be more occupied with the complexety of the system if you use assembly. You'll have to worry about the intricacies of the CPU and the parameter layout of os-calls for example. Then there is the fragmentation of your code into tens of thousands of subroutines which are one hell to manage, keep coherent and free from side effects, or the irrisistable temptation to start optimizing right away and getting yourself bogged down in endless ant-fucking.
Don't get me wrong, I think every CS student should know assembly in one form or another, but I can't agree with you on assembly being easier than HL, especially for the non-trivial stuff.
As for the teaching of (virtual) assembly to people that have no or very little concept of algorithmic processing ("what is a loop?"); I've witnessed that myself some 20 years ago, and I can assure you it has your desired effect. Our course started off with about 25 students of which about 15 quit in a period of 6 weeks. After a year there was only 2 of us left. Needles to say that was the only year that course was given, no-one in his right mind is going to sign up for course with a chance of 2:25 of succesful completion.
why not leave addresses/handles as abstracted values that the VM doesn't know the size of?
Because it would slow down java considerably? Java is very much a reference based language, and abstracting references in the VM would mean considerably more machine instructions to be run for every reference in the bytecode. Abstractions you put in the VM have effects on most or all bytecode you run on it, so you basicly don't want to do expensive abstractions in the VM.
So at least that way there is a way to sort of move to 64 bits.
The obvious solution would be to specify a 64-bit VM in a new version of java, but I guess this would slow down this new version of java on all 32-bit platforms, which would have to emulate 64-bit instructions for all basic operations like referencing, integer math, etc. (This slowdown would be less than abstracting references though, because you don't have to take other bitsizes into account and can do some optimizations. Basicly, having abstract references comes down to handling bignum pointers.)
I could see a problem coming up with people producing client-side java apps trying to slow down the migration because their customers run 32 bits, while the server-side guys want 64 bits yesterday. This is of course assuming we want to keep java portable in the java-sense.
Also integers are 32bits exactly in Java, so all arrays are necessarily limited to having (about) 4 billion entries. Though, of course, each entry may be more more than one byte in size.
Are you sure the total (byte-)size of an array can exceed 4Gb? As I recall, both the reference and returnAddress types are Category 1 (32-bit) in the VM specification, which implies 4Gb is the maximum size of both data and bytecodes.
That's not quite accurate. An atheist doesn't necessarily *reject* the notion of a physical God;
My point is that one doesn't have to believe in an immanent God, he should be provable/demonstable. The whole difference between agnosticism on one side and atheism and theism on the other, is the difference between knowledge and faith; the atheist rejects God on (lack of) faith, the agnosticist rejects God on (lack of) knowledge.
Well, Christianity does. Not every religion defines their gods as such.
Correct, though proper theism is not my invention but one by theologians and philosophers of religion. (By the way the wiki page about agnosticism is informative too.)
I'm a little confused -- if you can't discuss the metaphysical meaningfully, and you can't discuss God meaningfully, that implies that you think God is metaphysical. But you said that you can't assume that God is metaphysical, either. So what is it about God that makes it an invalid target for discussion?
It's a delicate affair:) Firstly, the agnosticist rejects "proper theism" just like the atheist does, he rejects the notion of an immanent (physical) God, which leaves a God that's transcendent (metaphysical) only (proper theism defines God as both transcendent and immanent).
Secondly, metaphysics or the supernatural implies that laws of physics/nature are broken, hence all methodology to investigate natural phenomena (logics, reason, etc.) don't apply to metaphysics. This leads the agnosticist to conclude that metaphysics can't be discussed meaningfully, or to put it in other words that metaphysics are unknowable.
To aswer your question: the (hard) agnosticist thinks that all metaphysics can't be discussed meaningfully, and since any proof of an immanent God is lacking, this confines God to transcendence; the unknowable/meaningless realm of metaphysics where everything is both true and false at the same time (so it's both true and false that God actually exists in that metaphysical realm).
I have found reference to a python class of that name, but know nothing of it.
Would you be able to provide me a reference? Ta.
I was trying to make it clear that typedef doesn't define or declare a new type, but an alias to an existing type. IOW the keyword "typedef" is misleading, but it doesn't make C++ weakly typed.
The cast, however, provides no type checking.
Yes, that's a design feature of the language. The compiler errs out if you implicitly try to cast incompatible types, but when you explicitly force the cast the compiler swallows it (because it assumes you know what you're doing). After all you've got to write extra code (the cast) to make it behave unsafe.
Certainly, if I assume that a God must exist in the metaphysical realm and therefore cannot be discussed meaningfully, then it would be irrational for me to maintain a belief in that God.
This is the crucial passage, an agnosticist does not assume God must exist in the metaphysical realm (nor that he doesn't exist there), the agnosticist doesn't assume anything about the metaphysical realm because all assumptions would be both wrong and right at the same time. Of course the hard agnosticist, like an atheist, doesn't believe in God, but he thinks an atheist does it for all the wrong reasons: the atheist tries to reason about God.
I'm not going to tell anyone that God can't exist, because that would be a ludicrous thing to say;
Ok, this is the agnostic viewpoint, but:
but if someone makes any kind of affirmative proposition (such as, "God exists" or "the Bernoulli effect is not what gives airplanes lift"), I'm going to ask for evidence.
This is not agnosticism but atheism. The (hard) agnosticist thinks you can never objectively prove or disprove anything in metaphysics, so asking for proof of the existence of God would be asking the impossible. In other words a hard agnosticist rejects any speculation about the metaphysical; the metaphysical to him is unknowable, a territory where logics and reason don't apply. The agnosticist doesn't know what metaphysical "proof" or "truth" would be like and thinks no one can know; hence he won't ask for it.
I know this sounds like nitpicking but there is a definite difference between atheism and hard agnosticism, which I'm trying to make clear. A hard agnosticist will radically refuse to discuss metaphysics because he thinks logics and reason don't apply there, while an atheist thinks he can apply logics to metaphysics and builds a logical thesis which he is willing to discuss and defend.
Though I agree with much of what you say, you make an assumption about atheism that's false. Atheism is a lack of belief in God. If you don't know what a god is or don't have an understanding, then it's not very likely that you'll believe in god either (though there are some that do).
Well I'm a hard agnosticist, so I support the argument that even though an atheist does not believe in (the existence of) God, he gets into arguments about the metaphysical; hence the atheist has some kind of understanding (gnosis) of what metaphysical reality is, even if he thinks of it as a void. I, as all hard agnosticists, deny that any objective gnosis is possible, there is no way to prove or disprove any claim about the metaphysical in a scientific fashion (because at that point it would stop being metaphysical).
I really doubt that many Saudi Geeks would have the same libertarian, open-society, atheistic outlook that many geeks here in the US seem to have.
Don't project your opinions on the group you think you belong to. To a lot of geeks, atheism is just as stupid as theism (you're still assuming things about "God", but can't define what "God" is), and uncontrolled libertarianism is just as stupid as unbridled socialism (why trust business more than government?).
There seems to be this big misconception that anyone who likes computers is therefore a "geek" and also therefore has a similar political/philosophical outlook.
Yes, and the misconception is yours. There is nothing that says you have to be a libertarian or an atheist to be a geek. Why would there be a PS geek code if we're all libertarians?
This isn't to say that I think everyone in Saudi Arabia is some kind of crazy religious zealot, but if you grow up in that kind of environment, a lot of it would probably rub off on you.
Probably just as much as that feeling of cultural superiority rubs off on a lot of westerners. There are a lot of little kings out there who think it's their godgiven right to pass judgement on everyone in the world (but get utterly nasty if you treat them the same way). It doesn't really matter if the superiority attidude comes from a religious or from a socio-economical background, the result is the same.
The Saudis, at least the people in charge, are like the Taliban with gold Rolexes.
Yeah cool, but what has this got to do with Saudi geeks?
I don't think of C++ as strongly typed. typedefs don't enforce, e.g., different meanings of ints (so number of apples vs. number of oranges can't really be distinguished without creating multiple classes).
Would you call C++ strongly typed if the keyword would be "typealias" instead of "typedef"?
Even enums aren't distinguishable from ints!
Bzzt, wrong! Try to assign an int to an enum without a cast... You'll get an error.
Will my USB Camera work? Can 1-touch scanning be setup without the use of a complex script? Joe Dialup doesn't want to go to Sourceforge to find a piece of software called gkehjg2 just to get his device to install and compile (compile? what's that!)
Right, Joe Dialup over in Europe wants to get online with his isdn connection without any hassle, it has to work right out of the box.
The install for Linux is CLOSE, I believe Fedora(/Redhat) needs to handle their package selection better (why install isdn-tools defaultly??)
Sorry, but you're wrong. Legally a license is just a contract. You can call it special all you want, but it just isn't true. Any of the things you say make licenses special can be put, with minor variations, into any contract.
Ok, here comes a quote from the Moglen article you linked to:
This right to exclude implies an equally large power
to license--that is, to grant permission to do what would otherwise be forbidden. Licenses are not contracts: the work's user is obliged to remain within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, but because she doesn't have any right to act at all except as the license permits.
So, basicly Moglen says what I'm saying, and you're being inconsistent. I'm sorry.
A revokation clause isn't critical, as any contract can be declared null and void if one party doesn't fulfill their end.
No no no, a license is a "one sided" contract, really. A normal contract is "tit-for-tat"; in a contract between A and B, B agrees to pay (or do something else in return) every time he makes use of the services or goods of A. In a license, B pays one time (or not at all) for the right to use services or goods of A.
An example: because you get a fishing license, you can catch as many fish as you wish; were it a fishing contract, you'd have to pay for each fish you catch. See now why "fulfilling your end of the deal" is different in contracts and in licenses?
This is why so many licenses have a clause that says something like "The copyright holder reserves the right to alter or revoke any portion of this copyright and distribution licenses below for any future versions of the applicable works/products/documents at any time and for any reason." If there is such a clause in the SCO license, you're screwed.
1) No, licenses are not special. A contract is a contract is a contract, and they are all governed by the same laws.
Yes, it's all contract law, but licenses are a special form of contract.
2) Most licenses do NOT allow you to do something you're normally not allowed to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most licenses PREVENT you from doing things you normally WOULD be able to do.
I agree with you (and Moglen) fully, most software licenses are actually not licenses. However, convincing a court that the majority of software "licenses" out there should be annulled might prove very difficult.
3) The only thing that makes most licenses easier to revoke/nullify is that they contain specific clauses describing the conditions under which that would happen. However, as I've stated above, any contract can have such a clause, and most well-written ones do.
See above for an example of a common license revokation clause.
The origional license does not give them that right, and they can't just add it in whenever they want
Are you sure of this? I don't know the original license, but it seems to me the revocation clause(s) would be critical. (Remember a licence is a special form of contract that allows you to do something you're normally not allowed to do, so it's much easier to revoke licences than it is to break up contracts.)
even if such a clause were legally enforcable (which it isn't, check previous discussions on non-compete clauses in employment contracts for a clue as to why).
Yes, as I've stated in another post the non-compete aspect is what strikes me as unenforceable, but then again I don't know enough about international contract law to say for sure; these licenses are not US-only.
Hehe, following best medieval theological practices, I detected a logical trap: What if God is so not-omniscient he doesn't know he's omnipotent? I think the concepts are mutually dependent. You can't know you're omnipotent unless you already know somehow (a priori), because you must try to do everything to confirm omnipotence experimentally, and you can't know what "everything" is if you're not omniscient.
The above is medieval theologics because in modern Christian theologics omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence are all three limiting properties in human eyes, but not to God. It goes something like this: God knows better (because he can't think or do evil but knows what evil is) and has a plan for his goodness to prevail over evil forever, so he's got to stick to his plan to be able to do anything in the long run. Once evil is non-existent God is "cured", he can literally do and know everything. The human aspect in this all is time; God is eternal so he views time differently; to him "temporary loss of omnipotence and omniscience in order to regain them" has no meaning because it's exactly the same God with exactly the same capabilities now and then (only things he can't do or think will disappear).
I don't think the contract has illegal agreements in it as such, but I could be mistaken because I don't know enough about international contract rights/laws.
My opinion is the contract basicly says "I hereby agree to not use Linux versions A, B, etc."; it says nothing about SCO having to prove its claims first. The only legal problem with this agreement I can see is that it possibly could be stifling competition.
Yep, Christians agree on God being omnipotent and omnibenevolent (and omniscient), but there is a lot of disagreement too.
Mormons (LDS) FI think that God is not tanscendent but immanent only (a physical being): they believe God was a (sanctified) man once, and every man can become God by following the faith. (IOW Mormonism, by implication, is not monotheistic.)
Yeah, but it also says "specifically identified in the attached notification letter"; so there is a notification attached which specifies what versions you're not allowed to run. If you sign this, you agree to not running those versions.
Remember this was sent to SCO licencees who have legal obligations towards SCO already.
1. You are not running Linux binary code that was compiled from any version of Linux
that contains our copyrighted application binary interface code ("ABI Code")
specifically identified in the attached notification letter.
So basicly you're not allowed to run Linux anymore if you sign this (unless it's a version prior to 2.4).
Simple:
1) You tell me what "God" is
2) I tell you if "God" exists or not
If you can't do step 1), step 2) becomes irrelevant (unknowable). You have define a concept before you can discuss its existence, and you can't do that objectively with "God". There is no possible objective definition of "God", just lots and lots of subjective ones.
This doesn't follow. If I take your GPL program, add on a do-hicky and keep that closed how does that cause a "loss of freedom".
Exactly as you describe: you take my program, that I determined to be our program, add your do-hicky to it and claim the resulting program is yours. If I hadn't opened my code, you wouldn't have been able to produce your do-hicky. Now you want to remove to possibility for all others to do the same with my program + your do-hicky.
I wrote the do-hicky, why should you be entitled to it [other than altruistic goodyness].
Because you made good use of my altruistic goodyness in giving you the code to build your do-hicky on.
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I guess you're talking about desensitisation? Well, for one agoraphobia is the one of the most difficult phobias to treat by desensitisation (60-80% initial success, 50% relapse). Secondly, all behavioural therapy is culturally biassed (by the therapist). Then there is the problem of desensitising someone who considers himself as far more ill than just phobic (aboriginals are desert people)...
Well, you're not the only one pissed of about the poor state of psychology, a lot of psychologists themselves are too. What they are pissed of about is bluntness of the scientific method in studying the human mind, and about null hypothesis testing in particular. Because of an arbitrary number in science (> 5% correlation == insignificant), psychology has been bogged down in "ritualistic, mindless use of statistics" and has virtually grinded to a halt. Almost all statistics that are locally very significant become insignificant during global peer review, very likely because human behaviour is much influenced by local conditions such as culture (implicating you can't treat an australian aboriginy for agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) the same way you would treat a chinese urbanite, for instance).
Nope, it will be phlogiston theory all over, not epicycles.
Phlogiston was covered in a real theory, IOW phlogiston explained (wrongly) how the burning process occurs and why some stuff burns and other stuff doesn't. Epicycles OTOH where never a theory, epicycles didn't try explain to the crazy motions of geocentric orbits but only to accurately describe them.
Even Ptolemy himself knew that epicycles where fundamentally wrong for two reasons: 1) the earth is not exactly at the center of the planets, suns and moons orbits (the center of the orbit is the halfway point between the earth and the equant); and 2) a planet on an epicycle would crash into it's own "heavenly" or "crystalline" sphere on which it was supposed to be mounted. IOW Ptolemy knew that epicycles wheren't compatible with Aristotle's theory nor with Pythagoras'; but he still affirmed that those theories were correct.
If you only count mnemonics in an assembly language, you should only count keywords in a higher language (this of course means ignoring operators and syntax). The thousands of library functions are generally wrappers for os-calls you're going to have to make also to write a non-trivial program in assembly.
With every task you're going to accomplish, you'll be more occupied with the complexety of the system if you use assembly. You'll have to worry about the intricacies of the CPU and the parameter layout of os-calls for example. Then there is the fragmentation of your code into tens of thousands of subroutines which are one hell to manage, keep coherent and free from side effects, or the irrisistable temptation to start optimizing right away and getting yourself bogged down in endless ant-fucking.
Don't get me wrong, I think every CS student should know assembly in one form or another, but I can't agree with you on assembly being easier than HL, especially for the non-trivial stuff.
As for the teaching of (virtual) assembly to people that have no or very little concept of algorithmic processing ("what is a loop?"); I've witnessed that myself some 20 years ago, and I can assure you it has your desired effect. Our course started off with about 25 students of which about 15 quit in a period of 6 weeks. After a year there was only 2 of us left. Needles to say that was the only year that course was given, no-one in his right mind is going to sign up for course with a chance of 2:25 of succesful completion.
Because it would slow down java considerably? Java is very much a reference based language, and abstracting references in the VM would mean considerably more machine instructions to be run for every reference in the bytecode. Abstractions you put in the VM have effects on most or all bytecode you run on it, so you basicly don't want to do expensive abstractions in the VM.
So at least that way there is a way to sort of move to 64 bits.
The obvious solution would be to specify a 64-bit VM in a new version of java, but I guess this would slow down this new version of java on all 32-bit platforms, which would have to emulate 64-bit instructions for all basic operations like referencing, integer math, etc. (This slowdown would be less than abstracting references though, because you don't have to take other bitsizes into account and can do some optimizations. Basicly, having abstract references comes down to handling bignum pointers.)
I could see a problem coming up with people producing client-side java apps trying to slow down the migration because their customers run 32 bits, while the server-side guys want 64 bits yesterday. This is of course assuming we want to keep java portable in the java-sense.
Are you sure the total (byte-)size of an array can exceed 4Gb? As I recall, both the reference and returnAddress types are Category 1 (32-bit) in the VM specification, which implies 4Gb is the maximum size of both data and bytecodes.
That's not quite accurate. An atheist doesn't necessarily *reject* the notion of a physical God;
My point is that one doesn't have to believe in an immanent God, he should be provable/demonstable. The whole difference between agnosticism on one side and atheism and theism on the other, is the difference between knowledge and faith; the atheist rejects God on (lack of) faith, the agnosticist rejects God on (lack of) knowledge.
Well, Christianity does. Not every religion defines their gods as such.
Correct, though proper theism is not my invention but one by theologians and philosophers of religion. (By the way the wiki page about agnosticism is informative too.)
It's a delicate affair :) Firstly, the agnosticist rejects "proper theism" just like the atheist does, he rejects the notion of an immanent (physical) God, which leaves a God that's transcendent (metaphysical) only (proper theism defines God as both transcendent and immanent).
Secondly, metaphysics or the supernatural implies that laws of physics/nature are broken, hence all methodology to investigate natural phenomena (logics, reason, etc.) don't apply to metaphysics. This leads the agnosticist to conclude that metaphysics can't be discussed meaningfully, or to put it in other words that metaphysics are unknowable.
To aswer your question: the (hard) agnosticist thinks that all metaphysics can't be discussed meaningfully, and since any proof of an immanent God is lacking, this confines God to transcendence; the unknowable/meaningless realm of metaphysics where everything is both true and false at the same time (so it's both true and false that God actually exists in that metaphysical realm).
I was trying to make it clear that typedef doesn't define or declare a new type, but an alias to an existing type. IOW the keyword "typedef" is misleading, but it doesn't make C++ weakly typed.
The cast, however, provides no type checking.
Yes, that's a design feature of the language. The compiler errs out if you implicitly try to cast incompatible types, but when you explicitly force the cast the compiler swallows it (because it assumes you know what you're doing). After all you've got to write extra code (the cast) to make it behave unsafe.
Certainly, if I assume that a God must exist in the metaphysical realm and therefore cannot be discussed meaningfully, then it would be irrational for me to maintain a belief in that God.
This is the crucial passage, an agnosticist does not assume God must exist in the metaphysical realm (nor that he doesn't exist there), the agnosticist doesn't assume anything about the metaphysical realm because all assumptions would be both wrong and right at the same time. Of course the hard agnosticist, like an atheist, doesn't believe in God, but he thinks an atheist does it for all the wrong reasons: the atheist tries to reason about God.
Ok, this is the agnostic viewpoint, but:
but if someone makes any kind of affirmative proposition (such as, "God exists" or "the Bernoulli effect is not what gives airplanes lift"), I'm going to ask for evidence.
This is not agnosticism but atheism. The (hard) agnosticist thinks you can never objectively prove or disprove anything in metaphysics, so asking for proof of the existence of God would be asking the impossible. In other words a hard agnosticist rejects any speculation about the metaphysical; the metaphysical to him is unknowable, a territory where logics and reason don't apply. The agnosticist doesn't know what metaphysical "proof" or "truth" would be like and thinks no one can know; hence he won't ask for it.
I know this sounds like nitpicking but there is a definite difference between atheism and hard agnosticism, which I'm trying to make clear. A hard agnosticist will radically refuse to discuss metaphysics because he thinks logics and reason don't apply there, while an atheist thinks he can apply logics to metaphysics and builds a logical thesis which he is willing to discuss and defend.
Well I'm a hard agnosticist, so I support the argument that even though an atheist does not believe in (the existence of) God, he gets into arguments about the metaphysical; hence the atheist has some kind of understanding (gnosis) of what metaphysical reality is, even if he thinks of it as a void. I, as all hard agnosticists, deny that any objective gnosis is possible, there is no way to prove or disprove any claim about the metaphysical in a scientific fashion (because at that point it would stop being metaphysical).
Don't project your opinions on the group you think you belong to. To a lot of geeks, atheism is just as stupid as theism (you're still assuming things about "God", but can't define what "God" is), and uncontrolled libertarianism is just as stupid as unbridled socialism (why trust business more than government?).
There seems to be this big misconception that anyone who likes computers is therefore a "geek" and also therefore has a similar political/philosophical outlook.
Yes, and the misconception is yours. There is nothing that says you have to be a libertarian or an atheist to be a geek. Why would there be a PS geek code if we're all libertarians?
This isn't to say that I think everyone in Saudi Arabia is some kind of crazy religious zealot, but if you grow up in that kind of environment, a lot of it would probably rub off on you.
Probably just as much as that feeling of cultural superiority rubs off on a lot of westerners. There are a lot of little kings out there who think it's their godgiven right to pass judgement on everyone in the world (but get utterly nasty if you treat them the same way). It doesn't really matter if the superiority attidude comes from a religious or from a socio-economical background, the result is the same.
The Saudis, at least the people in charge, are like the Taliban with gold Rolexes.
Yeah cool, but what has this got to do with Saudi geeks?
Would you call C++ strongly typed if the keyword would be "typealias" instead of "typedef"?
Even enums aren't distinguishable from ints!
Bzzt, wrong! Try to assign an int to an enum without a cast... You'll get an error.
Right, Joe Dialup over in Europe wants to get online with his isdn connection without any hassle, it has to work right out of the box.
The install for Linux is CLOSE, I believe Fedora(/Redhat) needs to handle their package selection better (why install isdn-tools defaultly??)
Huh?
Ok, here comes a quote from the Moglen article you linked to:
So, basicly Moglen says what I'm saying, and you're being inconsistent. I'm sorry.
No no no, a license is a "one sided" contract, really. A normal contract is "tit-for-tat"; in a contract between A and B, B agrees to pay (or do something else in return) every time he makes use of the services or goods of A. In a license, B pays one time (or not at all) for the right to use services or goods of A.
An example: because you get a fishing license, you can catch as many fish as you wish; were it a fishing contract, you'd have to pay for each fish you catch. See now why "fulfilling your end of the deal" is different in contracts and in licenses?
This is why so many licenses have a clause that says something like "The copyright holder reserves the right to alter or revoke any portion of this copyright and distribution licenses below for any future versions of the applicable works/products/documents at any time and for any reason." If there is such a clause in the SCO license, you're screwed.
1) No, licenses are not special. A contract is a contract is a contract, and they are all governed by the same laws.
Yes, it's all contract law, but licenses are a special form of contract.
2) Most licenses do NOT allow you to do something you're normally not allowed to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most licenses PREVENT you from doing things you normally WOULD be able to do.
I agree with you (and Moglen) fully, most software licenses are actually not licenses. However, convincing a court that the majority of software "licenses" out there should be annulled might prove very difficult.
3) The only thing that makes most licenses easier to revoke/nullify is that they contain specific clauses describing the conditions under which that would happen. However, as I've stated above, any contract can have such a clause, and most well-written ones do.
See above for an example of a common license revokation clause.
Are you sure of this? I don't know the original license, but it seems to me the revocation clause(s) would be critical. (Remember a licence is a special form of contract that allows you to do something you're normally not allowed to do, so it's much easier to revoke licences than it is to break up contracts.)
even if such a clause were legally enforcable (which it isn't, check previous discussions on non-compete clauses in employment contracts for a clue as to why).
Yes, as I've stated in another post the non-compete aspect is what strikes me as unenforceable, but then again I don't know enough about international contract law to say for sure; these licenses are not US-only.
The above is medieval theologics because in modern Christian theologics omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence are all three limiting properties in human eyes, but not to God. It goes something like this: God knows better (because he can't think or do evil but knows what evil is) and has a plan for his goodness to prevail over evil forever, so he's got to stick to his plan to be able to do anything in the long run. Once evil is non-existent God is "cured", he can literally do and know everything. The human aspect in this all is time; God is eternal so he views time differently; to him "temporary loss of omnipotence and omniscience in order to regain them" has no meaning because it's exactly the same God with exactly the same capabilities now and then (only things he can't do or think will disappear).
My opinion is the contract basicly says "I hereby agree to not use Linux versions A, B, etc."; it says nothing about SCO having to prove its claims first. The only legal problem with this agreement I can see is that it possibly could be stifling competition.
Mormons (LDS) FI think that God is not tanscendent but immanent only (a physical being): they believe God was a (sanctified) man once, and every man can become God by following the faith. (IOW Mormonism, by implication, is not monotheistic.)
Remember this was sent to SCO licencees who have legal obligations towards SCO already.
1) You tell me what "God" is
2) I tell you if "God" exists or not
If you can't do step 1), step 2) becomes irrelevant (unknowable). You have define a concept before you can discuss its existence, and you can't do that objectively with "God". There is no possible objective definition of "God", just lots and lots of subjective ones.
Exactly as you describe: you take my program, that I determined to be our program, add your do-hicky to it and claim the resulting program is yours. If I hadn't opened my code, you wouldn't have been able to produce your do-hicky. Now you want to remove to possibility for all others to do the same with my program + your do-hicky.
I wrote the do-hicky, why should you be entitled to it [other than altruistic goodyness].
Because you made good use of my altruistic goodyness in giving you the code to build your do-hicky on.