You wouldn't cite a textbook either; they're tertiary sources, and mostly useless for getting a deep, accurate view of any topic.
As the other responder said, this depends. Many (most) graduate-level textbooks (at least in my field) are also references for researchers. I frequently see such books cited in journal articles, often because they've become the "definitive" reference on a given area.
I tried CF bulbs a couple of years ago, for about three months. Three months (closer to four) is how long it took every CF bulb in the house to stop working. These things are supposed to last longer than regular light bulbs (LASTS OVER FIVE YEARS!!!!1 the packaging said) - but in my experience, they were vastly more likely to die during a power surge, power outage, or other form of "electrical event" than traditional bulbs.
Of course, I rent a Fight Club house with old wiring, but that doesn't change the fact that the rest of my equipment (oldskool light bulbs, half a dozen computers, alarm clock, etc) is still plugging away. But I can't exactly put the ceiling fixtures on a surge protector.:P
You need to get your power fixed, or move. I live in a townhouse which had really bad power problems when I first moved in. Over the summer, whenever the air conditioner of any neighbor turned on, my lights would dim and my UPSes would go off. Still, my CFLs survived for the most part. The ones that died came from another apartment and were 2-3 years old by the time they died. I still have some which are pushing 4 years now.
Talk to your neighbors, see if they have power issues too. It could be mostly a neighborhood thing (our neighborhood needed an upgraded transformer as a first step, and still needs more line upgrades which are in the works). Call your power company, find out if they have a "power quality" department that handles non-emergency power issues like this. My problem was that they kept sending over techs who were trained to fix outages and emergencies, whereas you might need an upgrade to the grid near you.
Of course, it could be a combination of that with internal wiring. Don't put up with inadequate internal wiring from your landlord. If you are having issues with things like CFLs dying, then your power is probably bad enough that you could build up a legal case if you needed to. Still, it's best to start cordial, and have the landlord have a qualified electrician look at everything and see if there are any reasonable ways to upgrade the setup (replacing old circuit breakers, etc.).
And relating to your other equipment, you should probably get a ground tester and see if all of your outlets are grounded. If they aren't, that could pose a real fire hazard if you plug in equipment that expects a ground. I've seen people put up with really remarkably bad power, especially on college campuses. If you spend a little time on it, you can really improve your own power and that of everyone who rents in your place in the future. We spend tons of money on electricity every month, it should be of reasonable quality.
.... you mean the underlying Debian system. The reason it's so polished at that level is that it's the result of an entire other organization doing that work for them. The Ubuntu part of the system really is just the UI polish, and updating some packages for that purpose.
Don't get me wrong, I love Debian and use it on several computers. However, it doesn't (seem to) have the hardware detection that Ubuntu has (granted, I haven't installed Debian in a few years now). The latest incarnation of an installer than Debian had detected some things okay, but Ubuntu beat a distro like Fedora handily by automatically enabling the ipw3945d for wireless with its kernel modules on boot. Those aren't even available in Fedora, though it looks available in Debian testing (no surprise there, giving Ubuntu's origins).
I'm as frustrated as Torvalds is with it, because it's not enough to just use KDE when given the chance. Look at the utter disregard the Ubuntu project has for Kubuntu; the system configuration dialogs last time I used it (Breezy Badger) were utterly broken and unusable -- and I've heard from some Edgy Eft users that it still sucks. There's a post right above here yapping about how awful slow Kubuntu is compared with Debian.
I'm a longtime KDE user. For the past several years I've used Fedora, usually with the improved KDE-RedHat packages of KDE. When I installed Fedora on my laptop, getting things like wireless to work required packages from atrpm. The repositories start adding up, and pretty soon you're running into incompatibilities between them.
So when I decided to try Kubuntu, I was pleasantly surprised with how polished the system seems. My wireless card (ipw3945) and video (widescreen with simple Intel graphics) were detected (including correct resolution) and enabled on install. One repository (including universe), and I had all the packages I need for my standard KDE use.
As for being slow, it certainly doesn't feel like it. The boot time is incredibly fast most of the time, due to the way (K)ubuntu handles startup services. KDE feels snappy, even with my relatively limited amount of RAM (512 MB). It certainly doesn't feel slower than Fedora was on the same system.
I like the idea of the unified control panel. RedHat's system configuration utilities are decent, but they're scattered, without a unifying interface. Furthermore, they're all in gtk, so they'll never quite integrate into a KDE desktop. I thought Kubuntu was going down the right path by taking the work the KDE people have done with the control panel and using it for everything. Granted, it needs some work (the network control panel isn't nearly as robust as Fedora's), and visually needs some work (have to "scroll down" a mostly empty window to get the Administrator Mode button). I think it's on the right track, though, it just needs more of the polish that the underlying Ubuntu system has.
Isn't it reaching a bit to assume that the reason eBooks failed is the public's rejection of DRM, rather than the readers costing hundreds of dollars and the books themselves costing as much or more as the paperback?
I don't think the analogy is that flawed. iPods are hundreds of dollars and DRM music from ITMS often costs about as much as the CD (or much more, if you're willing to buy used). A cheap portable CD player is less than $25. The CD also gives you a higher quality version. At least an ebook gives you value added like the ability to search.
I think it's hard to point to any one aspect of ebooks and say "that's why they aren't taking off". You've got the fact that people simply like reading printed documents (consider the massive printer industry now). People probably don't like the DRM (what do you mean I can't lend my ebook to my friend?). Yes, the readers themselves are pricey; but pricey from the perspective that they don't add much over the printed format. An iPod can carry almost everyone's entire music collection now. Being able to mix and match between such a huge choice of music is a big draw for music listeners. With books, just how many do you want to carry around with you at any given time? There is some convenience there, but it's not nearly as important as it is for music.
I hope the future of ebooks is this: you buy a print version of a book, you get a CD or web-code to an ebook version. Alternatively, you can buy the ebook version only for a fraction of the cost. This would be especially useful for textbooks/reference books - have the real thing in a comfortable location, carry all the ebooks to wherever I happen to work. Would I prefer no DRM? Definitely. However, I just don't see the publishing industry doing that any time soon.
Last time I checked, it was still impossible to (legally) play DVD's under Linux (without cracking the DRM, that is), never mind playing DVD's from different regions, like, in my case, the US...
It may be available elsewhere already, but with Linspire's Click to Run software being made available for more Linux distributions, that means the availability of a legal DVD player as well. Certainly it's been available for Linspire for some time.
Well, if a job is created elsewhere that could have been created in the US, isn't that a job lost?
Not necessarily. It's entirely conceivable that a firm cannot profitably expand operations and pay the wage required to hire a U.S. worker. However, the firm might be able to expand by hiring labor in another country (for a lower wage). In that case, the owners of the U.S. company (which often includes the company's own employees) would benefit. Keep in mind that foreign labor is not necessarily a perfect (or even very good) substitute for domestic labor.
This is not a zero-sum game, and it's very easy to oversimplify matters. I'm not saying that U.S. workers are not or cannot be replaced by foreign workers, I'm just saying that it's possible that foreign workers could be employed where otherwise there would be no job.
A similar argument has sometimes been made regarding investment outside of the U.S. After all, if you invest money in China, you're giving up investment in the U.S, right? Well, it's not that simple. One paper, for example, claims that a 10% increase in foreign investment will lead to a 2.2% increase in domestic investment.
The point is, outsourcing/offshoring is a complex issue. Since it's such a new phenomenon, it will take some time for researchers to come to a consensus about its general effects.
Depending on the hotel, the terms of service can claim all sorts of crazy things. Whether these are enforceable or not is another matter (IANAL). I usually anticipate that they reserve the right to log just about anything, but the worst I've seen was from a hotel in San Francisco. The service there (which wasn't even free at the time - 2003), claimed that anything you uploaded through the service you provided a perpetual, royalty-free license for them to do whatever they want with it. This would mean that on a business level, this would make this hotel service have the ability to redistribute any work you transmit over the internet, which is absurd. Now, I've often seen terms like this for specific websites (like forums), or claims that you are providing the ISP with the right to route your traffic as needed (which is probably legally implicit in your using an ISP).
When it comes to where you've been and what you've transmitted, I assume that many places log everything. If you don't like it, that's what VPNs are for. However, claiming a perpetual license to anything you transmit is just insane.
The modified version of KDE that ships in Fedora 6 is really buggy and unpolished. There's been talk for two years about placing KDE in Fedora Extras so that it will be better supported by the dedicated KDE community, but Redhat seems to keep refusing the help and treating KDE apps as second-class citizens.
If you don't like the FC-packaged KDE, or you want very up-to-date releases, check out the kde-redhat project. It's been around for years, and it does a good job of making FC a KDE-friendly distro. You have to add another repository (in addition to Fedora Extras and Livna), but those are common. If/when KDE becomes part of Fedora (word is that FC7 is the time), the kde-redhat admin (Rex Dieter) has said he will take an active role in that project.
[...]other changes (like using a 4-year old window decoration and widget styles) are at best the result of ineptitude or at worst a deliberate attempt to make KDE look bad and outdated.
I guess this doesn't bother me. I take about 5-10 minutes to make a series of changes to any default, be they KDE or FC, to end up with a setup that's substantially different.
Ideally the computer should just know what you want to do and do it for you. The problem is telling the computer what to do. I'm surprised that voice-recognition hasn't progressed further. The Apple OSX voice stuff is pretty cool but not responsive enough to be useable. And all it does is integrate into the window manager. Why would I want to ask the computer to open a window if I just want to ask a question? For instance, say I want to know what time it is. I can't just ask the computer, "Computer, what time is it?" Instead, I have to say, "Computer, open clock" and then read the time. Maybe some feedback would make it better. Communication requires feedback. Maybe the computer could respond, like the XO of a ship responds to the captain: "Make turns for 30 knots" XO: "30 knots, aye"
(emphasis mine)
In fact, you can ask Mac OS X, "What time is it?". See this article for more info. Also try out "Tell me a joke" to which the Mac responds "Knock Knock" and you have to reply "Who's there", and it tells you one of a few bad knock knock jokes (are there good knock knock jokes?).
Why would you insist on "scaling" applications when you could just set the priority(win)/nice(*nix) level lower? (i.e., higher nice value in linux, lower priority setting in windows). That way, it will always yield to every other system that needs to use the CPU. (And nevermind the belief that a process can use only 'part' of a single-core CPU)
Because even if my computer isn't running anything important, running it at 100% CPU usage will invoke the full cooling capacity of the system. For a desktop, this means a louder fan noise. For a laptop, however, it may not be well-suited to 24/7 100% CPU utilization. The fans are small and can get _very_ noisy. The bottom of the laptop can get so hot as to be unusable on your lap; quite possibly, you could shorten the lifespan of your components.
But that's exactly it--once you've released your source under the GPL, YOU are building on GPL code. Your own code becomes a derivative work of the first GPL release, and turning that backwards into non-GPL code would imply reverting to code base from before the first GPL release.
[IANAL] No, that's misinterpreting the GPL and copyright. When you license your code under the GPL, you still own the copyright (unless and until you explicitly transfer it to some other entity, like the FSF). Any additions or changes to the code are derivative works of your own copyrighted code, which are themselves also copyrighted by you. Thus, you are free to license the code in any way you see fit. This is how many projects will be "dual-licensed", where the different licenses serve different purposes. So long as you have the consent of all copyright holders (in the OP's case, it was all his/her code), you can re-license at will at any point.
There have been cases in the past where such a re-licensing takes place, and a fork occurs. See, for example, cdrecord (recently) and Ghostscript (a while back). The open source community will often take the GPL software and improve upon it (and, incidentally, any changes made by them under the GPL cannot be incorporated into the newly closed-fork without permission by the contributors).
The OP can choose to relicense his/her code during the school year as freeware with no right to receive the source code under the GPL. However, once someone has obtained the binary which is described as being licensed under the GPL, they have the right to receive the source code by reasonable means (see the GPL itself and GPL FAQ for more info). Then the downloader is free to distribute the code during the school year under the terms of the GPL.
Of course, the real solution to this problem isn't one of licensing. It's for instructors to vary the assignments more. In fact, an interesting twist would be to require students to obtain the GPL'd software of this game and make modifications. This would introduce students who aren't familiar with GPL'd software and make them understand what its benefits and restrictions are.
Actually its not without caselaw. If you change then republish something you get a new copyright on it. BUT someone can still copy the old material if they can find old material that the most recent revision of has fallen out of copyright./Yes even you can take Shakespear, change of few words and copyright your publication.:)
Right, I was operating under that assumption. Therefore, it is very important that we have a record of what existed at a given point in time.
What I don't know for certain is the answer to this hypothetical situation: A PDF or text file (or whatever) is made available on X date. X+100 years later (or whatever), the file is still available (perhaps not from the same source, but assume the file itself is dated). Is the file in the public domain, if accessed at a later date? I think it is, so long as the file is the same, bit-for-bit. Translate it into a new format, and you might have a new copyright, I'm not sure (and I'm not sure there is case law on it).
This brings up an analogy with other types of creative works. Are photographic reproductions of old artwork copyrighted? From what I understand, this depends on the country (with this being the relevant U.S. ruling that such a photograph is not copyrightable).
Many people think of the Wayback Machine as being a tool for history and nostalgia. However, consider copyright expiration (IANAL, etc.). Many web pages have items like "Copyright 1995-2006 Blah". Some of the content was created as early as 1995. Assuming, of course, that items created in modern times eventually have their copyright expire, we will need a record of the content of these pages at that time.
As more content moves online, the idea of publishing a work becomes blurred. Revisions years later can effectively update the copyright of the work, if the reader cannot distinguish when the content was created. So the Wayback Machine will hopefully provide that resource. The amount of potentially public-domain content there is huge.
As a side note, it will be interesting to note when the first GPL programs (for example) lose their copyright. Of course, by then, the languages will seem more than archaic.
At work we're seeing a larger number of motherboards where the USB suddenly fails. It only seems to happen to those using drives or palm sync devices.
My hypothesis would be static discharge. There was an issue way back when with the Palm V and its charging cradle frying ungrounded serial ports. With drives and Palms, you have frequent plugging in; given where people stash their flash drives (pockets, bags), I imagine building up a static charge is certainly possible.
A properly wired USB port should be fine (just like serial ports before), I would think.
I can't fathom why someone would chose to use the number keys as arrow keys when there are actual arrow keys sitting right there
For me, that reason is Civilization (2, 3, and FreeCiv, haven't played 4). Diagonal directions are very important. Clicking the mouse can be error prone (though goto is useful). I could probably remap the directions nethack-style onto the keyboard, but I've never gotten used to those keybindings.
In fact, this makes playing Civ for me much less convenient on a laptop. I often end up enabling num lock, and switching it off when I need to type a city name.
With num lock on, can the OS distinguish between num pad numbers and normal numbers? If that were the case, that'd work fine.
RHEL 4 did indeed switch to 2.6. It also changed all the redhat-* commands to system-* commands for some reason.
I noticed this too. I figured it was part of a harmonization with Fedora. Reduce the number of RH references in Fedora, and since RHEL is based in part on Fedora, certain things would carry through. Or perhaps it just makes more sense to have them be system-* rather than redhat-*. Perhaps they hope that other distros will pick up on the naming scheme, making for a more unified configuration structure (at least from the command line). No big deal, really.
It already does... this license doesn't count as Free software under almost any definition (e.g., Debian Social Contract). As such it's not part of the Free software community.
There is more to discouraging these restrictions than simply classifying them "non-free". It means using, developing, and helping alternatives instead of usage-restricted software. If great alternatives exist in the OSS world, don't package it for your distro (if you're a packager, you can probably spend your time working on another OSS package).
I'm certainly not against all non-free software (I certainly use a fair share myself). I am simply opposed to usage restrictions like this no-military clause. I am similarly opposed to no-benchmark clauses. Non-free repositories in distros are excellent places to distribute free-as-in-beer software, especially if the alternatives aren't good enough for everyone. I suppose my argument boils down to this: a usage restriction like this makes it no longer free-as-in-beer.
In the end, if it's enforceable, they certainly have the right to distribute software under terms as they see fit. But they aren't entitled to community support.
I feel the Free software/open source community should vigorously discourage any restrictions on usage, rather than distribution, of the software. The authors of GPU, according to the article, admit their restriction "contradicts the original intention of the GPL". Indeed it does.
Open source software is bound to be used in ways that the authors find unappealing to some extent. Still, there are a variety of reasons why any restriction on usage are inappropriate. First, the licenses and restrictions of open source software ought to be as clear as possible. This allows people to reasonably abide by the licenses and probably (IANAL) helps in their legal enforceability. Second, if the community begins to accept these usage restrictions, it may be a "slippery slope". Criminal usage might be prohibited, but in what jurisdiction? Then, behavior various authors find objectionable (pornography, as an example) might be prohibited. Then perhaps you'll have development tools (IDEs, etc) with restrictions that they may only be used to create open source software.
One of the greatest benefits of open source software for end users is that you only need to be familiar with the terms of a few licenses and they are nearly impossible to violate if all you're doing is running the software. Restrictions on usage destroy this freedom for users. Thus, I believe advocates of OSS should reject any such restrictions and continue their focus on the abilities to modify and redistribute the source code.
I give every organization its own email address (I realize this isn't unique, but I'm surprised at how few people do it). If the address gets out and I start getting spam, it's a simple matter to redirect that mail to/dev/null. A fortunate consequence of this method is another, easier way of filtering incoming messages: by the "To:" field, rather than hacking together "From:" or "Subject:" entries as needed. So far, I've had no need for any spam filtering solution. I get the most spam from the address listed in my WHOIS records and on my website, but I could start rotating that address if I really cared.
Not to say I'm organized enough to have every filter set up. Still, I usually don't let more than a couple hundred messages build up before I clear them out.
So, is Linus going to go after them for this copyright infringement, or is he going to accept it and possibly see theownership and protections of Tux deminished?
Or is that whole "You have to go after every infraction or lose your IP" thing just a myth used by PR agents to justify labels suing grandmas?
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Don't confuse copyright infringement with trademark infringement. Trademarks must be enforced to prevent them from being diluted. Copyrights and patents, on the other hand, do not have a similar requirement.
That's why you'll see issues come up like people claiming patents to LZW compression (in GIF images) and the mp3 format after they become popular. A similar copyright case that comes to mind was the stricter enforcement of "Happy Birthday" licensing at summer camps that made the news a few years back.
In the last twenty years, the real wages for college educated US workers have barely kept up with inflation.
Do you have a source for this? Because from what I've heard (and have found with a little searching), that's definitely not the case. For example, from one source: "I'll give you some context. For college-educated men, the median weekly wage rose 20 percent in real purchasing power from 1979 to 2002. Women with college degrees did even better -- up 34 percent." (this article was written in Oct 2005, and the data he used was not available past 2002). I suspect that the story for people without a college degree is not as fortunate, but I'm merely contesting your claim about college-educated workers. The earnings gap between rich and poor certainly has increased (with rather striking examples of executive pay increases over the past couple of decades).
Now I have seen some evidence that wages have fallen since 2002, and one can debate which inflation measure to use in calculating real wages. Perhaps some twenty year period started at the height of a boom and ended at the bottom of a recession, I don't know. But the overall trend in wages for college-educated people is certainly up. One reason that Social Security faces such dramatic underfunding is that benefit increases are tied to wage increases rather than inflation.
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As the other responder said, this depends. Many (most) graduate-level textbooks (at least in my field) are also references for researchers. I frequently see such books cited in journal articles, often because they've become the "definitive" reference on a given area.
You need to get your power fixed, or move. I live in a townhouse which had really bad power problems when I first moved in. Over the summer, whenever the air conditioner of any neighbor turned on, my lights would dim and my UPSes would go off. Still, my CFLs survived for the most part. The ones that died came from another apartment and were 2-3 years old by the time they died. I still have some which are pushing 4 years now.
Talk to your neighbors, see if they have power issues too. It could be mostly a neighborhood thing (our neighborhood needed an upgraded transformer as a first step, and still needs more line upgrades which are in the works). Call your power company, find out if they have a "power quality" department that handles non-emergency power issues like this. My problem was that they kept sending over techs who were trained to fix outages and emergencies, whereas you might need an upgrade to the grid near you.
Of course, it could be a combination of that with internal wiring. Don't put up with inadequate internal wiring from your landlord. If you are having issues with things like CFLs dying, then your power is probably bad enough that you could build up a legal case if you needed to. Still, it's best to start cordial, and have the landlord have a qualified electrician look at everything and see if there are any reasonable ways to upgrade the setup (replacing old circuit breakers, etc.).
And relating to your other equipment, you should probably get a ground tester and see if all of your outlets are grounded. If they aren't, that could pose a real fire hazard if you plug in equipment that expects a ground. I've seen people put up with really remarkably bad power, especially on college campuses. If you spend a little time on it, you can really improve your own power and that of everyone who rents in your place in the future. We spend tons of money on electricity every month, it should be of reasonable quality.
I'm a longtime KDE user. For the past several years I've used Fedora, usually with the improved KDE-RedHat packages of KDE. When I installed Fedora on my laptop, getting things like wireless to work required packages from atrpm. The repositories start adding up, and pretty soon you're running into incompatibilities between them.
So when I decided to try Kubuntu, I was pleasantly surprised with how polished the system seems. My wireless card (ipw3945) and video (widescreen with simple Intel graphics) were detected (including correct resolution) and enabled on install. One repository (including universe), and I had all the packages I need for my standard KDE use.
As for being slow, it certainly doesn't feel like it. The boot time is incredibly fast most of the time, due to the way (K)ubuntu handles startup services. KDE feels snappy, even with my relatively limited amount of RAM (512 MB). It certainly doesn't feel slower than Fedora was on the same system.
I like the idea of the unified control panel. RedHat's system configuration utilities are decent, but they're scattered, without a unifying interface. Furthermore, they're all in gtk, so they'll never quite integrate into a KDE desktop. I thought Kubuntu was going down the right path by taking the work the KDE people have done with the control panel and using it for everything. Granted, it needs some work (the network control panel isn't nearly as robust as Fedora's), and visually needs some work (have to "scroll down" a mostly empty window to get the Administrator Mode button). I think it's on the right track, though, it just needs more of the polish that the underlying Ubuntu system has.
I don't think the analogy is that flawed. iPods are hundreds of dollars and DRM music from ITMS often costs about as much as the CD (or much more, if you're willing to buy used). A cheap portable CD player is less than $25. The CD also gives you a higher quality version. At least an ebook gives you value added like the ability to search.
I think it's hard to point to any one aspect of ebooks and say "that's why they aren't taking off". You've got the fact that people simply like reading printed documents (consider the massive printer industry now). People probably don't like the DRM (what do you mean I can't lend my ebook to my friend?). Yes, the readers themselves are pricey; but pricey from the perspective that they don't add much over the printed format. An iPod can carry almost everyone's entire music collection now. Being able to mix and match between such a huge choice of music is a big draw for music listeners. With books, just how many do you want to carry around with you at any given time? There is some convenience there, but it's not nearly as important as it is for music.
I hope the future of ebooks is this: you buy a print version of a book, you get a CD or web-code to an ebook version. Alternatively, you can buy the ebook version only for a fraction of the cost. This would be especially useful for textbooks/reference books - have the real thing in a comfortable location, carry all the ebooks to wherever I happen to work. Would I prefer no DRM? Definitely. However, I just don't see the publishing industry doing that any time soon.
Not necessarily. It's entirely conceivable that a firm cannot profitably expand operations and pay the wage required to hire a U.S. worker. However, the firm might be able to expand by hiring labor in another country (for a lower wage). In that case, the owners of the U.S. company (which often includes the company's own employees) would benefit. Keep in mind that foreign labor is not necessarily a perfect (or even very good) substitute for domestic labor.
This is not a zero-sum game, and it's very easy to oversimplify matters. I'm not saying that U.S. workers are not or cannot be replaced by foreign workers, I'm just saying that it's possible that foreign workers could be employed where otherwise there would be no job.
A similar argument has sometimes been made regarding investment outside of the U.S. After all, if you invest money in China, you're giving up investment in the U.S, right? Well, it's not that simple. One paper, for example, claims that a 10% increase in foreign investment will lead to a 2.2% increase in domestic investment.
The point is, outsourcing/offshoring is a complex issue. Since it's such a new phenomenon, it will take some time for researchers to come to a consensus about its general effects.
Depending on the hotel, the terms of service can claim all sorts of crazy things. Whether these are enforceable or not is another matter (IANAL). I usually anticipate that they reserve the right to log just about anything, but the worst I've seen was from a hotel in San Francisco. The service there (which wasn't even free at the time - 2003), claimed that anything you uploaded through the service you provided a perpetual, royalty-free license for them to do whatever they want with it. This would mean that on a business level, this would make this hotel service have the ability to redistribute any work you transmit over the internet, which is absurd. Now, I've often seen terms like this for specific websites (like forums), or claims that you are providing the ISP with the right to route your traffic as needed (which is probably legally implicit in your using an ISP).
When it comes to where you've been and what you've transmitted, I assume that many places log everything. If you don't like it, that's what VPNs are for. However, claiming a perpetual license to anything you transmit is just insane.
where "the company" is implied to be Microsoft. However, from the article:
I think that's a rather important distinction.
If you don't like the FC-packaged KDE, or you want very up-to-date releases, check out the kde-redhat project. It's been around for years, and it does a good job of making FC a KDE-friendly distro. You have to add another repository (in addition to Fedora Extras and Livna), but those are common. If/when KDE becomes part of Fedora (word is that FC7 is the time), the kde-redhat admin (Rex Dieter) has said he will take an active role in that project.
I guess this doesn't bother me. I take about 5-10 minutes to make a series of changes to any default, be they KDE or FC, to end up with a setup that's substantially different.
In fact, you can ask Mac OS X, "What time is it?". See this article for more info. Also try out "Tell me a joke" to which the Mac responds "Knock Knock" and you have to reply "Who's there", and it tells you one of a few bad knock knock jokes (are there good knock knock jokes?).
Because even if my computer isn't running anything important, running it at 100% CPU usage will invoke the full cooling capacity of the system. For a desktop, this means a louder fan noise. For a laptop, however, it may not be well-suited to 24/7 100% CPU utilization. The fans are small and can get _very_ noisy. The bottom of the laptop can get so hot as to be unusable on your lap; quite possibly, you could shorten the lifespan of your components.
[IANAL] No, that's misinterpreting the GPL and copyright. When you license your code under the GPL, you still own the copyright (unless and until you explicitly transfer it to some other entity, like the FSF). Any additions or changes to the code are derivative works of your own copyrighted code, which are themselves also copyrighted by you. Thus, you are free to license the code in any way you see fit. This is how many projects will be "dual-licensed", where the different licenses serve different purposes. So long as you have the consent of all copyright holders (in the OP's case, it was all his/her code), you can re-license at will at any point.
There have been cases in the past where such a re-licensing takes place, and a fork occurs. See, for example, cdrecord (recently) and Ghostscript (a while back). The open source community will often take the GPL software and improve upon it (and, incidentally, any changes made by them under the GPL cannot be incorporated into the newly closed-fork without permission by the contributors).
The OP can choose to relicense his/her code during the school year as freeware with no right to receive the source code under the GPL. However, once someone has obtained the binary which is described as being licensed under the GPL, they have the right to receive the source code by reasonable means (see the GPL itself and GPL FAQ for more info). Then the downloader is free to distribute the code during the school year under the terms of the GPL.
Of course, the real solution to this problem isn't one of licensing. It's for instructors to vary the assignments more. In fact, an interesting twist would be to require students to obtain the GPL'd software of this game and make modifications. This would introduce students who aren't familiar with GPL'd software and make them understand what its benefits and restrictions are.
Right, I was operating under that assumption. Therefore, it is very important that we have a record of what existed at a given point in time.
What I don't know for certain is the answer to this hypothetical situation: A PDF or text file (or whatever) is made available on X date. X+100 years later (or whatever), the file is still available (perhaps not from the same source, but assume the file itself is dated). Is the file in the public domain, if accessed at a later date? I think it is, so long as the file is the same, bit-for-bit. Translate it into a new format, and you might have a new copyright, I'm not sure (and I'm not sure there is case law on it).
This brings up an analogy with other types of creative works. Are photographic reproductions of old artwork copyrighted? From what I understand, this depends on the country (with this being the relevant U.S. ruling that such a photograph is not copyrightable).
Many people think of the Wayback Machine as being a tool for history and nostalgia. However, consider copyright expiration (IANAL, etc.). Many web pages have items like "Copyright 1995-2006 Blah". Some of the content was created as early as 1995. Assuming, of course, that items created in modern times eventually have their copyright expire, we will need a record of the content of these pages at that time.
As more content moves online, the idea of publishing a work becomes blurred. Revisions years later can effectively update the copyright of the work, if the reader cannot distinguish when the content was created. So the Wayback Machine will hopefully provide that resource. The amount of potentially public-domain content there is huge.
As a side note, it will be interesting to note when the first GPL programs (for example) lose their copyright. Of course, by then, the languages will seem more than archaic.
My hypothesis would be static discharge. There was an issue way back when with the Palm V and its charging cradle frying ungrounded serial ports. With drives and Palms, you have frequent plugging in; given where people stash their flash drives (pockets, bags), I imagine building up a static charge is certainly possible.
A properly wired USB port should be fine (just like serial ports before), I would think.
For me, that reason is Civilization (2, 3, and FreeCiv, haven't played 4). Diagonal directions are very important. Clicking the mouse can be error prone (though goto is useful). I could probably remap the directions nethack-style onto the keyboard, but I've never gotten used to those keybindings.
In fact, this makes playing Civ for me much less convenient on a laptop. I often end up enabling num lock, and switching it off when I need to type a city name.
With num lock on, can the OS distinguish between num pad numbers and normal numbers? If that were the case, that'd work fine.
I noticed this too. I figured it was part of a harmonization with Fedora. Reduce the number of RH references in Fedora, and since RHEL is based in part on Fedora, certain things would carry through. Or perhaps it just makes more sense to have them be system-* rather than redhat-*. Perhaps they hope that other distros will pick up on the naming scheme, making for a more unified configuration structure (at least from the command line). No big deal, really.
There is more to discouraging these restrictions than simply classifying them "non-free". It means using, developing, and helping alternatives instead of usage-restricted software. If great alternatives exist in the OSS world, don't package it for your distro (if you're a packager, you can probably spend your time working on another OSS package).
I'm certainly not against all non-free software (I certainly use a fair share myself). I am simply opposed to usage restrictions like this no-military clause. I am similarly opposed to no-benchmark clauses. Non-free repositories in distros are excellent places to distribute free-as-in-beer software, especially if the alternatives aren't good enough for everyone. I suppose my argument boils down to this: a usage restriction like this makes it no longer free-as-in-beer.
In the end, if it's enforceable, they certainly have the right to distribute software under terms as they see fit. But they aren't entitled to community support.
I feel the Free software/open source community should vigorously discourage any restrictions on usage, rather than distribution, of the software. The authors of GPU, according to the article, admit their restriction "contradicts the original intention of the GPL". Indeed it does.
Open source software is bound to be used in ways that the authors find unappealing to some extent. Still, there are a variety of reasons why any restriction on usage are inappropriate. First, the licenses and restrictions of open source software ought to be as clear as possible. This allows people to reasonably abide by the licenses and probably (IANAL) helps in their legal enforceability. Second, if the community begins to accept these usage restrictions, it may be a "slippery slope". Criminal usage might be prohibited, but in what jurisdiction? Then, behavior various authors find objectionable (pornography, as an example) might be prohibited. Then perhaps you'll have development tools (IDEs, etc) with restrictions that they may only be used to create open source software.
One of the greatest benefits of open source software for end users is that you only need to be familiar with the terms of a few licenses and they are nearly impossible to violate if all you're doing is running the software. Restrictions on usage destroy this freedom for users. Thus, I believe advocates of OSS should reject any such restrictions and continue their focus on the abilities to modify and redistribute the source code.
I give every organization its own email address (I realize this isn't unique, but I'm surprised at how few people do it). If the address gets out and I start getting spam, it's a simple matter to redirect that mail to /dev/null. A fortunate consequence of this method is another, easier way of filtering incoming messages: by the "To:" field, rather than hacking together "From:" or "Subject:" entries as needed. So far, I've had no need for any spam filtering solution. I get the most spam from the address listed in my WHOIS records and on my website, but I could start rotating that address if I really cared.
Not to say I'm organized enough to have every filter set up. Still, I usually don't let more than a couple hundred messages build up before I clear them out.
(emphasis mine)
It's pretty funny to read a sentence about quality control followed up by something spellcheck could catch. Then again, this is Slashdot.
Ah, yes, and leave it to Radio Shack to sell them.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Don't confuse copyright infringement with trademark infringement. Trademarks must be enforced to prevent them from being diluted. Copyrights and patents, on the other hand, do not have a similar requirement.
That's why you'll see issues come up like people claiming patents to LZW compression (in GIF images) and the mp3 format after they become popular. A similar copyright case that comes to mind was the stricter enforcement of "Happy Birthday" licensing at summer camps that made the news a few years back.
Do you have a source for this? Because from what I've heard (and have found with a little searching), that's definitely not the case. For example, from one source: "I'll give you some context. For college-educated men, the median weekly wage rose 20 percent in real purchasing power from 1979 to 2002. Women with college degrees did even better -- up 34 percent." (this article was written in Oct 2005, and the data he used was not available past 2002). I suspect that the story for people without a college degree is not as fortunate, but I'm merely contesting your claim about college-educated workers. The earnings gap between rich and poor certainly has increased (with rather striking examples of executive pay increases over the past couple of decades).
Now I have seen some evidence that wages have fallen since 2002, and one can debate which inflation measure to use in calculating real wages. Perhaps some twenty year period started at the height of a boom and ended at the bottom of a recession, I don't know. But the overall trend in wages for college-educated people is certainly up. One reason that Social Security faces such dramatic underfunding is that benefit increases are tied to wage increases rather than inflation.