While this could spell death for OpenOffice, it could just as well be its revival. Since presumably the copyright assignment requirement and poor management by Sun will now be gone, features from go-oo can (and apparently, will) be merged into OO/LO, and potential developers will have a better incentive to contribute. The project might become truly free software, and get a real community. On the other hand, it seems from some of the posts at Planet go-oo, that not all go-oo developers are happy with the people behind this Document Foundation (I wish they'd picked a better name), for some reason. I will definitely keep an eye on this project.
Patent advocates represent their corporations, because it is the corporations that own the patents, not the advocates themselves. Corporations are legal persons but are not citizens. There is no equivalence there.
INAP, but there's no reason why the strong force should stop working just because the atom isn't moving. I don't understand your second question; since atoms in molecules have fixed positions relative to each other, surely atomic immobility implies molecular immobility and molecular immobility implies atomic immobility?
Except that copying without permission is not stealing. I think you will notice if a poor guy steals something from your warehouse. I don't think you will notice if he makes a copy of your program. Furthermore, if he is really that poor, then he would not have bought it in the first place, meaning that you can't even claim hypothetical losses! How such an action in this case is harmful or unethical, I cannot see.
Nowadays governments are much more powerful, in terms of military might, access to information and control over a citizen. It might have become infeasible to try to forcefully overthrow one. The next step that empowers citizens might just as well be total nuclear war.
No, you have it backwards. It's the media producers who live off other people. Is it not they, who expect to profit forever, without bound, from a limited amount of work? They, who don't want to accept the market as it exists, and want to impose their own rules on the general population, so that they can live off them without effort? We owe them nothing. We surrender our natural born right to copy bits as we please, for a limited time, to encourage these lazy persons to produce our music, but they have abused our trust and taken it to the extreme. They deserve no pity. The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits. It is solved by introducing sane copyright law, that brings balance back into the game.
This is not necessarily true. You must understand that Wine is not an emulator, rather it is an alternative implementation of Windows libraries. Some Windows features may not map well onto POSIX systems in terms of performance, but there is nothing in principle that prevents Wine developers from implementing their libraries to perform better than the originals.
It's not the altitude that's the problem, it's the amount of propellant that is needed to take you there. Given that the engine burns propellant at a constant rate, you burn the most propellant per unit of altitude when you go slowest, i.e. when you start. Therefore, even if your gain in altitude from rail launching is small, your gain in velocity can be large enough to save *a lot* of propellant, which is the whole point of this exercise.
When you cut off your engines, you *are* in orbit. There is no "final" orbit to go to from there. The only question is, does your orbit intersect the Earth or not:-)
Firstly, GNU runs on other kernels than just Linux (FreeBSD and Solaris, among others). Doesn't that make Linux less important? Seriously, both parts are needed to make a full operating system, you can't have a bare kernel or userland.
Secondly, if you look at the "host triple" used to fully describe an operating system for the purpose of compiling C programs, you will notice that it's actually given in that order: arch-kernel-system, e.g. x86_64-linux-gnu, but that's not because of importance, it's because you take a "top-down" or "bottom-up" view. As far as software goes, the kernel is always at the bottom, and on top of it there is the core userland. GNU/Linux is just looking from the top down, because as a user, you normally interact directly with the userland part, not the kernel part.
Take out Linux or take out GNU -- what you're left with is not an operating system any more. Take out anything else, then what's left still defines an operating system. That's why it's most efficient to call it GNU/Linux, but, of course, you are free to call it whatever you want, as long as you're not being misleading. I don't think anyone has an objection to calling a system KDE/Xorg/GNU/Linux, if you have the stamina to type it then go ahead!
The difference between using two-part names and multi-part names is that every operating system needs to have a basic userland and a kernel, but all the other programs are purely optional. If a system doesn't have GNU, it will have something else in its place. Your home router will probably not be running GNU/Linux, but Busybox/Linux instead. Your phone will be running Android/Linux. The key point is that these are incompatible, different operating systems, and you will likely have problems if you want to run a program with particular system dependencies on all of these. Because this is free software, there are many possibilities of such pairs, such as FreeBSD/kFreeBSD, GNU/kFreeBSD, GNU/kSolaris, etc.
When you say "I run Linux", strictly speaking, you refer to all possible operating systems that run on the Linux kernel. Since you need a userland to make a full operating system, such a description is incomplete. And when someone asks you what system you're running, they're not asking about just the kernel, they want to know the whole thing. So *at minimum* you should say what kernel and userland it has. If you say "I run Linux" to mean "I run GNU with Linux", then, strictly speaking, you are being misleading, because Linux does not necessarily imply GNU, same as GNU does not imply Linux.
So, you see, it's not just about giving credit, it's also because Linux is not an operating system, and it's because us geeks want to communicate precisely.
Since the median income in the States is $32,000 (according to Wikipedia), it follows that it is impossible for everyone to be happy, in fact most will be unhappy.
Slashdot Mirror
While this could spell death for OpenOffice, it could just as well be its revival. Since presumably the copyright assignment requirement and poor management by Sun will now be gone, features from go-oo can (and apparently, will) be merged into OO/LO, and potential developers will have a better incentive to contribute. The project might become truly free software, and get a real community. On the other hand, it seems from some of the posts at Planet go-oo, that not all go-oo developers are happy with the people behind this Document Foundation (I wish they'd picked a better name), for some reason. I will definitely keep an eye on this project.
No, but they could have renamed it to gooo. I guess they thought better of it.
That he has so many outspoken opponents, only confirms it.
Patent advocates represent their corporations, because it is the corporations that own the patents, not the advocates themselves. Corporations are legal persons but are not citizens. There is no equivalence there.
INAP, but there's no reason why the strong force should stop working just because the atom isn't moving. I don't understand your second question; since atoms in molecules have fixed positions relative to each other, surely atomic immobility implies molecular immobility and molecular immobility implies atomic immobility?
This is false, according to nationmaster.com. In fact, the murder rate in the States is 3 times that of the UK.
Hmm, have you tried using a good hardware RNG?
"This post is protected by ROT13+ROT13 ençryption and the DMCA!"
Oh yeah? Encrypt this, hot shot!
(I know, that's why you need the DMCA, it's like Viagra for the intellectual property market)
Ah, so they must have meant superconductor speeds! False advertising indeed!
Interesting, but this is a better link: Operation PBSUCCESS.
Except that copying without permission is not stealing. I think you will notice if a poor guy steals something from your warehouse. I don't think you will notice if he makes a copy of your program. Furthermore, if he is really that poor, then he would not have bought it in the first place, meaning that you can't even claim hypothetical losses! How such an action in this case is harmful or unethical, I cannot see.
Nowadays governments are much more powerful, in terms of military might, access to information and control over a citizen. It might have become infeasible to try to forcefully overthrow one. The next step that empowers citizens might just as well be total nuclear war.
No, you have it backwards. It's the media producers who live off other people. Is it not they, who expect to profit forever, without bound, from a limited amount of work? They, who don't want to accept the market as it exists, and want to impose their own rules on the general population, so that they can live off them without effort? We owe them nothing. We surrender our natural born right to copy bits as we please, for a limited time, to encourage these lazy persons to produce our music, but they have abused our trust and taken it to the extreme. They deserve no pity. The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits. It is solved by introducing sane copyright law, that brings balance back into the game.
No, it's Ethan Hunt who does it with a stick of gum.
Native clients will always run faster than Wine.
This is not necessarily true. You must understand that Wine is not an emulator, rather it is an alternative implementation of Windows libraries. Some Windows features may not map well onto POSIX systems in terms of performance, but there is nothing in principle that prevents Wine developers from implementing their libraries to perform better than the originals.
Only the Chinese can use base 126.
It's not the altitude that's the problem, it's the amount of propellant that is needed to take you there. Given that the engine burns propellant at a constant rate, you burn the most propellant per unit of altitude when you go slowest, i.e. when you start. Therefore, even if your gain in altitude from rail launching is small, your gain in velocity can be large enough to save *a lot* of propellant, which is the whole point of this exercise.
When you cut off your engines, you *are* in orbit. There is no "final" orbit to go to from there. The only question is, does your orbit intersect the Earth or not :-)
FYI:
Firstly, GNU runs on other kernels than just Linux (FreeBSD and Solaris, among others). Doesn't that make Linux less important? Seriously, both parts are needed to make a full operating system, you can't have a bare kernel or userland.
Secondly, if you look at the "host triple" used to fully describe an operating system for the purpose of compiling C programs, you will notice that it's actually given in that order: arch-kernel-system, e.g. x86_64-linux-gnu, but that's not because of importance, it's because you take a "top-down" or "bottom-up" view. As far as software goes, the kernel is always at the bottom, and on top of it there is the core userland. GNU/Linux is just looking from the top down, because as a user, you normally interact directly with the userland part, not the kernel part.
Take out Linux or take out GNU -- what you're left with is not an operating system any more. Take out anything else, then what's left still defines an operating system. That's why it's most efficient to call it GNU/Linux, but, of course, you are free to call it whatever you want, as long as you're not being misleading. I don't think anyone has an objection to calling a system KDE/Xorg/GNU/Linux, if you have the stamina to type it then go ahead!
The difference between using two-part names and multi-part names is that every operating system needs to have a basic userland and a kernel, but all the other programs are purely optional. If a system doesn't have GNU, it will have something else in its place. Your home router will probably not be running GNU/Linux, but Busybox/Linux instead. Your phone will be running Android/Linux. The key point is that these are incompatible, different operating systems, and you will likely have problems if you want to run a program with particular system dependencies on all of these. Because this is free software, there are many possibilities of such pairs, such as FreeBSD/kFreeBSD, GNU/kFreeBSD, GNU/kSolaris, etc.
When you say "I run Linux", strictly speaking, you refer to all possible operating systems that run on the Linux kernel. Since you need a userland to make a full operating system, such a description is incomplete. And when someone asks you what system you're running, they're not asking about just the kernel, they want to know the whole thing. So *at minimum* you should say what kernel and userland it has. If you say "I run Linux" to mean "I run GNU with Linux", then, strictly speaking, you are being misleading, because Linux does not necessarily imply GNU, same as GNU does not imply Linux.
So, you see, it's not just about giving credit, it's also because Linux is not an operating system, and it's because us geeks want to communicate precisely.
I think you will be happy to read this: Standardized mobile phone charger coming to EU—iPhone, too. Granted, this is only in the EU, but one can only expect that everyone else will follow.
Actually, it doesn't. What you want is the probability that (not (everything is OK in all three browsers)) = 1 - 0.96^3 = 0.115264.
No, I think you mean GNU/Linus Torvalds!
Since the median income in the States is $32,000 (according to Wikipedia), it follows that it is impossible for everyone to be happy, in fact most will be unhappy.
Fallout 3 is not a good example, because it changes genre too. 1 and 2 are excellent RPGs, 3 is a mediocre shooter with some RPG elements.