I know this is not the most practical question, but I have been wondering for a while whether it would is possible to do a Search for ExtraTerristrial Intelligence (or a sky survey for whatever reason) for ultrawide band signals. I've heard that it is very difficult to detect UWB if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, but perhaps someone who knows a lot about ultrawideband could comment on its general detectability.
What do you need in AppWatch that Freshmeat didn't provide?
I would like a license filter or license ranking option and an automated update detector such as
jdwhatsnew, ideally while still allowing user submitted updates.
On freshmeat, the updates that you see are generally very current, but, to the best of my knowledge, you only see what people submit. For example, to pick on myself, I see that I have been remiss in submitting an update for the
freshmeat
entry for the July 17 release of version 1.6 of
dvdtape. AppWatch's automated release monitoring provided more uniformity. As the amount of software scales up so that it's more work to double check for updates by visiting individual web sites, the value of this automation increases. Imagine if text search engines only updated from manual submissions.
By the way, I read Freshmeat daily in addition to AppWatch, but I would usually start with appwatch for its update speed and focus on the type of software that I am most interested in.
Then, I would typically visit freshmeat to see what appwatch did not cover and check out the unfree or GPL incompatible software (which I am also interested in monitoring after I've seen what's new in the GPL compatible space). I imagine that people with other copyright preferences might also like a copyright policy filter or prioritizer.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking any of the older Panasonic DVD-RAM drives (LF-D102U, LF-D101N?) that did not write DVD-R, which I believe identified themselves under SCSI as a magneto-optical drives.
The statements that I have seen about needing the prorietary driver program only named the Pioneer DVR-A03 and a couple of drives that write "authoring" DVD-R's. So, it is possible that what you say is true about the new Panasonic drive. However, I don't know if it is physically possible to randomly write sectors of a DVD-R, and you certainly can't rewrite them. So, I would not bet that you could write DVD-R's with the drive using the standard SCSI magneto-optical interface, but you could be right.
If you want a ~$600 DVD recorder, you already have a couple of other choices.
At $629 on
PriceWatch, the
Pioneer DVR-A03
that a number of posters have already mentioned writes DVD-R at 2X, DVD-RW at 1X, as well as CD-R and CD-RW.
Currently, to the best of my knowledge, the only Linux software that can drive DVD writes is
proprietary (sorry, there really is no good link for it). I am not sure whether complete information on how to drive these DVD writes is given in the
SCSI-3 standards on www.t10.org or whether some additional information is needed. Any pointers to this information would be appreciated, as I might get ambitious one of these days and try to hack
cdrecord
or
cdwrite to control these drives if nobody beats me to it.
The basic idealogical dispute is that previously it was illegal to link glibc with proprietary software linked by non-GNU compilers due to a special "modified GPL" in the libio section of the GNU C Library. The change that the steering committee (who are developers like Roland McGrath, not just "Stallman") made was primiarily to convert that code to LGPL. Ulrich was the one being an idealogue about it. In this case, the steering committee was the group that was actually trying to get the right thing done for the users.
The glibc-2.2.4 announcement advised everyone to switch to it. What the announcement did not mention is that if you try to configure glibc-2.2.4, you discover that it does not want to build under gcc-3. The steering committee is pushing for a fast release of glibc-2.2.5 which will not have this problem.
So far, the steering committee seems to be a very positive influence. In the past, people were giving up hope on glibc due to its bloat, arcaneness, and legal issues. The SC seems much more focused on what users want.
By the way, let me say that Ulrich Drepper has made many contributions to glibc and I hope he will continue to be involved as a contributor.
If you run./configure in the top of the glibc-2.2.4 source tree on a gcc-3.0 system, it ill abort with the following output:
*** This version of GNU libc cannot be compiled by GCC 3.x.
*** GCC 3.x will generate a library that is binary incompatible to
*** older and future releases of GNU libc.
*** You should compile this GNU libc release by an older GCC version
*** or wait for the next GNU libc release.
*** If you really mean to use GCC 3.x, run configure again
*** using the extra parameter `--disable-sanity-checks'.
The security standard in question is
802.1x, not 802.11x, because it is theoretically not specific to wireless, although the distribution of per-session WEP keys is. You could, for example, use 802.1x to authenticate conference attendees to use ethernet ports in conference rooms.
According to Alex Belitis's Metricom-on-Linux
web page,
there was no hardware change.
It's just that the Metricom pole top units were
no longer programmed to forward peer-to-peer "star mode" packets for modems registered after December 23, 2000. If you have two modems talking directly
to each other rather than through a pole top unit, then there shuld be no problem.
On the other hand, six months ago I tried and failed to get my
Merlin Metricom card to talk my external USB
metricom modem in star mode.
Much as we may hate the idea, copyright is a part of the way the world currently works.
All problems in the world are "part of the way the world currently works." That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix any of them.
The existing laws were written before they had any
idea of what computers would one day be capable of. Updating them to include [to the same degree of fairness]
digital forms only makes sense. Otherwise you are left with unequal protection, depending on the media.
First of all, DMCA does not simply extend copyright on software to the same degree that it previously existed for books. It has never before been illegal to make devices that could be used to circumvent copyrights on books, much less restricting devices that just allowed fair use.
Remember, in the United States, at least, copyright is exists soley for the purpose of promoting science and the useful arts. Essentially, it is a question of economic policy. The government offers copyright and patent monopolies on the theory these monopololies will promote creation of these works more more than impede it. There is nothing immoral about different copyright restrictions being available for different types of works. It's just a question of optimization.
Secondly, your use of the term "unequal protection" is completely misleading. In this cotext, "unequal protection" is not either morally or economically harmful. Disecting your words further, "protection" is a misleading term to apply to copyright restrictions, since copyright is not an inherently moral issue. What is restrictable by copyright is not exactly what is considered plagurism, and copyright is also unlike property in that violating a copyright does not deprive the author of his or her copy--the only deprivation is possibly of the royalties created by a copyright law in the first place. In addition, "unequal protection" in a legal context refers to people being discriminated against by the law. The government taxing cars differently from boats or having different types of safety standards for different types of vehicles is not the moral or legal wrong that that terms refers to where it is used elsewhere, even if you could argue the term could mean that in English.
There are real problems with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, both in terms of economics and freedom independent of any economic argument. It is not just a harmonization of existing law, and, even if it were, that would not be sufficient to justify it.
The Linux 2.4.7 Universal Serial Bus pegasus driver claims to support a bunch of Home Phone Networking Alliance devices. If the Linksys device is a version of these devices, you may be able to get support by just adding the appropriate vendor and product ID's to linux-2.4.7/drivers/usb/pegasus.h (and doing "cd/usr/src/linux && make modules && make modules_install && depmod && rmmod pegasus ; modprobe pegasus"). At the very least, reading pegasus.h will give you a list of USB HomePNA devices that should work with Linux.
Otherwise, you might want to dump the USB device and interface descriptors (by activating some debug option in the core Linux USB driver or by the lsusb program) and see if your device exports an interface compatible with the
USB Communications Class (wish I had a pointer to it in non-PDF form), which I believe includes an ethernet subclass. In that case, it still might be a lot of work and a lot of learning for someone not familiar with Linux device drivers and USB, but you would at least have some documentation (see http://www.usb.org for tons of free-as-in-beer USB documents).
The police abusing a bad law is not news specifically for nerds, but this is also about the bigger issue of the dangers of legislative overreaction to technology, in this case, the ever cheaper and smaller video cameras.
Agreed. In support of this, we provide a free courtesy LANRoamer account to anyone who runs an open access point that meets the other LANRoamer criteria (up most of the time, in our coverage maps, technical contact info provided, etc.).
I don't think this policy is on our web page yet,
but it will be soon and we publicly stated it in our presentation at the last sbay.org meeting, and possibly in our presentation at the last Bay Area Wireless User Group meeting.
Apropos to community networks, I'd like to make a shameless plug for a GPL-compatible open source
gateway and settlement system,
downloadable from ftp://ftp.lanroamer.net/pub/lanroamer. The backend software will also be released under GPL later this weekend. There is obviously a business behind it, but the software and the ideas are relevant to this article in their own right. The basic idea is that whoever puts up an access point gets free use of the everyone else's access points and a significant share of share of the revenues from paying customers (expected cost to paying customers: $20-$25/month). We are in the process of setting up a
sourceforge area for the software as well.
Finally, if you're curious about future development direction, you might want to check out the current wish list, although completely different additions to this list and, better yet, contributed code are welcome.
Out the outset, let me say that I agree that kernel advertising/credits messages hide useful information and make the system unnecessarily confusing to less experienced users. I am glad to see Linus taking aim at them, as it really takes someone very respected in the development world to attack something that has so much ego attached to it.
That said, I would like to still have a verbose mode that includes these messages so that someone who knows what they are doing can verify that a given facility is being initialized at boot.
The simplest way to achive this would be to change DEFAULT_MESSAGE_LOGLEVEL in linux/kernel/printk.c,
from 7 (KERN_DEBUG) to 6 (KERN_INFO), thereby filtering out KERN_INFO messages. Maintainers who feel that some of these messages really should be printed by default could submit patches to change them to the previously ill-defined KERN_NOTICE (5) level and try to convince Linus to apply them.
It is also trivial for individual Linux distributions and sysadmins to modify this policy by booting with the "debug" argument (sets console_loglevel to 10) or to modify this in a boot script by writing to/proc/sys/kernel/printk as documented in linux/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt. A "loglevel=n" kernel boot argument would also be a helpful feature for the future and would be trivial to add.
The ``physical source lines of code'' (physical SLOC) measure was used as the primary measure of SLOC in this paper. Less formally, a physical SLOC in this paper is a line with
something other than comments and whitespace (tabs and spaces). More specifically, physical SLOC is defined as follows: ``a physical source line of code is a line ending in a
newline or end-of-file marker, and which contains at least one non-whitespace non-comment character.'' Comment delimiters (characters other than newlines starting and ending a
comment) were considered comment characters. Data lines only including whitespace (e.g., lines with only tabs and spaces in multiline strings) were not included.
Since the copyright statements are comment, I infer that none of their lines have been counted.
If you want to check this statement later, you're supposed to be able to download David Wheeler's sloccount code here, but the.tar.gz file seem to be accidentally read-protected at the moment.
Come to think of it though, I would be even more interested in counts that included comments and documentation but somehow removed duplication, since comments and documentation also take an investment of time and add value (such as usability and maintainability) to the product.
Re:Sorry, I did not realize users could start at 2
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 1
Apology accepted, but next time, you might try a question rather than an accusation.
You're right. I definitely jumped to a conclusion and (generalizing your advice here) should have made a lot of room at the outset for the possibility that there might be some other explanation.
Sorry, I did not realize users could start at 2
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 1
I must apologize. I did not realize that it was possible for any user's post to start at 2. If your posts are simply starting at two, then the number of additional moderations remaining is not that unusual, and I was wrong.
According to SuiteSisterMary's
user information page at the time I am writing this reply, 37 out of 38 of his (or her) most recent postings are moderated up, including the one to which I am replying. I encourage readers to look at those replies. They are not the sort of postings that layout a substantial amount of new insight or that bring in much new factual information that normally get moderated up. Whether SuiteSisterMary is lying about having extra accounts or is doing something slightly different but close I leave readers and to draw their conclusions, and hope Slashdot staff will look at the IP addresses and times of SuiteSisterMary's postings and moderation events.
If you look a SuiteSisterMary's SlashDot
user information page,
you will see that almost all of this person's postings have been moderated up, even though they are typically trivial, not particularly insightful posting (and I mean this matter-of-factly, not as an intended insult). I had a discussion with SuiteSisterMary and noticed that each of his (her?) responses was moderated up to 2 as soon as it appeared, as was the case with all but one of SuiteSisterMary's other postings postings on
that article. I believe that SuiteSisterMary may be maintaining a stable of slashdot accounts to use as they get moderator points (or perhaps arranging with friends to achieve the same result through their accounts).
Although I do not think that it is possible to
always stop this kind of abuse if the perpetrator is
careful enough. On a case-by-case basis, one can point it out (as I am doing here, which is why I have attached this off-topic posting here).
It might be a good idea for Slashdot staff to check if SuiteSisterMary has been sloppy about this by
seeing if the IP addresses from which SuiteSisterMary's postings were made are the same the IP addresses from which they were moderated
(or a group of very close ones, say, from a DHCP or modem pool) and if all of the moderation consistently happened within a minute or two of posting.
It may also be possible to make some systemic fixes to at least reduce the problem, such as by preventing a moderator from moderating the same user's posting within one month (which would also discourage moderators from camping out on one particular thread for partisan purposes).
I would like to know why many people in the community are so hung up on the GPL. How is it better than the Apache, BSD, Mozilla,
Artistic or other licences?
The GPL makes certain types of free software businesses more viable by requiring that others who build on the GPL'ed work must make their work freely redistributable, but some other copying conditions also have this property to varying degrees, for example the Mozilla Public License. What makes the GPL special in comparison to other copying conditions that have this crucial type of restriction is that the GPL has the largest collection of legally cominglable software (which includes a lot of software that does not restrict proprietary variants, like "new BSD style", "MIT style" and public domain). This software includes critical components of a free system, such as the GNU compilers and the best implementations of a myriad of unix-style utilities. Why is the amount of mutually cominglable software important? Because the efficiencies of software sharing depend on what software there is to share, and often this sharing occurs in ways that were not efficient to anticipate as an prewritten programming interface when the software is originally created. Software recycling is a network effect. So, if you write code under GPL compatible copying conditions, it should find the most use, adaptation and contribution in the future.
By the way, some people also feel there is an ethetical issue in wanting or opposing restrictions against derivative works. I think both of those groups probably feel something that is part of a larger efficiency ethic that angers us when we see our time being wasted even when we are being paid by the hour, for example, and that probably motivates a lot of free software development by itself.
Of course, I imagine other people have other reasons as well. I certainly don't know everyone's mind on this.
You said "spoken like a child", and if that does not prove it at least evinces the wrongness of your intuition.
An example of the adage "with freedom comes responsibility" is that with, say, the freedom to drive a car, which could potentially endanger others, comes the responsonsibility to follow the local traffic conventions like driving on the correct side of the street in a given country, so that, in this case, you don't actually endanger others.
Having privacy to read freely available information does not endanger others. (What someone does with that information, whether they had privacy to read it or not, is their responsibility, but having privacy does not change that responsibility.)
Besides, if your argument had any merit, there would be no problem with the test of symmetry. If "dad" has the freedom to read the internet and the "responsibility" that you think comes with that freedom is having the reader's monitored the other family member, he should have no problem with my suggestion that he arrange for his web browsing activity to be logged and sent to his daughter.
Well, I'm 33. I'd have to say that your response is spoken like a sophmore who does not understand and consequentely misapplies common saying like
"with freedom comes responsibility." In this case, the peeping parent is not giving his child freedom (to look at freely available information privately) or responsibility.
If you're going to violate your kid's privacy, maybe you should make is symmetric and set up some software to automatically mail her the URL's that you visit.
Slashdot Mirror
You can buy "sectorized" or "patch" antennas for under US$100 that have specific coverage arcs, like 90 degrees or 120 degrees.
I know this is not the most practical question, but I have been wondering for a while whether it would is possible to do a Search for ExtraTerristrial Intelligence (or a sky survey for whatever reason) for ultrawide band signals. I've heard that it is very difficult to detect UWB if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, but perhaps someone who knows a lot about ultrawideband could comment on its general detectability.
What do you need in AppWatch that Freshmeat didn't provide?
I would like a license filter or license ranking option and an automated update detector such as jdwhatsnew, ideally while still allowing user submitted updates.
On freshmeat, the updates that you see are generally very current, but, to the best of my knowledge, you only see what people submit. For example, to pick on myself, I see that I have been remiss in submitting an update for the freshmeat entry for the July 17 release of version 1.6 of dvdtape. AppWatch's automated release monitoring provided more uniformity. As the amount of software scales up so that it's more work to double check for updates by visiting individual web sites, the value of this automation increases. Imagine if text search engines only updated from manual submissions.
By the way, I read Freshmeat daily in addition to AppWatch, but I would usually start with appwatch for its update speed and focus on the type of software that I am most interested in. Then, I would typically visit freshmeat to see what appwatch did not cover and check out the unfree or GPL incompatible software (which I am also interested in monitoring after I've seen what's new in the GPL compatible space). I imagine that people with other copyright preferences might also like a copyright policy filter or prioritizer.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking any of the older Panasonic DVD-RAM drives (LF-D102U, LF-D101N?) that did not write DVD-R, which I believe identified themselves under SCSI as a magneto-optical drives.
The statements that I have seen about needing the prorietary driver program only named the Pioneer DVR-A03 and a couple of drives that write "authoring" DVD-R's. So, it is possible that what you say is true about the new Panasonic drive. However, I don't know if it is physically possible to randomly write sectors of a DVD-R, and you certainly can't rewrite them. So, I would not bet that you could write DVD-R's with the drive using the standard SCSI magneto-optical interface, but you could be right.
If you want a ~$600 DVD recorder, you already have a couple of other choices.
At $629 on PriceWatch, the Pioneer DVR-A03 that a number of posters have already mentioned writes DVD-R at 2X, DVD-RW at 1X, as well as CD-R and CD-RW.
At $535 on PriceWatch, the Panasonic LF-D311 writes DVD-R at 1X and DVD-RAM (1X for 2.6GB, 2X for 4.7GB), as well as reading the usual CD formats, but apparently not writing any CD format whatsoever.
Currently, to the best of my knowledge, the only Linux software that can drive DVD writes is proprietary (sorry, there really is no good link for it). I am not sure whether complete information on how to drive these DVD writes is given in the SCSI-3 standards on www.t10.org or whether some additional information is needed. Any pointers to this information would be appreciated, as I might get ambitious one of these days and try to hack cdrecord or cdwrite to control these drives if nobody beats me to it.
The basic idealogical dispute is that previously it was illegal to link glibc with proprietary software linked by non-GNU compilers due to a special "modified GPL" in the libio section of the GNU C Library. The change that the steering committee (who are developers like Roland McGrath, not just "Stallman") made was primiarily to convert that code to LGPL. Ulrich was the one being an idealogue about it. In this case, the steering committee was the group that was actually trying to get the right thing done for the users.
The glibc-2.2.4 announcement advised everyone to switch to it. What the announcement did not mention is that if you try to configure glibc-2.2.4, you discover that it does not want to build under gcc-3. The steering committee is pushing for a fast release of glibc-2.2.5 which will not have this problem.
So far, the steering committee seems to be a very positive influence. In the past, people were giving up hope on glibc due to its bloat, arcaneness, and legal issues. The SC seems much more focused on what users want.
By the way, let me say that Ulrich Drepper has made many contributions to glibc and I hope he will continue to be involved as a contributor.
If you run ./configure in the top of the glibc-2.2.4 source tree on a gcc-3.0 system, it ill abort with the following output:
*** This version of GNU libc cannot be compiled by GCC 3.x.
*** GCC 3.x will generate a library that is binary incompatible to
*** older and future releases of GNU libc.
*** You should compile this GNU libc release by an older GCC version
*** or wait for the next GNU libc release.
*** If you really mean to use GCC 3.x, run configure again
*** using the extra parameter `--disable-sanity-checks'.
The security standard in question is 802.1x, not 802.11x, because it is theoretically not specific to wireless, although the distribution of per-session WEP keys is. You could, for example, use 802.1x to authenticate conference attendees to use ethernet ports in conference rooms.
According to Alex Belitis's Metricom-on-Linux web page, there was no hardware change. It's just that the Metricom pole top units were no longer programmed to forward peer-to-peer "star mode" packets for modems registered after December 23, 2000. If you have two modems talking directly to each other rather than through a pole top unit, then there shuld be no problem.
On the other hand, six months ago I tried and failed to get my Merlin Metricom card to talk my external USB metricom modem in star mode.
Much as we may hate the idea, copyright is a part of the way the world currently works.
All problems in the world are "part of the way the world currently works." That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix any of them.
The existing laws were written before they had any idea of what computers would one day be capable of. Updating them to include [to the same degree of fairness] digital forms only makes sense. Otherwise you are left with unequal protection, depending on the media.
First of all, DMCA does not simply extend copyright on software to the same degree that it previously existed for books. It has never before been illegal to make devices that could be used to circumvent copyrights on books, much less restricting devices that just allowed fair use. Remember, in the United States, at least, copyright is exists soley for the purpose of promoting science and the useful arts. Essentially, it is a question of economic policy. The government offers copyright and patent monopolies on the theory these monopololies will promote creation of these works more more than impede it. There is nothing immoral about different copyright restrictions being available for different types of works. It's just a question of optimization.
Secondly, your use of the term "unequal protection" is completely misleading. In this cotext, "unequal protection" is not either morally or economically harmful. Disecting your words further, "protection" is a misleading term to apply to copyright restrictions, since copyright is not an inherently moral issue. What is restrictable by copyright is not exactly what is considered plagurism, and copyright is also unlike property in that violating a copyright does not deprive the author of his or her copy--the only deprivation is possibly of the royalties created by a copyright law in the first place. In addition, "unequal protection" in a legal context refers to people being discriminated against by the law. The government taxing cars differently from boats or having different types of safety standards for different types of vehicles is not the moral or legal wrong that that terms refers to where it is used elsewhere, even if you could argue the term could mean that in English.
There are real problems with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, both in terms of economics and freedom independent of any economic argument. It is not just a harmonization of existing law, and, even if it were, that would not be sufficient to justify it.
The Linux 2.4.7 Universal Serial Bus pegasus driver claims to support a bunch of Home Phone Networking Alliance devices. If the Linksys device is a version of these devices, you may be able to get support by just adding the appropriate vendor and product ID's to linux-2.4.7/drivers/usb/pegasus.h (and doing "cd /usr/src/linux && make modules && make modules_install && depmod && rmmod pegasus ; modprobe pegasus"). At the very least, reading pegasus.h will give you a list of USB HomePNA devices that should work with Linux.
Otherwise, you might want to dump the USB device and interface descriptors (by activating some debug option in the core Linux USB driver or by the lsusb program) and see if your device exports an interface compatible with the USB Communications Class (wish I had a pointer to it in non-PDF form), which I believe includes an ethernet subclass. In that case, it still might be a lot of work and a lot of learning for someone not familiar with Linux device drivers and USB, but you would at least have some documentation (see http://www.usb.org for tons of free-as-in-beer USB documents).
The police abusing a bad law is not news specifically for nerds, but this is also about the bigger issue of the dangers of legislative overreaction to technology, in this case, the ever cheaper and smaller video cameras.
Agreed. In support of this, we provide a free courtesy LANRoamer account to anyone who runs an open access point that meets the other LANRoamer criteria (up most of the time, in our coverage maps, technical contact info provided, etc.).
I don't think this policy is on our web page yet, but it will be soon and we publicly stated it in our presentation at the last sbay.org meeting, and possibly in our presentation at the last Bay Area Wireless User Group meeting.
Tim Pozar's page The FCC's Part15 Rules and Regulation and 802.11b emissions in the ISM 2.4GHz Band discusses this and has links to the regulations and other useful references. Look for the section titled "Fixed, point-to-point paths and get even more power."
Apropos to community networks, I'd like to make a shameless plug for a GPL-compatible open source gateway and settlement system, downloadable from ftp://ftp.lanroamer.net/pub/lanroamer. The backend software will also be released under GPL later this weekend. There is obviously a business behind it, but the software and the ideas are relevant to this article in their own right. The basic idea is that whoever puts up an access point gets free use of the everyone else's access points and a significant share of share of the revenues from paying customers (expected cost to paying customers: $20-$25/month). We are in the process of setting up a sourceforge area for the software as well. Finally, if you're curious about future development direction, you might want to check out the current wish list, although completely different additions to this list and, better yet, contributed code are welcome.
Out the outset, let me say that I agree that kernel advertising/credits messages hide useful information and make the system unnecessarily confusing to less experienced users. I am glad to see Linus taking aim at them, as it really takes someone very respected in the development world to attack something that has so much ego attached to it.
That said, I would like to still have a verbose mode that includes these messages so that someone who knows what they are doing can verify that a given facility is being initialized at boot. The simplest way to achive this would be to change DEFAULT_MESSAGE_LOGLEVEL in linux/kernel/printk.c, from 7 (KERN_DEBUG) to 6 (KERN_INFO), thereby filtering out KERN_INFO messages. Maintainers who feel that some of these messages really should be printed by default could submit patches to change them to the previously ill-defined KERN_NOTICE (5) level and try to convince Linus to apply them.
It is also trivial for individual Linux distributions and sysadmins to modify this policy by booting with the "debug" argument (sets console_loglevel to 10) or to modify this in a boot script by writing to /proc/sys/kernel/printk as documented in linux/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt. A "loglevel=n" kernel boot argument would also be a helpful feature for the future and would be trivial to add.
From section 2.2 of the paper (my emphasis):
The ``physical source lines of code'' (physical SLOC) measure was used as the primary measure of SLOC in this paper. Less formally, a physical SLOC in this paper is a line with something other than comments and whitespace (tabs and spaces). More specifically, physical SLOC is defined as follows: ``a physical source line of code is a line ending in a newline or end-of-file marker, and which contains at least one non-whitespace non-comment character.'' Comment delimiters (characters other than newlines starting and ending a comment) were considered comment characters. Data lines only including whitespace (e.g., lines with only tabs and spaces in multiline strings) were not included.
Since the copyright statements are comment, I infer that none of their lines have been counted. If you want to check this statement later, you're supposed to be able to download David Wheeler's sloccount code here, but the .tar.gz file seem to be accidentally read-protected at the moment.
Come to think of it though, I would be even more interested in counts that included comments and documentation but somehow removed duplication, since comments and documentation also take an investment of time and add value (such as usability and maintainability) to the product.
Apology accepted, but next time, you might try a question rather than an accusation.
You're right. I definitely jumped to a conclusion and (generalizing your advice here) should have made a lot of room at the outset for the possibility that there might be some other explanation.
I must apologize. I did not realize that it was possible for any user's post to start at 2. If your posts are simply starting at two, then the number of additional moderations remaining is not that unusual, and I was wrong.
According to SuiteSisterMary's user information page at the time I am writing this reply, 37 out of 38 of his (or her) most recent postings are moderated up, including the one to which I am replying. I encourage readers to look at those replies. They are not the sort of postings that layout a substantial amount of new insight or that bring in much new factual information that normally get moderated up. Whether SuiteSisterMary is lying about having extra accounts or is doing something slightly different but close I leave readers and to draw their conclusions, and hope Slashdot staff will look at the IP addresses and times of SuiteSisterMary's postings and moderation events.
If you look a SuiteSisterMary's SlashDot user information page, you will see that almost all of this person's postings have been moderated up, even though they are typically trivial, not particularly insightful posting (and I mean this matter-of-factly, not as an intended insult). I had a discussion with SuiteSisterMary and noticed that each of his (her?) responses was moderated up to 2 as soon as it appeared, as was the case with all but one of SuiteSisterMary's other postings postings on that article. I believe that SuiteSisterMary may be maintaining a stable of slashdot accounts to use as they get moderator points (or perhaps arranging with friends to achieve the same result through their accounts).
Although I do not think that it is possible to always stop this kind of abuse if the perpetrator is careful enough. On a case-by-case basis, one can point it out (as I am doing here, which is why I have attached this off-topic posting here). It might be a good idea for Slashdot staff to check if SuiteSisterMary has been sloppy about this by seeing if the IP addresses from which SuiteSisterMary's postings were made are the same the IP addresses from which they were moderated (or a group of very close ones, say, from a DHCP or modem pool) and if all of the moderation consistently happened within a minute or two of posting.
It may also be possible to make some systemic fixes to at least reduce the problem, such as by preventing a moderator from moderating the same user's posting within one month (which would also discourage moderators from camping out on one particular thread for partisan purposes).
I would like to know why many people in the community are so hung up on the GPL. How is it better than the Apache, BSD, Mozilla, Artistic or other licences?
The GPL makes certain types of free software businesses more viable by requiring that others who build on the GPL'ed work must make their work freely redistributable, but some other copying conditions also have this property to varying degrees, for example the Mozilla Public License. What makes the GPL special in comparison to other copying conditions that have this crucial type of restriction is that the GPL has the largest collection of legally cominglable software (which includes a lot of software that does not restrict proprietary variants, like "new BSD style", "MIT style" and public domain). This software includes critical components of a free system, such as the GNU compilers and the best implementations of a myriad of unix-style utilities. Why is the amount of mutually cominglable software important? Because the efficiencies of software sharing depend on what software there is to share, and often this sharing occurs in ways that were not efficient to anticipate as an prewritten programming interface when the software is originally created. Software recycling is a network effect. So, if you write code under GPL compatible copying conditions, it should find the most use, adaptation and contribution in the future.
By the way, some people also feel there is an ethetical issue in wanting or opposing restrictions against derivative works. I think both of those groups probably feel something that is part of a larger efficiency ethic that angers us when we see our time being wasted even when we are being paid by the hour, for example, and that probably motivates a lot of free software development by itself.
Of course, I imagine other people have other reasons as well. I certainly don't know everyone's mind on this.
What does age prove?
You said "spoken like a child", and if that does not prove it at least evinces the wrongness of your intuition.
An example of the adage "with freedom comes responsibility" is that with, say, the freedom to drive a car, which could potentially endanger others, comes the responsonsibility to follow the local traffic conventions like driving on the correct side of the street in a given country, so that, in this case, you don't actually endanger others.
Having privacy to read freely available information does not endanger others. (What someone does with that information, whether they had privacy to read it or not, is their responsibility, but having privacy does not change that responsibility.)
Besides, if your argument had any merit, there would be no problem with the test of symmetry. If "dad" has the freedom to read the internet and the "responsibility" that you think comes with that freedom is having the reader's monitored the other family member, he should have no problem with my suggestion that he arrange for his web browsing activity to be logged and sent to his daughter.
Well, I'm 33. I'd have to say that your response is spoken like a sophmore who does not understand and consequentely misapplies common saying like "with freedom comes responsibility." In this case, the peeping parent is not giving his child freedom (to look at freely available information privately) or responsibility.
If you're going to violate your kid's privacy, maybe you should make is symmetric and set up some software to automatically mail her the URL's that you visit.