I know I'm not the only Slashdotter who senses the irony of a community of people who supposedly stand for freedom declaring an entire platform to be useless because they find it politically unacceptable.
I think you should s/politically/ethically/ in the above statement. There is a difference between politics and ethics, and conflating them in the way you are doing is dishonest and empty rhetoric.
"Politics" has come to have a distasteful connotation, meaning roughly, "the arbitrary abuse of power": When the boss's lazy, incompetent protege is promoted ahead of a hard-working and competent individual, everyone complains about "office politics".This isn't the only meaning of "politics, its a special case. Politics is about who has power and how they use it. The reasons for choosing a particular arrangement of power or a particalular use of it can me ethically based, or not.
Anti-war and anti-abortion activists both have political ends in mind, but their reasons for their beliefs and actions is based in ethics. You might disagree with the policies they advocate, or disagree with the reasoning that leads them to these policies, or disagree with their entire system of ethics, but to represent their beliefs and actions as solely political would be dishonest.
Free software does have political implications: it rearranges the legal rights of copyright holders and software users. But free software advocates have ethical reasons for wanting to rearrange these rights in the exact same sense that anti-war and anti-abortion activists have an ethical base for wanting to change government policy.
You might think that ethics has nothing to do with software, and that which software to use should be decided on solely on technical merit. Obviously some people disagree. As stupid as you might find their position it's wrong to misrepresent their beliefs and reasoning.
Right. "copy" describes the operation, "backup" describes the intent of an operation
But, you can't backup something without copying it, and you can't discuss or explain "backing up" without also talking about "copying". The MPAA would like to make "copy" a dirty word and equate it with criminal activity when we already have a perfectly good meaning for the word.
"Copy" is a perfectly neutral word, and copying is a perfectly neutral action. You can infringe on a copyright by redistributing a copy of a work without the copyright owners permission, but this possibility doesn't imply that all copying is copyright infringement.
IMO, they made a mistake with the name. DVD-X-Copy is, obviously, intended to make illegal copies. DVD-X-Backup, on the other hand, would obviously be intended to make legal, fair-use, backups.
If we took this line of reasoning seriously then every computer program that has data-copying functions needs to be changed. The C library function "strcpy" would need to be be switched to "strbkup", all our unix shell scripts would need to be scanned to replace "cp" with "bkup". No longer can our kernels use "copy-on-write" pages; new processes will do "backup-on-write".
"Copy" is a perfectly neutral term.We can't let the MPAA dictate our language.
RMS dislikes the use of "win" to refer to the MS Windows platform because he regards using MS Windows as a loss, not a win. So in the GNU Emacs source code, all variables and functions in the MS Windows port that had been named win32-* were changed to w32-*.
Additionally, In the Emacs manual, "MS-DOG" is used to reference MS-DOS.
Mmmm.. I LOVE the SMELL of FLAME war in the Morning.
A disturbance in the network.. it felt like a 100,000 flames hit a Disney lawyers mbox.. and then silence
By posting this comment, you've infringed on two pieces of MPAA Intellectual Property- prepare to submit your body's memory and i/o features to Organic Digital "Rights Management".
What I would really like is scientific journals to adopt a standard WYSIWYG open file format for text submissions.
Most accept MS Word, some exclusively. Some will accept LaTeX, but if you are are collaborating with people who are used to MS Word on MacOS and Windows (as most biologists are), this isn't a viable option.
If MS Word could read & write OpenOffice files reliably and the OpenOffice files format had all the features needed for authoring scientific manuscipts and grant proposals, this could be a huge step forward.
They aren't stating only an opinion; they are also pointing out two facts:
1. You can't use the GPL for software whose patent is licensed with field-of-use restrictions. This would mean that existing GPLed software could not be extended to implement W3C standards with these restrictions. Since the GPL is a very popular license, such restrictions could cause problems for many free software projects
2. Even if you use an MIT-style license, the software still will not be free because it may infringe the patent license to use that code in another project that falls outside the field-of-use restrictions.
Regardless of your views of the ethical stances the FSF takes on copyright, patents, and naming operating systems, the above 2 points will cause practical problems for developers of W3C standards implementations. Since the FSF developed the GPL, have defined "free software", and have the thought the most deeply about these issues, what they think is important and worth listening to, whether or not you agree with them on this or other issues.
And they're shameless about it, too! If you want to donate some code to the FSF, they demand that you sign over the copyright on the code to them! We had some legacy software here (I work for Lockheed in Fort Worth, and we have a collection of Ada libraries that we don't use any more) that we wanted to donate to the FSF and they said that they wouldn't accept it unless we signed over the copyright to them!
They have
good reasons for this policy. If you think this is only a theoretical concern, look up the early history of the development of GNU Emacs. RMS originally based GNU Emacs off code whose copyright had not been assigned to the FSF, but which he had been told he had permission to use by a contibuter to the original codebase. He was later forced to remove that code after being threatened by a company who had bought the copyright from another contributer (James Gosling) to that project.
This infomation can be found here. Do a search for "Gosling", to find the relevant part.
~Phillip
Re:How about the Intel Compiler?
on
GCC 3.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's proprietary software. A better question is "Why doesn't Intel dedicate engineers to optimizing gcc's code generation for ia32 and ia64?". This would be a much more useful contribution.
To gain an understanding of these issues, you can read the GPL itself (compared to a EULA its quite easy to grok). If you need clarification, you can read the GPL FAQ.
"REAL geeks think that Y2K happens in the year 2048."
Don't you mean 2038? Assuming of course, that you are referring to the problems that may occur in 2038 when the number of seconds since the beginning of the UNIX epoch will overflow 32 bit integers.
Its odd that they make a big thing out of finding the forgery though. What does that buy them? Why not say "Ouch!" fire him and move on?
It buys them them the sort of respect in the scientific community that being open about bugs and security flaws buys Debian or OpenBSD in the hacker community. Quietly sweeping this under the carpet would create among scientists the sort of sentiment MS and others recieve from hackers and admins when those companies hide or ignore security holes.
I have a feeling that sometimes scientists just have a 6th sense that lead them to correct hypothesises even when data does not back them up
Police and prosecutors may just have a 6th sense that can lead them to correct hypotheses about the identity of the guilty party even when evidence does not back them up, but few would want to give them the benefit of the doubt and base the criminal justice system upon their conjectures.
like when a program runs amuck and fills up the process list
I can imagine circumstances like this happening inadvertantly due to program or kernel bugs, but isn't this a rare occurance unless you've executed a deliberate fork bomb?
Almost every Emacs user I know, also occasionally runs VI, usually for a quickie edit, not wanting to wait for emacs to load
The way emacs is intended to be used is fundamentally different than the way vi is intended to be used. While vi users frequently run vi for quick edits, then quit back to the shell, if someone is repeatedly running running emacs, editing a single file, then quitting, they're using emacs incorrectly- I have my emacs sessions running for several days or weeks at a time, loading files into buffers as needed.
And at any given time, I usually also have two shells running, info and woman buffers for reading documentation, a dired buffer for editing directories, a compilation or interpreter interaction buffer, a grep buffer, etc- emacs isn't just an editor, its an (almost) complete environment and UI
If an intermediate was better than the original, the original should be gone by evolutionary theory.
That isn't true. The original species will continue to exist so long as its members produce enough offspring to replace the individuals of that species that die.
If the descendent species occupy the same ecological niche (eat the same food, use the same places for shelter and mating, etc) then it is possible that one or the other species will die out because the ecosystem can't support them both, but it isn't an inevitable outcome when new species emerge
To succeed, a species or individual doesn't need to be the "fittest", it just needs to be good enough.
(1) nobody seems to have noticed or mentioned here that DNA is not the only way of inheriting cellular information
This seems like a trivial statement, though underemphasized in the popular media. Any organelle or chemical that is passed from parent to progeny is "cellular information"
(2) we are still borrowing microbes to do the actual manufacturing, rather than doing it mechanically ourselves.
Microbes have had billions of years more than homo sapiens to "discover" and test new anti biotics, it would be remarkable if we had surpassed them in cleverness in the few centuries we've studied them. We have gotten better at somethings though; 16 years ago if you wanted to clone a gene, the typical way to do it was to insert it into the E. coli genome, wait for the bacteria to divide several times and harvest the dna. Now its often done using polymerase chain reaction (though this does still require using a DNA polymerase from a thermophile, so we can't quite declare independence from the rest of nature.)
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm not the only Slashdotter who senses the irony of a community of people who supposedly stand for freedom declaring an entire platform to be useless because they find it politically unacceptable.
I think you should s/politically/ethically/ in the above statement. There is a difference between politics and ethics, and conflating them in the way you are doing is dishonest and empty rhetoric.
"Politics" has come to have a distasteful connotation, meaning roughly, "the arbitrary abuse of power": When the boss's lazy, incompetent protege is promoted ahead of a hard-working and competent individual, everyone complains about "office politics".This isn't the only meaning of "politics, its a special case. Politics is about who has power and how they use it. The reasons for choosing a particular arrangement of power or a particalular use of it can me ethically based, or not.
Anti-war and anti-abortion activists both have political ends in mind, but their reasons for their beliefs and actions is based in ethics. You might disagree with the policies they advocate, or disagree with the reasoning that leads them to these policies, or disagree with their entire system of ethics, but to represent their beliefs and actions as solely political would be dishonest.
Free software does have political implications: it rearranges the legal rights of copyright holders and software users. But free software advocates have ethical reasons for wanting to rearrange these rights in the exact same sense that anti-war and anti-abortion activists have an ethical base for wanting to change government policy.
You might think that ethics has nothing to do with software, and that which software to use should be decided on solely on technical merit. Obviously some people disagree. As stupid as you might find their position it's wrong to misrepresent their beliefs and reasoning.
~Phillip
Right. "copy" describes the operation, "backup" describes the intent of an operation
But, you can't backup something without copying it, and you can't discuss or explain "backing up" without also talking about "copying". The MPAA would like to make "copy" a dirty word and equate it with criminal activity when we already have a perfectly good meaning for the word.
"Copy" is a perfectly neutral word, and copying is a perfectly neutral action. You can infringe on a copyright by redistributing a copy of a work without the copyright owners permission, but this possibility doesn't imply that all copying is copyright infringement.
~Phillip
IMO, they made a mistake with the name. DVD-X-Copy is, obviously, intended to make illegal copies. DVD-X-Backup, on the other hand, would obviously be intended to make legal, fair-use, backups.
If we took this line of reasoning seriously then every computer program that has data-copying functions needs to be changed. The C library function "strcpy" would need to be be switched to "strbkup", all our unix shell scripts would need to be scanned to replace "cp" with "bkup". No longer can our kernels use "copy-on-write" pages; new processes will do "backup-on-write".
"Copy" is a perfectly neutral term.We can't let the MPAA dictate our language.
~Phillip
Just a typo. :-)
By GNU in the Emacs manual or by Microsoft when they named MS-DOS? ;-)
~Phillip
RMS dislikes the use of "win" to refer to the MS Windows platform because he regards using MS Windows as a loss, not a win. So in the GNU Emacs source code, all variables and functions in the MS Windows port that had been named win32-* were changed to w32-*.
Additionally, In the Emacs manual, "MS-DOG" is used to reference MS-DOS.
~PhillipMmmm.. I LOVE the SMELL of FLAME war in the Morning.
A disturbance in the network.. it felt like a 100,000 flames hit a Disney lawyers mbox.. and then silence
By posting this comment, you've infringed on two pieces of MPAA Intellectual Property- prepare to submit your body's memory and i/o features to Organic Digital "Rights Management".
What I would really like is scientific journals to adopt a standard WYSIWYG open file format for text submissions.
Most accept MS Word, some exclusively. Some will accept LaTeX, but if you are are collaborating with people who are used to MS Word on MacOS and Windows (as most biologists are), this isn't a viable option.
If MS Word could read & write OpenOffice files reliably and the OpenOffice files format had all the features needed for authoring scientific manuscipts and grant proposals, this could be a huge step forward.
~Phillip
1. You can't use the GPL for software whose patent is licensed with field-of-use restrictions. This would mean that existing GPLed software could not be extended to implement W3C standards with these restrictions. Since the GPL is a very popular license, such restrictions could cause problems for many free software projects
2. Even if you use an MIT-style license, the software still will not be free because it may infringe the patent license to use that code in another project that falls outside the field-of-use restrictions.
Regardless of your views of the ethical stances the FSF takes on copyright, patents, and naming operating systems, the above 2 points will cause practical problems for developers of W3C standards implementations. Since the FSF developed the GPL, have defined "free software", and have the thought the most deeply about these issues, what they think is important and worth listening to, whether or not you agree with them on this or other issues.
~Philliip
And they're shameless about it, too! If you want to donate some code to the FSF, they demand that you sign over the copyright on the code to them! We had some legacy software here (I work for Lockheed in Fort Worth, and we have a collection of Ada libraries that we don't use any more) that we wanted to donate to the FSF and they said that they wouldn't accept it unless we signed over the copyright to them!
They have good reasons for this policy. If you think this is only a theoretical concern, look up the early history of the development of GNU Emacs. RMS originally based GNU Emacs off code whose copyright had not been assigned to the FSF, but which he had been told he had permission to use by a contibuter to the original codebase. He was later forced to remove that code after being threatened by a company who had bought the copyright from another contributer (James Gosling) to that project.
This infomation can be found here. Do a search for "Gosling", to find the relevant part.
~Phillip
It seems to be
why aren't more using it??
It's proprietary software. A better question is "Why doesn't Intel dedicate engineers to optimizing gcc's code generation for ia32 and ia64?". This would be a much more useful contribution.
~Phillip
~Phillip
You can charge a distribution fee, but not a royalty.
To gain an understanding of these issues, you can read the GPL itself (compared to a EULA its quite easy to grok). If you need clarification, you can read the GPL FAQ.
~Phillip
Ah, but real geeks use base 1009 (for their mathematical needs and
2k = 2 * 1009 + 20 = 2018 + 20 = 2038
~Phillip
"REAL geeks think that Y2K happens in the year 2048."
Don't you mean 2038? Assuming of course, that you are referring to the problems that may occur in 2038 when the number of seconds since the beginning of the UNIX epoch will overflow 32 bit integers.
~Phillip
Its odd that they make a big thing out of finding the forgery though. What does that buy them? Why not say "Ouch!" fire him and move on?
It buys them them the sort of respect in the scientific community that being open about bugs and security flaws buys Debian or OpenBSD in the hacker community. Quietly sweeping this under the carpet would create among scientists the sort of sentiment MS and others recieve from hackers and admins when those companies hide or ignore security holes.
I have a feeling that sometimes scientists just have a 6th sense that lead them to correct hypothesises even when data does not back them up
Police and prosecutors may just have a 6th sense that can lead them to correct hypotheses about the identity of the guilty party even when evidence does not back them up, but few would want to give them the benefit of the doubt and base the criminal justice system upon their conjectures.
~Phillip
I can imagine circumstances like this happening inadvertantly due to program or kernel bugs, but isn't this a rare occurance unless you've executed a deliberate fork bomb?
Almost every Emacs user I know, also occasionally runs VI, usually for a quickie edit, not wanting to wait for emacs to load
The way emacs is intended to be used is fundamentally different than the way vi is intended to be used. While vi users frequently run vi for quick edits, then quit back to the shell, if someone is repeatedly running running emacs, editing a single file, then quitting, they're using emacs incorrectly- I have my emacs sessions running for several days or weeks at a time, loading files into buffers as needed.
And at any given time, I usually also have two shells running, info and woman buffers for reading documentation, a dired buffer for editing directories, a compilation or interpreter interaction buffer, a grep buffer, etc- emacs isn't just an editor, its an (almost) complete environment and UI
~Phillip
The claim that skipping commercials is stealing was made by by Jamie Kellner, CEO of Turner broadcasting>
~Phillip
Unfortunately, nott all the bugs have been fixed. I guess that's what you get for not waiting for 1.0.
If an intermediate was better than the original, the original should be gone by evolutionary theory.
That isn't true. The original species will continue to exist so long as its members produce enough offspring to replace the individuals of that species that die.
If the descendent species occupy the same ecological niche (eat the same food, use the same places for shelter and mating, etc) then it is possible that one or the other species will die out because the ecosystem can't support them both, but it isn't an inevitable outcome when new species emerge
To succeed, a species or individual doesn't need to be the "fittest", it just needs to be good enough.
Kernel Traffic
KernelTrap
You may also want to take a look at the letter Richard Stallman (the hacker who created GNU, wrote GNU Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger, among other things), wrote to the New York Times protesting their misuse of the term "hacker".
You can find his letter at the bottom of this page in The Jargon File.
--Phillip
This seems like a trivial statement, though underemphasized in the popular media. Any organelle or chemical that is passed from parent to progeny is "cellular information"
(2) we are still borrowing microbes to do the actual manufacturing, rather than doing it mechanically ourselves.Microbes have had billions of years more than homo sapiens to "discover" and test new anti biotics, it would be remarkable if we had surpassed them in cleverness in the few centuries we've studied them. We have gotten better at somethings though; 16 years ago if you wanted to clone a gene, the typical way to do it was to insert it into the E. coli genome, wait for the bacteria to divide several times and harvest the dna. Now its often done using polymerase chain reaction (though this does still require using a DNA polymerase from a thermophile, so we can't quite declare independence from the rest of nature.)
--phillipI think you're thinking of something else artificial...
--Phillip