You are implicitly equating two different mathematical concepts which are often times referred to using the same word "infinite":
I agree there is a distinction there, but it's not clear to me that a lot of other people make it, or that the original poster was referring only to the second. It doesn't help that they mean the same thing in two different languages, too.
I would say that the notion of an infinite object, distinct from the idea of 'arbitrarily large', is probably due to Cantor.
Obviously there was a lot of hinting at it by others (Leibniz, Newton, Cauchy) but I would guess it started with him.
I would think that 0.99... would be approaching the value of one. Sorta think of it in the context of limits, where a function can sometimes approach but never reach a number. (as if you couldnt tell, my math reasoning is less than stellar)
You're right, in the sense that 0.9... with any finite number of nines after it would approach 1 as a limit, as the number of nines goes to infinity.
But with real numbers, in theoretical terms, you're allowed to have numbers with infinite decimal expansions. Not just decimal expansions that approach infinity, but which are infinite. is a number, not just a succession of slightly better approximations. These means, of course, that there are numbers out there which are effectively uncomputable.
There are really four classes of numbers, each of which contains the previous one.
Numbers with a finite decimal expansion in base 10. Examples are 0.125, 0.12957235, 456, and 5/2.
Rational numbers. Numbers which can be written as a/b for a and b integers. This includes the previous numbers, as well as numbers like 1/3, which have infinite decimal expansions in base 10 (but not in base 3!).
Algebraic numbers. Technically, these are numbers which appear as the root of a polynomial equation with rational coefficients, like x2 - 2=0. This means, basically, that these are the numbers you can get by starting with some rational numbers and dividing, multiplying, adding, subtracting, taking powers, and taking square roots. The algebraic numbers include all the previous numbers, plus irrational numbers like the square root of 2.
Real numbers. This is the so-called 'number line' as you probably learned it. They include all algebraic numbers, plus so-called 'transcendal' numbers, which basically fill in the gaps in the number line left by the algebraic numbers. Since they're not algebraic, you can't produce them from simpler numbers by a finite series of steps involving algebraic operations. Transcendental numbers have to be gotten at using infinity in some way. Examples of transcendental numbers are and e. Here's a simple-to-understand way of producing e via an infinite-running algorithm:
e:= 1; n:= 1; for i from 1 to infinity do
n:= n * i;
e:= e + 1/n end do;
Chop that off wherever you want and you'll get an approximation; after 5 steps it's already at 2.716666667.
Re:Impromptu "Ask SlashMath"
on
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· Score: 4, Informative
Brings up an interesting (to me, at least) point: which came first, the idea of zero, or of infinity?
Well, I'm no certified mathematical historian, but I don't know if you'll find one on Slashdot.
The standard claim is that zero was invented in India around the 7th century, as wikipedia says. There is some controversy over this, largely because other cultures had previously invented various forms of placeholders to indicate 'nothing' or 'no value', but I don't think there's any proof that these placeholders had been elevated to the class of an actual number.
The notion of infinity is rather older than this, going back to the Greeks. One early mention of the concept was by Aristotle in Physics:
"... it is always possible to think of a larger number: for the number of times a magnitude can be bisected is infinite. Hence the infinite is potential, never actual; the number of parts that can be taken always surpasses any assigned number." [Physics 207b8]
It does make some sense that the notion of infinity precedes zero, simply because it's easy to think of bigger and bigger numbers, wonder if they ever stop, and realize they cannot. This is an intuitive argument, though, and its plausibility may depend heavily on the historical development of these ideas.
One of the best non-mathematical books I've read on the modern theory of Infinity is
"The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity"
I read this book. (Actually, I bought it from Aczel himself, when I saw him speak.) The title certainly sounds meaty, and I figured the author was enough of a mathematician that he couldn't be outright lying when he connected Cantor's work with Jewish mysticism.
The book was, unfortunately, way too light and fluffy. And he seems to put wayyy too much emphasis on the mystic implications of what is really just simple notation. Sure, the cardinality of the natural numbers is denoted by aleph, but does that really have anything to do with the mystic aleph, except as a coincidence?
There was also a bit too much of the "mad Icarus" imagery in the book with regard to Cantor. Mathematicians are often not the most stable people around, but the insane ones aren't all cutting-edge theorists driven to madness by the profundity of their ideas, which are too great for a fragile human vessel; some of them are just plain nuts. With Cantor it's kind of hard to say, though he fits the bill more than most.
Of course nothing replaces actually reading the original (English-translated) works of say the great Georg Cantor or my favorite, Bertrand Russel.
Sorry if I'm being a bit unfair here, but the fact that you mispelled Russell's name makes be a bit suspicious about whether you're really read Principia. Adding to this suspicion is the fact that I don't know anyone personally who's actually read Cantor, simply because the set-theoretic language and notation has changed so much since his time. Apologies if my suspicion is unjustified.
I understand genetics pretty well. I know, for instance, that random breeding between populations does not alter allele frequencies in the resulting population, just phenotypes.
Here's an example: fruit flies. Winglessness in fruit flies is a recessive trait. Take a bunch of wingless female flies, mate them with a bunch of winged male flies. Yes, all the flies in the resulting generation will be winged. It certainly seems as though winglessness has been 'bred out' of the population.
But really what's happened is that each of the resulting new flies has one winged gene, and one wingless gene. So in the second generation, the trait of winglessness, which had apparently 'disappeared' before, suddenly makes a triumphant reappearance.
The ability of recessive genes to skip generations in this manner is the reason many diseases caused by recessive genes persist in our population; notables examples include sickle-cell anemia and certain asthsma-related diseases.
This is why the argument of the post to which I replied, which suggested that recessive traits associated with Caucasians would be bred out of the population simply because they were recessive, is utter garbage.
(I know I'm replying to a troll, but hey, I got time and karma to burn.)
I don't understand why there is so much resistance to voting machines that print receipts for each voter.
If by 'receipt' you mean just a slip indicating your voted, with a timestamp and some number which can be traced back to the machine, then fine.
However, by 'more accurate exit polls' you obviously want the person's choice to also be printed on the receipt.
Historically this has not been done because it's presumed to encourage vote-buying: as you say, the receipt serves as proof you voted a certain way, so someone can pay you upon confirmation of the receipt and be certain you were bought.
I understand what you're going through.. best of luck. I'm really hoping to find something and get away from the city, but in doing so I may have to give up my career for something else. I hope not, but in the end, I think it's worth it to get away from the city and live around trees again.
If you're already in Ontario, why don't you move to Kitchener-Waterloo, or failing that, Ottawa?
There are tons of tech companies in KW, and the rent's a hell of a lot cheaper than Toronto (I'm paying $810 and sharing a pretty nice two-bedroom apartment).
Moreover, as the US's behaviour regarding soft wood and Canadian wheat has shown, these "dispute resolution bodies" have, apparently, no teeth, anyway, so who gives a damn?
They do have some teeth, when the issues at hand are not ones that are politically sensitive for the current US administration. An example might be Canada's rules on favourable postage rates for Canadian content:
Currently, 85 percent of all magazines available at Canadian newsstands are American. In an effort to protect its own magazines, Canada gave favorable postage rates to certain Canadian periodicals and introduced a tax law that gave an incentive to Canadian advertisers to place ads with domestic, instead of foreign, magazines.
In 1997, the WTO ruled that Canada's measures were in violation of GATT. Canada has been forced to comply and has eliminated both the favorable postage rates for Canadian periodicals and the tax.
I'm a Canadian. Big Brother is here, watching. CSIS works hand-in-hand with the CIA.
As does the RCMP, apparently:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/
That said, we have only so much tolerance for Big Brother, and especially for the wishes of our southern brethren. CSIS may do the CIA's bidding, but when an issue is outed and has popular support, they will often back down.
Plus, CSIS has a reputation for being bloody incompetent. It may be unjustified, but it's true.
(Adapted from the opening of The Producers, with apologies to Mel Brooks.)
Middle-Earth was having trouble, what a sad sad story Needed a new leader to restore its former glory Where oh where was he Where could that lord be?
We looked around, and then we found The Maia for you and me
So, now its Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth Mordor is happy and gay, We're marching to a faster pace Look out here comes the Orcish race
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth Winter for Gondor and Rohan Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth Come up Ringwraiths, go into your dance.
Nazgul Lord: I did get a magic ring, and that is why I'm the Witch-King. Nazgul: Don't be stupid, be a braino, don't throw the ring in the volcano.
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth (Clash of iron on iron) Goose-step's the new step today (Oliphant bellows) Fell Beasts in the skies again, (Fell Beast cries shrilly) Mordor is on the rise again
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth Corsairs are sailing once more Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth Means... that... soon we'll be going... We've got to be going... You know we'll be going to... WAR!
Debian is about "free software", not "free software as long as we turn a blind eye".
But they're not modifying anything. MySQL is distributed under two licences; Debian can simply redistribute it only under only one of these two.
Let's suppose I contribute something to the Debian distribution, licensing it under the GPL. People like my code, use it all over the place, but for whatever reason, nobody else actually modifies it. So I retain complete copyright to the code as it exists in the Debian distribution.
Several years later, Microsoft comes along, and offers me a million dollars to grant them a non-free licence to use my code deep within the guts of Windows, where no one will ever see it. I do so, since as the sole copyright holder, I have this right. They incorporate it into Windows.
Should Debian now remove my package, even though it's established, and even though the only public licence I've ever released it under is the GPL? How is this different from the MySQL case?
Here's a slightly less direct, but more true-to-life example. Many of the original BSD tools were licensed under the BSD licence, which is less restrictive than the GPL. Now, presumably they're licensed under the GPL when incorporated into Debian, because the BSD licence is GPL-compatible, but this doesn't mean these same tools aren't also available under licences that are compatible with BSD, but not with the GPL (in closed-source variants of Unix, for example).
Does this mean these tools should be stripped from Debian's distribution? Why?
The moral is that you can never make someone release something under only the GPL, but that it's always possible to redistribute a GPL'ed product available under other licences solely under the GPL. And that should be good enough for most circumstances.
The moral of the story is clear: don't contribute to dual licensed projects, or any project where there is a clear single copyright owner. They have the ability to re-license at will, profiting from your work as you please and not having to offer in return what the original distribution license intended (e.g. GPL).
I know little about copyright law, but this seems wong to me. When you contribute code, you must have some expectation of how the code will be distributed.
The ownership of collaborative projects cannot be determined uniquely by the initial copyright owner. For example, I don't think Linus Torvalds has the right to release Linux under a non-GPL licence.
MySQL has always been available under more than one licence, so calling the GPL the 'original distribution license' is wrong. Contributors to MySQL must have known their work would be released commercially as well as under GPL, and contributed code with this belief.
So, the reason MySQL has the power to release code under a non-GPL licence without breaking faith with their contributors is because they have always reserved that right to themselves, have informed contributors of this fact all along, not because they are the 'original copyright holder'.
That said, you're quite right that if you believe strongly in the GPL as the one true licence, contributing to dual-licensed projects, especially ones in which the second licence is proprietary, might be setting yourself up for betrayal.
A better idea than not contributing at all is forking, redistributing only under the GPL, and contributing to the new forked project. Since the original project would still be GPL'ed, you could incorporate later revisions, while keeping your own changes, but all this work would probably get tedious after awhile unless you really believed in the goal (using the GPL exclusively).
Will Debian now remove MySQL or move it to non-free?
Well, whether or not MySQL happens to allow this exception themselves, I don't see any reason why Debian couldn't simply redistribute MySQL and remove the exception.
Presumably MySQL is offering a specific non-GPL licence to select 'friends', of which PHP is one. This does not change the fact that MySQL is also distributing its product under the GPL. Thus, Debian can simply choose to only use the GPL for redistribution.
Well, as might have been evident from my post:), I'm a Canadian.
Along with a monarch and a parliamentary system, we inherited mostly British spellings, which includes 'practise' as the verb and 'practice' as the noun.
Similarly, I can license my code under the GNU General Public Licence.
Yes, it's true, we have TWO Republican parties in Canada.
Oh, come on. I'll probably be voting NDP as well in the next federal election, as I did in the last two elections I voted in, but comparing the Liberals and even the Conservatives to the Republicans is completely ridiculous.
Perhaps you just don't understand how incredibly reactionary and right-wing the Republicans are.
First off, Republicans don't support socialized medicare on the scale present in Canada, they generally don't like gay marriage, they are generally against gun control, they are generally in favour of harsh penalties for drug violations. And they seem to like funding the military.
Though the Liberals haven't done much about gay marriage or drug law yet, they are talking about it, and on the rest of these issues they disagree with Republicans. If you want any evidence, look how often Ralph Klein is complaining about the Liberals doing stuff that threatens Alberta's oil industry; the thought of Republicans (at least the ones in office now) coming out against the oil industry is laughable.
The Conservatives don't really have much of a cohesive policy set yet, but after that flap with two-tier health care in 2000 they're sure as hell not going to go against the Canada Health Act, whatever Belinda Stronach says. I agree they're the most Republican of Canada's parties, though.
I agree that, far too often, the Liberals talk left, do little, and it's becoming more and more obvious they are disturbingly corrupt. Chretien (spell his name right, btw) did a bit as he was leaving, but it remains to be seen how much of that will really see the light of day. But they're not complete liars; most of them honestly are leftists.
I have high hopes for the NDP in the next election. Layton is a bit of a showman at times, but he really does seem to be building momentum.
Completely useless? I would tend to disagree. From what I remember of high school history, the Senate is meant primarily as a "check" on what the House of Commons passes.
Yeah, this is what they tell us in highscool, the whole "school of sober second thought" line I heard from grade eight all the way through high school.
On reflection, after seeing politics in action for a number of years, I think that whole line was just propaganda. Occasionally the Senate may come up with some useful ideas, but in general it seems to be just a gigantic patronage scheme.
Really, how the Senate not completely useless? I don't believe the Senate has successfully blocked a bill the House of Commons wanted passed since I've paid attention to Canadian politics, and when the Senate tried to keep Mulroney from passing the Free Trade Act (or maybe was it the GST?), he just appointed more Tory Senators until the vote got through.
And of course, if the Senate ever did stomp on a bill that the public really wanted passed, the wave of public opinion and the media would probably result in a reform of how the Senate works.
No, I think the Prime Minister would probably do just what Mulroney did and add more senators.
I would be very surprised if such a tactic wouldn't work, simply because, as you suggest, the public has little tolerance for antics from the Senate, viewing them correctly as a patronage institution. This is exactly why it's unlikely senators would be stupid enough to really exert their authority: it would mean the end of their comfortable lifestyle.
If the Senate is likely to rebel on anything, it's by killing some bill which the Prime Minister and the House of Commons supports but for which they think there is considerable public discontent. Public support for the Senate on that issue would then keep the Prime Minister from rendering it powerless.
For example, we may see a Senate rebellion if Martin attempts to decriminalize pot or legalize gay marriage, though I think it's quite unlikely, since there is significant public support for both of these initiatives.
By the way, I'm quite impressed with Radio-Canada's record at scooping its English equivalent. This story was available on src.ca a good few hours before it was on CBC. A good excuse to practise my French.
Yes, you can install Linux applications. Linux libraries and system tools, including the rpm installer, the shell utilities, and the configuration files, are provided in UnixWare 7.
Shell utilities? You mean, like all the GNU tools?
LKP does not provide a Linux kernel. With the exception of the Linux kernel, however, the entire Linux distribution is installed in a/linux directory.
Hey kids, it's GNU/Linux without the Linux!
They're directly claiming to provide all the GNU tools and all the tremendous number of other GPL'ed applications in a Linux install image bundled into a proprietary, commercial product.
It's just so hard to understand. Even if Linux was crawling with code yanked from SCO/Unix, even if the were GPL were somehow declared non-binding on a global scale, what on earth does SCO think gives them the ownership to GPL'ed code which is clearly not tainted?
If the GPL were conclusively shown to be non-binding tomorrow, we would all be suddenly sitting on a tremendous mass of copyrighted code to which we had no right (unless we happened to be the sole authors). This does not suddenly make it all public domain.
Course, you still have to bother with Perl variables. But it should still be possible to do it in 4 lines.
And if he thinks that's a hack, well, Perl is one huge freaking hack. To quote Larry Wall:
"The Amulet isn't exactly beautiful though--in fact, up close it still looks like a bunch of beads melted together. Well, all right, I admit it. It's downright ugly. But never mind that. It's the Magic that counts."
Yeah, but lynx doesn't work without a terminal [1], so you can't put it in as a cron job.
[1] At least, not without more effort spent on reading the documentation than I was willing to spend, when I already had a working example of LWP before me.
Slashdot Mirror
You are implicitly equating two different mathematical concepts which are often times referred to using the same word "infinite":
I agree there is a distinction there, but it's not clear to me that a lot of other people make it, or that the original poster was referring only to the second. It doesn't help that they mean the same thing in two different languages, too.
I would say that the notion of an infinite object, distinct from the idea of 'arbitrarily large', is probably due to Cantor.
Obviously there was a lot of hinting at it by others (Leibniz, Newton, Cauchy) but I would guess it started with him.
You're right, in the sense that 0.9... with any finite number of nines after it would approach 1 as a limit, as the number of nines goes to infinity.
But with real numbers, in theoretical terms, you're allowed to have numbers with infinite decimal expansions. Not just decimal expansions that approach infinity, but which are infinite. is a number, not just a succession of slightly better approximations. These means, of course, that there are numbers out there which are effectively uncomputable.
There are really four classes of numbers, each of which contains the previous one.
Numbers with a finite decimal expansion in base 10. Examples are 0.125, 0.12957235, 456, and 5/2.
Rational numbers. Numbers which can be written as a/b for a and b integers. This includes the previous numbers, as well as numbers like 1/3, which have infinite decimal expansions in base 10 (but not in base 3!).
Algebraic numbers.
Technically, these are numbers which appear as the root of a polynomial equation with rational coefficients, like x2 - 2=0. This means, basically, that these are the numbers you can get by starting with some rational numbers and dividing, multiplying, adding, subtracting, taking powers, and taking square roots. The algebraic numbers include all the previous numbers, plus irrational numbers like the square root of 2.
Real numbers. This is the so-called 'number line' as you probably learned it.
They include all algebraic numbers, plus so-called 'transcendal' numbers, which basically fill in the gaps in the number line left by the algebraic numbers. Since they're not algebraic, you can't produce them from simpler numbers by a finite series of steps involving algebraic operations. Transcendental numbers have to be gotten at using infinity in some way. Examples of transcendental numbers are and e. Here's a simple-to-understand way of producing e via an infinite-running algorithm:
e
n
for i from 1 to infinity do
n
e
end do;
Chop that off wherever you want and you'll get an approximation; after 5 steps it's already at 2.716666667.
Brings up an interesting (to me, at least) point: which came first, the idea of zero, or of infinity?
Well, I'm no certified mathematical historian, but I don't know if you'll find one on Slashdot.
The standard claim is that zero was invented in India around the 7th century, as wikipedia says. There is some controversy over this, largely because other cultures had previously invented various forms of placeholders to indicate 'nothing' or 'no value', but I don't think there's any proof that these placeholders had been elevated to the class of an actual number.
The notion of infinity is rather older than this, going back to the Greeks. One early mention of the concept was by Aristotle in Physics:
"... it is always possible to think of a larger number: for the number of times a magnitude can be bisected is infinite. Hence the infinite is potential, never actual; the number of parts that can be taken always surpasses any assigned number." [Physics 207b8]
It does make some sense that the notion of infinity precedes zero, simply because it's easy to think of bigger and bigger numbers, wonder if they ever stop, and realize they cannot. This is an intuitive argument, though, and its plausibility may depend heavily on the historical development of these ideas.
One of the best non-mathematical books I've read on the modern theory of Infinity is
"The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity"
I read this book. (Actually, I bought it from Aczel himself, when I saw him speak.) The title certainly sounds meaty, and I figured the author was enough of a mathematician that he couldn't be outright lying when he connected Cantor's work with Jewish mysticism.
The book was, unfortunately, way too light and fluffy. And he seems to put wayyy too much emphasis on the mystic implications of what is really just simple notation. Sure, the cardinality of the natural numbers is denoted by aleph, but does that really have anything to do with the mystic aleph, except as a coincidence?
There was also a bit too much of the "mad Icarus" imagery in the book with regard to Cantor. Mathematicians are often not the most stable people around, but the insane ones aren't all cutting-edge theorists driven to madness by the profundity of their ideas, which are too great for a fragile human vessel; some of them are just plain nuts. With Cantor it's kind of hard to say, though he fits the bill more than most.
Of course nothing replaces actually reading the original (English-translated) works of say the great Georg Cantor or my favorite, Bertrand Russel.
Sorry if I'm being a bit unfair here, but the fact that you mispelled Russell's name makes be a bit suspicious about whether you're really read Principia. Adding to this suspicion is the fact that I don't know anyone personally who's actually read Cantor, simply because the set-theoretic language and notation has changed so much since his time. Apologies if my suspicion is unjustified.
You obviously do not understand genetics, do you?
I understand genetics pretty well. I know, for instance, that random breeding between populations does not alter allele frequencies in the resulting population, just phenotypes.
Here's an example: fruit flies. Winglessness in fruit flies is a recessive trait. Take a bunch of wingless female flies, mate them with a bunch of winged male flies. Yes, all the flies in the resulting generation will be winged. It certainly seems as though winglessness has been 'bred out' of the population.
But really what's happened is that each of the resulting new flies has one winged gene, and one wingless gene. So in the second generation, the trait of winglessness, which had apparently 'disappeared' before, suddenly makes a triumphant reappearance.
The ability of recessive genes to skip generations in this manner is the reason many diseases caused by recessive genes persist in our population; notables examples include sickle-cell anemia and certain asthsma-related diseases.
This is why the argument of the post to which I replied, which suggested that recessive traits associated with Caucasians would be bred out of the population simply because they were recessive, is utter garbage.
(I know I'm replying to a troll, but hey, I got time and karma to burn.)
I don't understand why there is so much resistance to voting machines that print receipts for each voter.
If by 'receipt' you mean just a slip indicating your voted, with a timestamp and some number which can be traced back to the machine, then fine.
However, by 'more accurate exit polls' you obviously want the person's choice to also be printed on the receipt.
Historically this has not been done because it's presumed to encourage vote-buying: as you say, the receipt serves as proof you voted a certain way, so someone can pay you upon confirmation of the receipt and be certain you were bought.
The white gene is recessive and all offspring produced in such interracial unions will be colored.
You obviously have no idea what a recessive gene is, do you?
I understand what you're going through .. best of luck. I'm really hoping to find something and get away from the city, but in doing so I may have to give up my career for something else. I hope not, but in the end, I think it's worth it to get away from the city and live around trees again.
If you're already in Ontario, why don't you move to Kitchener-Waterloo, or failing that, Ottawa?
There are tons of tech companies in KW, and the rent's a hell of a lot cheaper than Toronto (I'm paying $810 and sharing a pretty nice two-bedroom apartment).
Moreover, as the US's behaviour regarding soft wood and Canadian wheat has shown, these "dispute resolution bodies" have, apparently, no teeth, anyway, so who gives a damn?
They do have some teeth, when the issues at hand are not ones that are politically sensitive for the current US administration. An example might be Canada's rules on favourable postage rates for Canadian content:
Currently, 85 percent of all magazines available at Canadian newsstands are American. In an effort to protect its own magazines, Canada gave favorable postage rates to certain Canadian periodicals and introduced a tax law that gave an incentive to Canadian advertisers to place ads with domestic, instead of foreign, magazines.
In 1997, the WTO ruled that Canada's measures were in violation of GATT. Canada has been forced to comply and has eliminated both the favorable postage rates for Canadian periodicals and the tax.
I'm a Canadian. Big Brother is here, watching. CSIS works hand-in-hand with the CIA.
As does the RCMP, apparently:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/
That said, we have only so much tolerance for Big Brother, and especially for the wishes of our southern brethren. CSIS may do the CIA's bidding, but when an issue is outed and has popular support, they will often back down.
Plus, CSIS has a reputation for being bloody incompetent. It may be unjustified, but it's true.
and all the ISPs in Canada, save one, are rejecting any attempts to open their records
Sigh, good old Videotron.
How would you compare the erosion of civil liberties and freedom of expression on the Internet with, say, the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany?
[ducks]
(Adapted from the opening of The Producers, with apologies to Mel Brooks.)
... that ... soon we'll be going ... ... ... WAR!
Middle-Earth was having trouble, what a sad sad story
Needed a new leader to restore its former glory
Where oh where was he
Where could that lord be?
We looked around, and then we found
The Maia for you and me
So, now its Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth
Mordor is happy and gay,
We're marching to a faster pace
Look out here comes the Orcish race
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth
Winter for Gondor and Rohan
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth
Come up Ringwraiths, go into your dance.
Nazgul Lord: I did get a magic ring, and that is why I'm the Witch-King.
Nazgul: Don't be stupid, be a braino, don't throw the ring in the volcano.
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth
(Clash of iron on iron)
Goose-step's the new step today
(Oliphant bellows)
Fell Beasts in the skies again,
(Fell Beast cries shrilly)
Mordor is on the rise again
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth
Corsairs are sailing once more
Springtime for Sauron, and Middle-Earth
Means
We've got to be going
You know we'll be going to
Debian is about "free software", not "free software as long as we turn a blind eye".
But they're not modifying anything. MySQL is distributed under two licences; Debian can simply redistribute it only under only one of these two.
Let's suppose I contribute something to the Debian distribution, licensing it under the GPL. People like my code, use it all over the place, but for whatever reason, nobody else actually modifies it. So I retain complete copyright to the code as it exists in the Debian distribution.
Several years later, Microsoft comes along, and offers me a million dollars to grant them a non-free licence to use my code deep within the guts of Windows, where no one will ever see it. I do so, since as the sole copyright holder, I have this right. They incorporate it into Windows.
Should Debian now remove my package, even though it's established, and even though the only public licence I've ever released it under is the GPL? How is this different from the MySQL case?
Here's a slightly less direct, but more true-to-life example. Many of the original BSD tools were licensed under the BSD licence, which is less restrictive than the GPL. Now, presumably they're licensed under the GPL when incorporated into Debian, because the BSD licence is GPL-compatible, but this doesn't mean these same tools aren't also available under licences that are compatible with BSD, but not with the GPL (in closed-source variants of Unix, for example).
Does this mean these tools should be stripped from Debian's distribution? Why?
The moral is that you can never make someone release something under only the GPL, but that it's always possible to redistribute a GPL'ed product available under other licences solely under the GPL. And that should be good enough for most circumstances.
The moral of the story is clear: don't contribute to dual licensed projects, or any project where there is a clear single copyright owner. They have the ability to re-license at will, profiting from your work as you please and not having to offer in return what the original distribution license intended (e.g. GPL).
I know little about copyright law, but this seems wong to me. When you contribute code, you must have some expectation of how the code will be distributed.
The ownership of collaborative projects cannot be determined uniquely by the initial copyright owner. For example, I don't think Linus Torvalds has the right to release Linux under a non-GPL licence.
MySQL has always been available under more than one licence, so calling the GPL the 'original distribution license' is wrong. Contributors to MySQL must have known their work would be released commercially as well as under GPL, and contributed code with this belief.
So, the reason MySQL has the power to release code under a non-GPL licence without breaking faith with their contributors is because they have always reserved that right to themselves, have informed contributors of this fact all along, not because they are the 'original copyright holder'.
That said, you're quite right that if you believe strongly in the GPL as the one true licence, contributing to dual-licensed projects, especially ones in which the second licence is proprietary, might be setting yourself up for betrayal.
A better idea than not contributing at all is forking, redistributing only under the GPL, and contributing to the new forked project. Since the original project would still be GPL'ed, you could incorporate later revisions, while keeping your own changes, but all this work would probably get tedious after awhile unless you really believed in the goal (using the GPL exclusively).
Will Debian now remove MySQL or move it to non-free?
Well, whether or not MySQL happens to allow this exception themselves, I don't see any reason why Debian couldn't simply redistribute MySQL and remove the exception.
Presumably MySQL is offering a specific non-GPL licence to select 'friends', of which PHP is one. This does not change the fact that MySQL is also distributing its product under the GPL. Thus, Debian can simply choose to only use the GPL for redistribution.
Canada has a larger coastline that Australia? I think not.
Erm, Canada does kind of have the second largest landmass of any country in the world (after Russia).
Mind you, most of this coastline is on the Arctic Ocean, so it's often frozen in the winter and is not often travelled. But it's there.
Hudson's Bay does see more shipping traffic than you might think given its latitude, though.
Nope, I'd suggest you practice your English :-)
:), I'm a Canadian.
Well, as might have been evident from my post
Along with a monarch and a parliamentary system, we inherited mostly British spellings, which includes 'practise' as the verb and 'practice' as the noun.
Similarly, I can license my code under the GNU General Public Licence.
Yes, it's true, we have TWO Republican parties in Canada.
Oh, come on. I'll probably be voting NDP as well in the next federal election, as I did in the last two elections I voted in, but comparing the Liberals and even the Conservatives to the Republicans is completely ridiculous.
Perhaps you just don't understand how incredibly reactionary and right-wing the Republicans are.
First off, Republicans don't support socialized medicare on the scale present in Canada, they generally don't like gay marriage, they are generally against gun control, they are generally in favour of harsh penalties for drug violations.
And they seem to like funding the military.
Though the Liberals haven't done much about gay marriage or drug law yet, they are talking about it, and on the rest of these issues they disagree with Republicans. If you want any evidence, look how often Ralph Klein is complaining about the Liberals doing stuff that threatens Alberta's oil industry; the thought of Republicans (at least the ones in office now) coming out against the oil industry is laughable.
The Conservatives don't really have much of a cohesive policy set yet, but after that flap with two-tier health care in 2000 they're sure as hell not going to go against the Canada Health Act, whatever Belinda Stronach says. I agree they're the most Republican of Canada's parties, though.
I agree that, far too often, the Liberals talk left, do little, and it's becoming more and more obvious they are disturbingly corrupt. Chretien (spell his name right, btw) did a bit as he was leaving, but it remains to be seen how much of that will really see the light of day. But they're not complete liars; most of them honestly are leftists.
I have high hopes for the NDP in the next election. Layton is a bit of a showman at times, but he really does seem to be building momentum.
Completely useless? I would tend to disagree. From what I remember of high school history, the Senate is meant primarily as a "check" on what the House of Commons passes.
Yeah, this is what they tell us in highscool, the whole "school of sober second thought" line I heard from grade eight all the way through high school.
On reflection, after seeing politics in action for a number of years, I think that whole line was just propaganda. Occasionally the Senate may come up with some useful ideas, but in general it seems to be just a gigantic patronage scheme.
Really, how the Senate not completely useless? I don't believe the Senate has successfully blocked a bill the House of Commons wanted passed since I've paid attention to Canadian politics, and when the Senate tried to keep Mulroney from passing the Free Trade Act (or maybe was it the GST?), he just appointed more Tory Senators until the vote got through.
And of course, if the Senate ever did stomp on a bill that the public really wanted passed, the wave of public opinion and the media would probably result in a reform of how the Senate works.
No, I think the Prime Minister would probably do just what Mulroney did and add more senators.
I would be very surprised if such a tactic wouldn't work, simply because, as you suggest, the public has little tolerance for antics from the Senate, viewing them correctly as a patronage institution. This is exactly why it's unlikely senators would be stupid enough to really exert their authority: it would mean the end of their comfortable lifestyle.
If the Senate is likely to rebel on anything, it's by killing some bill which the Prime Minister and the House of Commons supports but for which they think there is considerable public discontent. Public support for the Senate on that issue would then keep the Prime Minister from rendering it powerless.
For example, we may see a Senate rebellion if Martin attempts to decriminalize pot or legalize gay marriage, though I think it's quite unlikely, since there is significant public support for both of these initiatives.
Here's the The CBC article about this story, and here's the
Radio-Canada story (in French, of course).
By the way, I'm quite impressed with Radio-Canada's record at scooping its English equivalent. This story was available on src.ca a good few hours before it was on CBC. A good excuse to practise my French.
Yes, you can install Linux applications. Linux libraries and system tools, including the rpm installer, the shell utilities, and the configuration files, are provided in UnixWare 7.
Shell utilities? You mean, like all the GNU tools?
LKP does not provide a Linux kernel. With the exception of the Linux kernel, however, the entire Linux distribution is installed in a
Hey kids, it's GNU/Linux without the Linux!
They're directly claiming to provide all the GNU tools and all the tremendous number of other GPL'ed applications in a Linux install image bundled into a proprietary, commercial product.
It's just so hard to understand. Even if Linux was crawling with code yanked from SCO/Unix, even if the were GPL were somehow declared non-binding on a global scale, what on earth does SCO think gives them the ownership to GPL'ed code which is clearly not tainted?
If the GPL were conclusively shown to be non-binding tomorrow, we would all be suddenly sitting on a tremendous mass of copyrighted code to which we had no right (unless we happened to be the sole authors). This does not suddenly make it all public domain.
Anyone know if the FSF plans a suit?
Tell me, what would happen if some package install that updates libc went bad?
Well, if you were crazy you could compile Perl statically, like
So then you go with
#!/usr/bin/perl
system("command 1");
system("command 2");
$some_returned_value = `command 3`;
system("command 4");
Course, you still have to bother with Perl variables. But it should still be possible to do it in 4 lines.
And if he thinks that's a hack, well, Perl is one huge freaking hack. To quote Larry Wall:
"The Amulet isn't exactly beautiful though--in fact, up close it still looks like a bunch of beads melted together. Well, all right, I admit it. It's downright ugly. But never mind that. It's the Magic that counts."
#!/bin/sh
lynx -dump 'http://imdb.com/title/tt0151804/'
Yeah, but lynx doesn't work without a terminal [1], so you can't put it in as a cron job.
[1] At least, not without more effort spent on reading the documentation than I was willing to spend, when I already had a working example of LWP before me.