It doesn't matter what the FSF thinks. The Artistic License meets every one of the FSF's criteria for Free Software. To say that a license needs to be A, B and C to be Free, and then to turn around and call a license unfree that meets these very points is disingenuous.
Yes, the AL may be vague, but precision of language is not one of the criteria for Free Software. Of course, to some people, the AL is quite straight forward and precise in it's language.
You're asking two distinct questions, so I'll address them one at a time.
First, as to license, you want to retain control/ownership while making it open source. This is a balancing act. It helps to know exactly what community who want involved with your project. Some communities are ideologically oriented and won't work with any project that doesn't have their license. Other communities are content having less control than the author if it is software that they use (they want to make it better). You also need to think about whether you want the community to help you create the software, or just enhance and maintain it once it's done.
The popular commercial OSS license would be good to look at. I hate to state any specific license because that's sure to start a war, but both the MPL and QPL are good for what you want.
As for your second question, you should care less what the Slashdot community thinks about Windows:-) That's like asking Jazz fans with they think about Rock music. They're not going to be your community.
But Windows certainly needs to get an Open Source community started! I don't mind commercial or closed-source programs, but in the Windows world, every two bit piece of trash written in VB ends up as shareware! But it's not necessarily their fault since Microsoft has increasingly ignored and insulted the small developer and hobbyist. When you have to spend several hundred dollars for a somewhat complete development environment, you want to get your money back.
But all it takes is the realization that "freeware" doesn't have to be crappy before the community changes. And availability of the Windows SDK wouldn't hurt either.
Hmmm, I ask for a Supreme Court decision, and you give me one from the Court of Appeals. Oh well...
What you cite is largely someone else's interpretation of Reno vs ACLU. Specifically, the assertion that "Blocking Software: For Parents, Not the Government" and simply cannot be found in the ruling.
Have you read the actual ruling yourself? I find it telling that the above article references sections from the findings of fact as if they were legal opinion. The CDA attempted to eliminate some speech altogether. Filtering software does not do this. But see what the ruling actually says.
Here are some direct quotes from Reno vs ACLU:
From the Conclusions of Law -
Sloviter: "When Congress decided that material unsuitable for minors was available on the Internet, it could have chosen to assist and support the development of technology that would enable parents, schools, and libraries to screen such material from their end. It did not do so, and thus did not follow the example available in the print media where non-obscene but indecent and patently offensive books and magazines abound. "
Buckwalter: "That is to say that I specifically do not find that any and all statutory regulation of protected speech on the Internet could not survive constitutional scrutiny. Prior cases have established that government regulation to prevent access by minors to speech protected for adults, even in media considered the vanguard of our First Amendment protections, like print, may withstand a constitutional challenge."
I added the emphasis. Reading through the ruling, one finds that there was great concern on the vagueness of the words "indecent" and "indecency". If there is to be a court problem with filtering software in libraries, it will be because they filter too broadly, not because a librarian uses them. But the proposed Utah law does not mandate a specific piece of software. Therefore, the law could be held constitutional, while certain specific applications of it would not be.
Oh, but I do understand the issues. I am perfectly capable of reading and understanding the First Amendment all on my own without any handholding. Have YOU read it? Here it is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Please tell me where it says that the government must provide access to speech. This sounds vaguely like Berkeleyism, where specific areas on the UCB campus are devoted to free speech, as if one were not allowed to express the opinions elsewhere. My freedom of speech does not depend upon the existance of libraries, the presence of computer terminals within them, or the lack of filtering. Believe it or not, I would still have 100% freedom of speech if my local library had no computers at all! It is various dangerous to predicate the existance of free speech upon government action or inaction.
Can you cite the case where the US Supreme Court said that filtering software was illegal? I can't find it.
Is there anything in the Kerberos license that demands they not call it "Kerberos"?
Why can GNU call their version of a standard "make", even though it has numerous incompatible extensions, but Microsoft is not allowed to call their version of Kerberos by the name of "Kerberos", even though it has far fewer extensions and incompatibilities than does GNU Make?
If that's the case, that patents should only be applied to trade secrets, then why patent at all? Why not skip the whole patenting process and to straight to licensing the trade secrets?
Rather, the purpose of patents to to protect original innovations that can be easily seen or deduced by experts in the field. If you take a look at mechanical patents that are not processes, this is readily apparent. The phonograph was an innovative idea, but without a patent, anyone skilled in tinkering could have reproduced one by examining a copy.
The problem with software patents is not so much that they are patented (though many are downright trivial), but that the patent terms are so long for such ephemeral products. LZW was innovative when it was introduced. However, it hardly deserved such an extended patent period.
"How can we figure out a way to prevent Microsoft from doing this?"
What exactly do you want to stop? If you want to stop Microsoft from extending standards, then your only recourse to to make those standards proprietary. Even if Kerberos were under the GPL, Microsoft could still add an extension to it and release the modifications back. But there would STILL be an extension to Kerberos! It would then be up to the Kerberos team to incorporate the Microsoft extensions or not. Only by disallowing modifications can this be stopped.
But the Kerberos license is unrestricted, and not copyleft. Their goal was to get Kerberos used as widely as possible. W2K with Kerberos extensions is much more compatible than W2K with no Kerberos at all.
"The fact is, and has been upheld numerous times in court, and by the supreme court, that current filter software CANNOT be implemented in public libraries."
Then what's the problem? Utah will pass the law, someone will challenge it, and the very first court it reaches will throw it out.
"True, but THIS IS NOT ABOUT PROVIDING SPEACH, its about stifling free speech."
How is my speech stifled when a library uses filtering? Let's say I have a web site that goes into great detail on verboten material. Do I now have the right to compel libraries to distribute that speech? Of course not. If the government clamped down on the web site itself, that would be censorship, but that is not the case. No rights of mine are violated if the government decides not to disseminate my information.
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles all existed thirty years ago, and they were just as big then as they are now. But that's begging the point. My home town had a population of 10,000. When I was growing up, it hadn't had a murder since the Dalton brothers rode through town a century earlier. Today, the town has a population of 15,000. It's still small enough that people know their neighbors. Yet it has had about five murders in ten years. Also, if you take a look at Columbine, everyone knew their neighbors. There's something else beyond 'connectedness' that's the problem.
And I don't think there's any one single cause behind the recent random violence in society. It stems from several causes. Your supposition may work in the big city, but it is by no means the only cause, and hardly explains Columbine or the rise of gangs in Small Town, USA.
I'll have to respond by asking what universe you're from!
First of all, anything the government does is by definition, legal;-) Second, the first amendment does not mean that freedom of expression has to be carried by government facilities. Thinking this way is just plain ridiculous. I have the freedom to orate on political issues but I don't have the right to compel (hah!) the government to broadcast it for me.
A reading of the amendments to the US constitution reveals that they are all limits to government actions. Not one of them gives any powers to the government, nor compels private individuals to any action. Just as the second amendment does not mean that the goverment has to supply you with firearms, so the first amendment does not mean that the government has to provide you with speech or press.
The problem is not the bombs or the guns or the knives or the sticks. The problem is that the nation is hemorrhaging to death and you want to ban bleeding.
When someone can tell my why I was safer as a child thirty years ago when assault weapons were legal, than children are today when they are not, then I'll listen to their gun control arguments.
"We forget-- we are the governement, or should be. They're saying you must use filtering software... the problem is... who decides what is allowable and what's not. Who controls the information?"
You could, of course, have the general populace vote on all library issues. But if the referendum process is expanded to included such trivialities as what software a library should use, the ballots would end up being hundreds of pages long, and that's not including any text of the laws. That's why we elect representatives in republics, so that the average citizen doesn't have to concern himself with the day-to-day workings of government.
However, I do feel that county libraries should be run at the county level. Keep the taxes local and spend them locally.
But censorware in libraries is NOT controlling information. You already have access to the internet elsewhere. Utah is not banning web sites, just limiting access to them from public locations.
I do not believe that filtering is the best solution by any means, but at the present time it may be the only practical one. Lincoln said that you can't please all of the people all of the time, yet that is precisely what we want our governments to do and it's impossible. Thus, we are either stuck with lowest-common-denominator libraries, those which offend the fewest people, or taking libraries private, which is not presently practical.
"A handgun... has and only one use: killing humans."
If you want to use those terms, fine. But it would be much more accurate to say that their purpose is to meet deadly force with deadly force. You don't use guns to defend yourself against knives. You use them to defend yourself against other guns. The proper use of handguns is only for practice, hunting and dire emergencies.
"But what about people who acquire guns legally and then go crazy and go on a killing spree?"
If you'll recall, those assholes at Columbine also weilded pipe bombs. The reason there was no outcry to ban pipe bombs is because they were already illegal. If the guns they used were illegal, they still would have had the bombs!
These senseless killings, particularly against children, stir at our emotions so much that many people turn off their brains and let their feelings rule. Banning guns is treating the symptom but letting disease continue to fester. Guns were just as widely available in the first half of this century as they are now. Yet no one ever heard of schoolyard shootings until a couple of decades ago. This disease has become an epidemic of death because people are too focused on the symptoms.
"DOES A GUN IN THE HOME MAKE YOU SAFER?"
What a stupid article. What stupid statistics. Don't you realize that people who own an automobile are 22 times more likely to die in an automobile accident than those who don't? Don't you realize that those who own a swimming pool have a 220% greater chance of their children accidentally drowning than those that don't?
Owning a handgun and keeping it locked up in a safe in the basement won't protect anyone any better from crime. But not owning a gun while putting a sign in your window saying you do is very effective.
"You are blinded by NRA propaganda into thinking a gun makes you safe in your home when the truth is quite the opposite."
And you are deluded by the liberal press into believing that banning guns solves crime. Murder has been outlawed for how many millenia now? Five or six? If banning murder doesn't stop murder, you're smoking dope if you think banning guns will eliminate guns.
I don't see any problem with this at all. Now before you proceed to flame me unmercifully for the above statement, let me explain myself.
First of all, I believe that he who owns the property gets to make the rules for that property. Since the government owns the library, the government gets to set the rules for its use. It may be slightly problematic that this is a state law and the library is under county jurisdiction, but the principle holds. If you don't like the fact that the government can force libraries to block general access to pornography, perhaps it's time you thought about why libraries need to be under the control of governments to begin with.
Second, if libraries have the legitimate authority to deny children access to pornographic magazines printed on paper, then they also have the authority to deny them access to pornography online. Why aren't the censorware foes lobbying to get Penthouse and Hustler put out on the regular magazine racks?
Third, the internet is a form of public broadcast. Like it or not, that's what it is. As long as porn merchants continue to publically broadcast their wares, then they'll have to deal with the repercussions of public broadcasting. There's a reason that PBS is not allowed to broadcast pornography, but is allowed to broadcast "I, Claudius". Since the internet is publically broadcast, public access to it falls under community standards.
Forth, one can access hardcore pornography online through sheer accident. Some people who choose NOT to view pornography can be subjected to it anyway. A misspelling of an URL can result in a large explicitly graphic display of copraphilia, as once happened to me with great disgust. If I don't ever want to see the inside of a Hustler magazine, I don't have to. I could go an entire lifetime without opening one up. But online porn is much different.
Fifth, and finally, this law does not mandate specific filtering software, but leaves the choice up to the library. If one particular piece of software is flawed and limits legitimate access, another can be used instead.
Let's see, assume 400 employees. It's a software company, so assume the employees get paid an average of $90,000 a year. That's approx $30 an hour. If each employee loses an hour of time dealing with this hassle (remember, it's a software company, so I'm not expecting computer literacy:-)) then it will have cost the company $12,000.
Oh yeah, murder can only occur in the presence of firearms.
A few years ago a stupid fuck took his automobile through the chain link fence of an elementary school and ran over and killed several children. What's the difference between that and a schoolyard shooting?
Face it, criminals do not heed the law (which is why they're criminals). They will always have guns, even if they have to import them from China via COSCO. When one of them breaks into my house armed with an illegal weapon, what do you want me to do? Call the cops and tell the thug to wait ten minutes until they arrive? Fuck that!
If you want to place yourself at the mercy of criminals, so be it. Sure, go ahead and praise Sharon Stone for turning in her guns while she still has armed guards on the payroll. Idolize the hypocrites.
Who gives a rip that Mickey has his fingers in Britney's pie? What business is it of yours? What's the point of your rant? Are you saying Britney Spears does not have the right of freedom of association?
So what if supporting Britney directly or indirectly supports Disney? BFD! Maybe the next artist isn't a pawn of evil mediacorp, but uses you ticket money to buy a Britney Spears CD. Are you going to start accounting for every cent that leaves your hands?
Of course you must be right, you posted it on Slashdot, the home of the cyberconspiracists.
The Secret Service did nothing wrong, it was all Bell South's doing. After all, SJG and Illuminati BBS was infinging on their turf!
You can be as paranoid as you want to be about big business (aka anyone who makes more money than you), but nothing will get fixed until the real culprits are put on a tight leash.
The real criminal in this case was the US Government. The solution isn't to break the baby bells up further, or to deny hollywood filmmakers the right of association, or to prevent anyone from making more money than you. Instead, it is to ensure that laws are applied equally to everyone, including the government.
Let's accept, for the sake of argument, the spurious claim that Bell South approached the US Secretary of the Treasury with an offer to hire the Secret Service, for the express purpose of eliminating a BBS that wasn't obsequious enough for them. Now let's assume that the guv'ment had to follow the same laws as everyone else. In this case, Bell South might as well as hire the mafia as the Secret Service, since the raid would have been a criminal act of extortion and theft.
If you make the laws apply to everyone equally, then lobbying by the filthy evil anti-linux megacorps will stop, since there would be no way to get exclusive legal priviledges.
The application template that the appwizard creates is just that, a template. What's the big deal? Most developers have their own templates anyway, whether or not they're using an IDE. If you don't like the templates that KDevelop gives you, replace them with your own (under/opt/kde/share/apps/kdevelop/templates) or just don't use them.
And what's your beef with dialog editors? Do you think that this came straight from the VC++ world? Hardly! Unlike VC++, the output of KDevelop dialogs is real code, not a bunch of numbers. Again, it's up to you whether or not you want to use a dialog editor, or if you prefer to use the straightforward and easy layout widgets of Qt directly.
But your quote that "KDevelop makes it possible to write a KDE GUI program without any clear understanding of how the toolkit works" makes me think that you haven't really used KDevelop on a real project. The dialog editor may layout the visual aspects of a dialog, but all it really does is generate widget declarations, leaving the actual code to the developer.
To use KDevelop, you have to know how to program! How can I make it any clearer than that? I have a coworker who spent a few years writing VB programs. He thought he was a programmer because he could create programs. To compare a KDevelop programmer to this type of person, who doesn't even know what a pointer is, is insulting.
Tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend to encourage much of the intelligence to move into the development environment, making the actual code difficult to read and maintain any other way. And, conversely, tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend not to be able to make a lot of sense of interesting abstractions implemented "by hand".
Take a closer look at KDevelop. Don't let it's superficial appearance fool you into thinking it's a VC++ clone. It is not. (tree on left, view on right and messages below actually makes sense).
Beneath it all, KDevelop uses exactly the same tools you are: g++, make, autoconf, etc. No, its makefiles are not the most readable in the world, but that's an artifact of the autoconf schema, not of KDevelop. And unlike VC++, it won't try to write your classes for you. Other than the brief application "template", which you can easily replace, it does no coding for you. If you have it create a new class for you, it creates an empty one. KDevelop is essentially an editor, class browser, documentation browser, dialog editor and debugger, all rolled up into one with a ton of documentation thrown in to boot. It's not trying to change how you program, like VC++ does, but instead is trying to give you all the tools you need in one package.
No, the editor doesn't have the power of emacs. So what? For some people, this is actually a plus. And the debugger isn't as rich as ddd, and the dialog editor isn't as full blown as QtArchitect, etc. That's not the point. The point is that KDevelop has a whole bunch of good tools integrated into one IDE.
Qt is extremely portable between Windows and X (and rumours abound of a Mac version in progress). In fact, 99% of the code is identical between Windows and X. For closed-source work, you will need to buy the professional edition license from Troll, which shouldn't be too much of a problem if you can get your work to spring for it. Also, there is no free Windows version yet (Win users won't even register shareware, so why would they buy something for proprietary use if there's a free version around?).
Some things you won't get is the *environment* stuff, since Qt is not meant to be an everything-in-one-packlage library like MFC. You will have to use the platform versions of thread libraries, configuration management, etc. But overall, an intelligent design will relegate all this stuff to just a single source file and a few #ifdef's.
A good place for more info is the qt-interest mailing list, which you can sign up for at www.troll.no. The subscribers seem to be evenly split betwen X and Win users. It's definitely not a KDE dominated list.
Actually, thinking this over during the past 24 hours, I suspect that little would change if the GPL were invalidated.
Think about it. You have already been granted many permissions in the GPL. No ruling is going to invalidate an author's right to give permissions to the user. Even if the GPL is invalidated as a license, you still have proof that the author gave you certain permissions. Even if the author took you to court, your merely waving his source code with the GPL notice attached in front of the judge would be extremely damaging to any of his claims.
Although copyright gives you no permissions to distribute, the author has already done so. However, the clauses in the GPL that restrict certain forms of usage (yes, they are there) would no longer be valid. As long as you do not copy, distribute or modify the author's code, copyright law allows you to do whatever you want with your *own* code, including dynamically linking it with GPLd code. Copyright law does not consider this to be derivation, but merely referencing. Only the GPL's restrictions on usage (and the lack of UCITA) prevents this.
Unless readline.h is chock full of macros, I still wouldn't be distributing any readline code if I include the headers. Notice how you said "and use none of readline's original source files". All I am doing is using readline, not distributing it.
A proper header file (is there such a beast?) will only be an interface to the code. So even if I write ``#include "readline.h"'', I am not including any readline code in my resulting binary (excepting any convoluted macros), nor is the header file itself in my code. I've only declared a reference to it. In fact, I never have to see any of readline code. I don't even have to look at the header file, I can use the man page instead.
According to RMS, such linking would not be permitted with non-GPL code (yes, readline is a GPL library). Yet the GPL specifically states in section zero that it only covers copying, modification and distribution. I am still doing none of these.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter what the FSF thinks. The Artistic License meets every one of the FSF's criteria for Free Software. To say that a license needs to be A, B and C to be Free, and then to turn around and call a license unfree that meets these very points is disingenuous.
Yes, the AL may be vague, but precision of language is not one of the criteria for Free Software. Of course, to some people, the AL is quite straight forward and precise in it's language.
You're asking two distinct questions, so I'll address them one at a time.
:-) That's like asking Jazz fans with they think about Rock music. They're not going to be your community.
First, as to license, you want to retain control/ownership while making it open source. This is a balancing act. It helps to know exactly what community who want involved with your project. Some communities are ideologically oriented and won't work with any project that doesn't have their license. Other communities are content having less control than the author if it is software that they use (they want to make it better). You also need to think about whether you want the community to help you create the software, or just enhance and maintain it once it's done.
The popular commercial OSS license would be good to look at. I hate to state any specific license because that's sure to start a war, but both the MPL and QPL are good for what you want.
As for your second question, you should care less what the Slashdot community thinks about Windows
But Windows certainly needs to get an Open Source community started! I don't mind commercial or closed-source programs, but in the Windows world, every two bit piece of trash written in VB ends up as shareware! But it's not necessarily their fault since Microsoft has increasingly ignored and insulted the small developer and hobbyist. When you have to spend several hundred dollars for a somewhat complete development environment, you want to get your money back.
But all it takes is the realization that "freeware" doesn't have to be crappy before the community changes. And availability of the Windows SDK wouldn't hurt either.
Hmmm, I ask for a Supreme Court decision, and you give me one from the Court of Appeals. Oh well...
What you cite is largely someone else's interpretation of Reno vs ACLU. Specifically, the assertion that "Blocking Software: For Parents, Not the Government" and simply cannot be found in the ruling.
Have you read the actual ruling yourself? I find it telling that the above article references sections from the findings of fact as if they were legal opinion. The CDA attempted to eliminate some speech altogether. Filtering software does not do this. But see what the ruling actually says.
Here are some direct quotes from Reno vs ACLU:
From the Conclusions of Law -
Sloviter: "When Congress decided that material unsuitable for minors was available on the Internet, it could have chosen to assist and support the development of technology that would enable parents, schools, and libraries to screen such material from their end. It did not do so, and thus did not follow the example available in the print media where non-obscene but indecent and patently offensive books and magazines abound. "
Buckwalter: "That is to say that I specifically do not find that any and all statutory regulation of protected speech on the Internet could not survive constitutional scrutiny. Prior cases have established that government regulation to prevent access by minors to speech protected for adults, even in media considered the vanguard of our First Amendment protections, like print, may withstand a constitutional challenge. "
I added the emphasis. Reading through the ruling, one finds that there was great concern on the vagueness of the words "indecent" and "indecency". If there is to be a court problem with filtering software in libraries, it will be because they filter too broadly, not because a librarian uses them. But the proposed Utah law does not mandate a specific piece of software. Therefore, the law could be held constitutional, while certain specific applications of it would not be.
Oh, but I do understand the issues. I am perfectly capable of reading and understanding the First Amendment all on my own without any handholding. Have YOU read it? Here it is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Please tell me where it says that the government must provide access to speech. This sounds vaguely like Berkeleyism, where specific areas on the UCB campus are devoted to free speech, as if one were not allowed to express the opinions elsewhere. My freedom of speech does not depend upon the existance of libraries, the presence of computer terminals within them, or the lack of filtering. Believe it or not, I would still have 100% freedom of speech if my local library had no computers at all! It is various dangerous to predicate the existance of free speech upon government action or inaction.
Can you cite the case where the US Supreme Court said that filtering software was illegal? I can't find it.
Is there anything in the Kerberos license that demands they not call it "Kerberos"?
Why can GNU call their version of a standard "make", even though it has numerous incompatible extensions, but Microsoft is not allowed to call their version of Kerberos by the name of "Kerberos", even though it has far fewer extensions and incompatibilities than does GNU Make?
If that's the case, that patents should only be applied to trade secrets, then why patent at all? Why not skip the whole patenting process and to straight to licensing the trade secrets?
Rather, the purpose of patents to to protect original innovations that can be easily seen or deduced by experts in the field. If you take a look at mechanical patents that are not processes, this is readily apparent. The phonograph was an innovative idea, but without a patent, anyone skilled in tinkering could have reproduced one by examining a copy.
The problem with software patents is not so much that they are patented (though many are downright trivial), but that the patent terms are so long for such ephemeral products. LZW was innovative when it was introduced. However, it hardly deserved such an extended patent period.
"How can we figure out a way to prevent Microsoft from doing this?"
What exactly do you want to stop? If you want to stop Microsoft from extending standards, then your only recourse to to make those standards proprietary. Even if Kerberos were under the GPL, Microsoft could still add an extension to it and release the modifications back. But there would STILL be an extension to Kerberos! It would then be up to the Kerberos team to incorporate the Microsoft extensions or not. Only by disallowing modifications can this be stopped.
But the Kerberos license is unrestricted, and not copyleft. Their goal was to get Kerberos used as widely as possible. W2K with Kerberos extensions is much more compatible than W2K with no Kerberos at all.
"The fact is, and has been upheld numerous times in court, and by the supreme court, that current filter software CANNOT be implemented in public libraries."
Then what's the problem? Utah will pass the law, someone will challenge it, and the very first court it reaches will throw it out.
"True, but THIS IS NOT ABOUT PROVIDING SPEACH, its about stifling free speech."
How is my speech stifled when a library uses filtering? Let's say I have a web site that goes into great detail on verboten material. Do I now have the right to compel libraries to distribute that speech? Of course not. If the government clamped down on the web site itself, that would be censorship, but that is not the case. No rights of mine are violated if the government decides not to disseminate my information.
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles all existed thirty years ago, and they were just as big then as they are now. But that's begging the point. My home town had a population of 10,000. When I was growing up, it hadn't had a murder since the Dalton brothers rode through town a century earlier. Today, the town has a population of 15,000. It's still small enough that people know their neighbors. Yet it has had about five murders in ten years. Also, if you take a look at Columbine, everyone knew their neighbors. There's something else beyond 'connectedness' that's the problem.
And I don't think there's any one single cause behind the recent random violence in society. It stems from several causes. Your supposition may work in the big city, but it is by no means the only cause, and hardly explains Columbine or the rise of gangs in Small Town, USA.
I'll have to respond by asking what universe you're from!
;-) Second, the first amendment does not mean that freedom of expression has to be carried by government facilities. Thinking this way is just plain ridiculous. I have the freedom to orate on political issues but I don't have the right to compel (hah!) the government to broadcast it for me.
First of all, anything the government does is by definition, legal
A reading of the amendments to the US constitution reveals that they are all limits to government actions. Not one of them gives any powers to the government, nor compels private individuals to any action. Just as the second amendment does not mean that the goverment has to supply you with firearms, so the first amendment does not mean that the government has to provide you with speech or press.
The problem is not the bombs or the guns or the knives or the sticks. The problem is that the nation is hemorrhaging to death and you want to ban bleeding.
When someone can tell my why I was safer as a child thirty years ago when assault weapons were legal, than children are today when they are not, then I'll listen to their gun control arguments.
"We forget-- we are the governement, or should be. They're saying you must use filtering software... the problem is... who decides what is allowable and what's not. Who controls the information?"
You could, of course, have the general populace vote on all library issues. But if the referendum process is expanded to included such trivialities as what software a library should use, the ballots would end up being hundreds of pages long, and that's not including any text of the laws. That's why we elect representatives in republics, so that the average citizen doesn't have to concern himself with the day-to-day workings of government.
However, I do feel that county libraries should be run at the county level. Keep the taxes local and spend them locally.
But censorware in libraries is NOT controlling information. You already have access to the internet elsewhere. Utah is not banning web sites, just limiting access to them from public locations.
I do not believe that filtering is the best solution by any means, but at the present time it may be the only practical one. Lincoln said that you can't please all of the people all of the time, yet that is precisely what we want our governments to do and it's impossible. Thus, we are either stuck with lowest-common-denominator libraries, those which offend the fewest people, or taking libraries private, which is not presently practical.
"A handgun ... has and only one use: killing humans."
If you want to use those terms, fine. But it would be much more accurate to say that their purpose is to meet deadly force with deadly force. You don't use guns to defend yourself against knives. You use them to defend yourself against other guns. The proper use of handguns is only for practice, hunting and dire emergencies.
"But what about people who acquire guns legally and then go crazy and go on a killing spree?"
If you'll recall, those assholes at Columbine also weilded pipe bombs. The reason there was no outcry to ban pipe bombs is because they were already illegal. If the guns they used were illegal, they still would have had the bombs!
These senseless killings, particularly against children, stir at our emotions so much that many people turn off their brains and let their feelings rule. Banning guns is treating the symptom but letting disease continue to fester. Guns were just as widely available in the first half of this century as they are now. Yet no one ever heard of schoolyard shootings until a couple of decades ago. This disease has become an epidemic of death because people are too focused on the symptoms.
"DOES A GUN IN THE HOME MAKE YOU SAFER?"
What a stupid article. What stupid statistics. Don't you realize that people who own an automobile are 22 times more likely to die in an automobile accident than those who don't? Don't you realize that those who own a swimming pool have a 220% greater chance of their children accidentally drowning than those that don't?
Owning a handgun and keeping it locked up in a safe in the basement won't protect anyone any better from crime. But not owning a gun while putting a sign in your window saying you do is very effective.
"You are blinded by NRA propaganda into thinking a gun makes you safe in your home when the truth is quite the opposite."
And you are deluded by the liberal press into believing that banning guns solves crime. Murder has been outlawed for how many millenia now? Five or six? If banning murder doesn't stop murder, you're smoking dope if you think banning guns will eliminate guns.
I don't see any problem with this at all. Now before you proceed to flame me unmercifully for the above statement, let me explain myself.
First of all, I believe that he who owns the property gets to make the rules for that property. Since the government owns the library, the government gets to set the rules for its use. It may be slightly problematic that this is a state law and the library is under county jurisdiction, but the principle holds. If you don't like the fact that the government can force libraries to block general access to pornography, perhaps it's time you thought about why libraries need to be under the control of governments to begin with.
Second, if libraries have the legitimate authority to deny children access to pornographic magazines printed on paper, then they also have the authority to deny them access to pornography online. Why aren't the censorware foes lobbying to get Penthouse and Hustler put out on the regular magazine racks?
Third, the internet is a form of public broadcast. Like it or not, that's what it is. As long as porn merchants continue to publically broadcast their wares, then they'll have to deal with the repercussions of public broadcasting. There's a reason that PBS is not allowed to broadcast pornography, but is allowed to broadcast "I, Claudius". Since the internet is publically broadcast, public access to it falls under community standards.
Forth, one can access hardcore pornography online through sheer accident. Some people who choose NOT to view pornography can be subjected to it anyway. A misspelling of an URL can result in a large explicitly graphic display of copraphilia, as once happened to me with great disgust. If I don't ever want to see the inside of a Hustler magazine, I don't have to. I could go an entire lifetime without opening one up. But online porn is much different.
Fifth, and finally, this law does not mandate specific filtering software, but leaves the choice up to the library. If one particular piece of software is flawed and limits legitimate access, another can be used instead.
Let's see, assume 400 employees. It's a software company, so assume the employees get paid an average of $90,000 a year. That's approx $30 an hour. If each employee loses an hour of time dealing with this hassle (remember, it's a software company, so I'm not expecting computer literacy :-)) then it will have cost the company $12,000.
Oh yeah, murder can only occur in the presence of firearms.
A few years ago a stupid fuck took his automobile through the chain link fence of an elementary school and ran over and killed several children. What's the difference between that and a schoolyard shooting?
Face it, criminals do not heed the law (which is why they're criminals). They will always have guns, even if they have to import them from China via COSCO. When one of them breaks into my house armed with an illegal weapon, what do you want me to do? Call the cops and tell the thug to wait ten minutes until they arrive? Fuck that!
If you want to place yourself at the mercy of criminals, so be it. Sure, go ahead and praise Sharon Stone for turning in her guns while she still has armed guards on the payroll. Idolize the hypocrites.
Who gives a rip that Mickey has his fingers in Britney's pie? What business is it of yours? What's the point of your rant? Are you saying Britney Spears does not have the right of freedom of association?
So what if supporting Britney directly or indirectly supports Disney? BFD! Maybe the next artist isn't a pawn of evil mediacorp, but uses you ticket money to buy a Britney Spears CD. Are you going to start accounting for every cent that leaves your hands?
Of course you must be right, you posted it on Slashdot, the home of the cyberconspiracists.
The Secret Service did nothing wrong, it was all Bell South's doing. After all, SJG and Illuminati BBS was infinging on their turf!
You can be as paranoid as you want to be about big business (aka anyone who makes more money than you), but nothing will get fixed until the real culprits are put on a tight leash.
The real criminal in this case was the US Government. The solution isn't to break the baby bells up further, or to deny hollywood filmmakers the right of association, or to prevent anyone from making more money than you. Instead, it is to ensure that laws are applied equally to everyone, including the government.
Let's accept, for the sake of argument, the spurious claim that Bell South approached the US Secretary of the Treasury with an offer to hire the Secret Service, for the express purpose of eliminating a BBS that wasn't obsequious enough for them. Now let's assume that the guv'ment had to follow the same laws as everyone else. In this case, Bell South might as well as hire the mafia as the Secret Service, since the raid would have been a criminal act of extortion and theft.
If you make the laws apply to everyone equally, then lobbying by the filthy evil anti-linux megacorps will stop, since there would be no way to get exclusive legal priviledges.
The application template that the appwizard creates is just that, a template. What's the big deal? Most developers have their own templates anyway, whether or not they're using an IDE. If you don't like the templates that KDevelop gives you, replace them with your own (under /opt/kde/share/apps/kdevelop/templates) or just don't use them.
And what's your beef with dialog editors? Do you think that this came straight from the VC++ world? Hardly! Unlike VC++, the output of KDevelop dialogs is real code, not a bunch of numbers. Again, it's up to you whether or not you want to use a dialog editor, or if you prefer to use the straightforward and easy layout widgets of Qt directly.
But your quote that "KDevelop makes it possible to write a KDE GUI program without any clear understanding of how the toolkit works" makes me think that you haven't really used KDevelop on a real project. The dialog editor may layout the visual aspects of a dialog, but all it really does is generate widget declarations, leaving the actual code to the developer.
To use KDevelop, you have to know how to program! How can I make it any clearer than that? I have a coworker who spent a few years writing VB programs. He thought he was a programmer because he could create programs. To compare a KDevelop programmer to this type of person, who doesn't even know what a pointer is, is insulting.
But I degress, if you need some IDE your not a real programmer anyway
Real programmers don't give one shit if you approve of their tools or not. You are meaningless to them.
Tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend to encourage much of the intelligence to move into the development environment, making the actual code difficult to read and maintain any other way. And, conversely, tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend not to be able to make a lot of sense of interesting abstractions implemented "by hand".
Take a closer look at KDevelop. Don't let it's superficial appearance fool you into thinking it's a VC++ clone. It is not. (tree on left, view on right and messages below actually makes sense).
Beneath it all, KDevelop uses exactly the same tools you are: g++, make, autoconf, etc. No, its makefiles are not the most readable in the world, but that's an artifact of the autoconf schema, not of KDevelop. And unlike VC++, it won't try to write your classes for you. Other than the brief application "template", which you can easily replace, it does no coding for you. If you have it create a new class for you, it creates an empty one. KDevelop is essentially an editor, class browser, documentation browser, dialog editor and debugger, all rolled up into one with a ton of documentation thrown in to boot. It's not trying to change how you program, like VC++ does, but instead is trying to give you all the tools you need in one package.
No, the editor doesn't have the power of emacs. So what? For some people, this is actually a plus. And the debugger isn't as rich as ddd, and the dialog editor isn't as full blown as QtArchitect, etc. That's not the point. The point is that KDevelop has a whole bunch of good tools integrated into one IDE.
Qt is extremely portable between Windows and X (and rumours abound of a Mac version in progress). In fact, 99% of the code is identical between Windows and X. For closed-source work, you will need to buy the professional edition license from Troll, which shouldn't be too much of a problem if you can get your work to spring for it. Also, there is no free Windows version yet (Win users won't even register shareware, so why would they buy something for proprietary use if there's a free version around?).
Some things you won't get is the *environment* stuff, since Qt is not meant to be an everything-in-one-packlage library like MFC. You will have to use the platform versions of thread libraries, configuration management, etc. But overall, an intelligent design will relegate all this stuff to just a single source file and a few #ifdef's.
A good place for more info is the qt-interest mailing list, which you can sign up for at www.troll.no. The subscribers seem to be evenly split betwen X and Win users. It's definitely not a KDE dominated list.
Actually, thinking this over during the past 24 hours, I suspect that little would change if the GPL were invalidated.
Think about it. You have already been granted many permissions in the GPL. No ruling is going to invalidate an author's right to give permissions to the user. Even if the GPL is invalidated as a license, you still have proof that the author gave you certain permissions. Even if the author took you to court, your merely waving his source code with the GPL notice attached in front of the judge would be extremely damaging to any of his claims.
Although copyright gives you no permissions to distribute, the author has already done so. However, the clauses in the GPL that restrict certain forms of usage (yes, they are there) would no longer be valid. As long as you do not copy, distribute or modify the author's code, copyright law allows you to do whatever you want with your *own* code, including dynamically linking it with GPLd code. Copyright law does not consider this to be derivation, but merely referencing. Only the GPL's restrictions on usage (and the lack of UCITA) prevents this.
Unless readline.h is chock full of macros, I still wouldn't be distributing any readline code if I include the headers. Notice how you said "and use none of readline's original source files". All I am doing is using readline, not distributing it.
A proper header file (is there such a beast?) will only be an interface to the code. So even if I write ``#include "readline.h"'', I am not including any readline code in my resulting binary (excepting any convoluted macros), nor is the header file itself in my code. I've only declared a reference to it. In fact, I never have to see any of readline code. I don't even have to look at the header file, I can use the man page instead.
According to RMS, such linking would not be permitted with non-GPL code (yes, readline is a GPL library). Yet the GPL specifically states in section zero that it only covers copying, modification and distribution. I am still doing none of these.
In other words, it uses the court system to ensure that the code is being used in the community interest.
Community interest! Exactly how is Quake in the community interest?