Right, I understand that. But that's a whole different kind of detention than the "please come downtown and talk with us for a while, no we won't tell you when we're going to let you go" detention. Didn't I say I'd probaby prefer being detained to being arrested even so? (Except that AFAIK being detained is not well-defined or very formal and has the property of being therefore easily abused if not strictly regulated to mean something very different from being arrested). Sitting in my car for ten minutes while getting a traffic ticket is much different than being taken for a trip in the back of a squad car against my will. It's the latter that concerns me.
I'll go with the Steve Jobs model until there is a commodity robot hardware that runs Debian GNU/AI. The Steve Jobs model may cost a little more and not be binary compatible with the other 95% of the robots, but it will look cool as heck, be very durable, and may just take "Think Different" to a whole 'nother level.
Just because it's standard treatment doesn't necessarily mean it's legal. This stuff does vary from community to community-- the main thing is they can't use detention as a surrogate arrest. And you can probably force the issue by informing them that you do not want to go to the station (but don't resist if they insist), and asking if you're under arrest, and asking to speak to a lawyer. But then, being detained is probably a lot more fun than being arrested (which will require a court visit), which would be a real risk of being uncooperative.
Frankly, I think that any system of law where you can be detained without being arrested is just plain wrong. I mean, why not just forget the distinctions if they are basically meaningless?
I thought Napster was offline. That's not a pulse. That's e-Suicide.:)
I guess it's time to go back to the old-fashioned methods of borrowing CDs from friends and taping them (only instead of taping I'll be using Ogg Vorbis) myself. I mean, we all still have at least a couple of friends we actually see face to face, right?
NO. They should have arrested him in the middle of the presentation for maximum effect, and yes they can warn him but are under no burden to do so. However, it is unlikely that they were even present at the conference (in this capacity)-- and even if they were, maybe once they saw this complex and new "crime" being committed they felt they should wait for the okay from their own FBI lawyers (rather than the Adobe jackals) before proceeding.
The crime here is not cracking the "protection" but sharing the method used to perform the crack. While it is not a crime to describe in detail how to kill someone (if you do it without being inciteful), how to manufacture drugs, how to build a bomb, how to cheat on your wife, how to molest children, it is a crime to discuss methods of cracking anti-consumer "protections" on copyright restricted materials on digital media. This Russian guy broke that blatantly illegal law on US soil (using information he obtained at home in Russia where he may not have been violating any laws). Ergo, he gets arrested.
Editor's Note [from the article]: (17 July 2001 0100 PDST) Vladimir Katalov has informed Planet eBook that Dmitry Sklyarov, author of the "Advanced eBook Processor", was in fact arrested, and that he is being held in a Las Vegas prison waiting for subsequent judgement in California.
Under normal circumstances the authorities cannot detain citizens without arresting them, since doing so is paramount to an arrest. However, this case involves a non-citizen being barred from boarding a plane at an airport, and his detention was merely a temporary condition prior to his arrest.
In my version of history the preferred medium was vinyl LPs, which I recall typically paying $8 to $12 for. Nor do I recall in 1985/6 paying only $5 for cassettes-- and I wouldn't compare those cassettes with any CD I paid $20 for today (which leads me to believe you're buying imports or you're in Canada).
Music prices have quadrupled in the last 15 years? When was the price of a CD ever $5? Or even an LP for that matter? Heck, by shopping online or at large merchants like Best Buy I can still buy most new CDs for around $13, not a real dent in the pocketbook considering the prices of more important things, like food or housing, that really have experienced vast increases in price.
DRM technologies are not tools to enforce laws. They are tools to prevent other tools from working. The criminal justice system enforces laws, not private corporations producing electronic goods.
DRM technologies, once in place as standards won't go away, even if the laws regarding copyright are completely abolished. It will still be technically impossible to make copies because the tools we all purchased are crippled.
I realize I am in a minority when it comes to software usership, but I won't help you make a living writing software that is not Free Software. I simply won't pay you for software which does not also include the source code and the right to change the code as I would. If you plan on making a living coding, you should recognize that most coding does not result in widget-based product sales, it results in in-house applications for which the phrase, "Free Software", is mostly irrelevant since neither the client nor the programmers expect the code to be reused by anyone except the client. And if I'm ever in the position of directing the creation of contract code, you can bet your ass I would not allow the contractor to retain the rights to code unless I also obtain the source and full rights to make modifications for my own use.
Are you completely daft? You said copying mp3s was illegal. It is not necessarily so. Also, I spefically said that issues of morality are the province of parents -- which you completely side-step as though I said children should be made to be completely ignorant.
Children learning about law is an academic activity-- usually referred to as "Civics Class" (in the USA, anyway). Children being told blatant untruths like "copying mp3s is illegal" (end of discussion) is not learning. It is misinformation. The law is a complex thing and often what is and is not illegal is a matter for courts and juries decide. Furthermore, in a democracy how to handle unjust laws is a very necessary topic of discussion. In fact, getting a bad law repealed or nullified often requires substantial law-breaking so that there will be test cases for the judges to weigh in on.
Go ahead and slide down your slippery slope if you like, but I prefer that school stick to critical reasoning skills and skip the propaganda. If you look at the situation objectively, you'll find that most people are "good" and "do the right thing" without having it spelled out for them in excruciating detail in school. I, for one, think schools should concentrate on academia (they seem to be having enough trouble graduating literate adults) than social programming (if you can't teach them to read, what makes you think you're qualified to teach them right from wrong?).
Whether it's morally right or wrong to share MP3s/photos, the fact is that it's still illegal.
Actually there are lots of circumstances where sharing is perfectly legal, in addition to being moral. Kids should be taught to understand that laws and social mores are complicated things and require the individual to apply a little critical thinking when venturing into the grey areas.
I am SO glad now that I went to a school where HD Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" was actually a required text and where there was no DARE program. Kids shouldn't be taught anything in school except academics, trade skills, arts, and whatever you'd call what it is you learn in Phys. Ed.
Morals, right and wrong, how to deal with bullies, how to say no to drugs are all lessons that belong at home. And if the parents don't teach them this stuff, well tough. Then the kids figure it out for themselves. As a parent it disgusts me how much time I have to spend with my child going over what she "learned" in school and applying critical thinking skills to it so that my daughter has a chance to form her own opinions about what she's been told.
Yeah. if what you're doing is illegal (like sharing metallica songs), then you may find you need a username or password to get on a site, otherwise anonymous/a@b.com works as a user ID/password on most any legal FTP site. Although some of us are good netizens and we do enter our email for anonymous FTP.
That said, what makes FTP so hard to use that wasn't just as much work with Napster? What it did great was peer-to-peer indexing with search capabilities, not file sharing.
This same function is performed by Google for web sites (which could include links to files)-- except that no one wants to put up a web page of mp3s because they know it's illegal.
Even if there weren't half a million graphic interfaces to FTP (starting with the venerable favorites like "Fetch"), it is simply a sad comment on the state of computing that a program that is as hard to use as typing: ftp ftp.freemusic.com
cd/pub/metallica
get Creeping_Death.mp3 is considered "obscure" and "hard to use". If you can't use FTP you don't deserve free music. Which is exactly your point, music goes back underground.
Even RMS might have a problem if someone started distributing a fork of GNU Emacs this way -- especially if they included proprietary add-ons.
Excuse me for wondering, but how the fsck can you have a proprietary add-on to a GPL product without violating the GPL? Doesn't this go against everything the license was intended to promote? This also occurred to me as I read the article posting... how can the Gemini table type (or whatever it was-- I don't use any version of MySQL) be non-open-source but be a feature for an open source licensed piece of software?
And BTW, Dear Slashdot, if you start using anything remotely resembling proprietary code for your site, I don't think I can look you in the eyes anymore.
More troubling than the GNU project using the name GNU on everything is the projects that use GNU but have nothing to do with the FSF (at least as far as I can see)-- like Gnutella or Gnucleus.
For the FSF to put GNU out there is to "brand" the software, which is certainly better than FSF or affixing Free to the front (which is way overdone already and would only lead to confusion).
Re:This has been mentioned before, but...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
No. It is a language because it has rules-- and yes, the rules are filled with exceptions and the rules are constantly changing: new words are made fairly often, new constructions appear (think of "verbing"). Humans learn languages through repetition and pattern recognition. Rules are inherent, because language that was not consistent from use to use and which had no recognizable patterns would be impossible to learn unless it was actually a constructed language and one had a reference book in which one could look up previously unused constructions. Whether we choose a set of those rules and make them the "right" or "official" version of the language is a different matter.
As to computer languages, I agree that the more they look like English the worse they have done... but oddly there are languages like Perl which are natural language oriented (with things like pronouns, context, etc) and seem to be relatively successful.
Yeah, a free service from Microsoft. Sure. Next you'll tell me that Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are free, too. Never mind that pesky OS you have to pay through the nose for.
Not that I expect an AC to check for replies, but the point is, a corporation can take the software at no cost, but if they develop proprietary software on top of that we run the risk of having their value-added version of public goods supplant our public version of the software in popular usage. I realize that they have added value and deserve compensation for same, but there is no reason they should be allowed to build a proprietary product on top of public work, thereby obscuring all of the public portions of that same work.
There is a marginal cost to producing electronic copies of data, although compared to cars it may be very small. But what difference does that make?
Well, two kinds of difference, first the public's perception of the fairness of a price is a part of what causes demand curves to fall as they do. But given that most of the public "knows" that soda at McDonald's costs them a few cents to make, but we still pay $1 a cup for soda-- obviously not a big part. The public, by and large, is not concerned with marginal cost to the producer.
Second difference it makes is that even though the marginal cost of reproducing electronic data is slight, look at the Slashdot effect. When 100,000 users suddenly go banging away at some minor server they increase the cost of providing that information enormously-- maybe way past the point at which it was affordable to provide. Same goes for making CDs-- I might make 10 CDs of my underground band on a CD-burner for just a few dollars. If those are well-received I might get 1000 pressed for a few hundred bucks at some limited-run plant. But to produce enough to go Gold by selling at Best Buy and Sam Goody is very very expensive all told. Yes, the unit cost may decrease, but the total cost may be out of range without some sort of capital investment (like a loan to get a large pressing done).
People will pay lots of money for valuable information, but most information is not that valuable-- and a lot of information is valuable only because of intellectual property laws. For instance, Britney Spears CDs sell well (for some unknown reason) and if I want to listen to "Hit Me Baby One More Time" I have to buy her CD. I cannot buy the Rage Against the Machine version for half the price of the official Spears version. In part because RATM knows not to do such an awful song, but mostly because they would have to license the rights to perform the song increasing their cost so that they cannot offer it at a reduced price. [This whole example is an oversimplification, but you get the idea... no knockoffs allowed in the realm of information].
Today's news is affordable because there are a lot of producers of the news, and even if there weren't it's not going to be news for long (it loses value so quickly that no one is willing to pay much for it in the first place). But imagine insider information for stock tradinng, very valuable news, which some people would pay well for, even though it is illegal but very lucrative to use the information. Some information is very valuable, just not most content online.
And I agree, we need a healthy competition in the media. The fewer players we have the more the collusion becomes implicit (legal) and less explicit (illegal).
I think the government should be able to use GPL (especially if there is a GPL piece of software they would like to work with). The original post brought up the point about the government using public money to develop a public resource and likened this to the public parks-- where public money goes to make sure the public has a place to go and do recreational stuff. The only way a corporation can prevent the public from using the park is to buy the park
The problem with a BSD-ish license is that it allows a private corporation to take advantage of a public resource without any compensation to the public. The libertarians (especially those tools that think corporations deserve the same rights as people) will argue that the corporation has theoretically paid taxes and therefore has as much right to the public resource as it needs. But when/if a corporation takes that public good and uses it to further their private development (and does not pass along the public resource in the same form they received it), then they have been given a freebie at the expense of society.
If we are going to give away public resources, we should be aware of it. And personally I'm against it. The GPL makes certain that a public resource remains a public resource, to which all users have the same right of access.
Re:This has been mentioned before, but...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever studied Latin? The language used by Caesar, Vergil, Ovid and the like was hardly regular. The number of irregular words (often borrowed from Greek) is not insignificant. The idea that Classical Latin is "constructed" is on its face interesting, but higly suspect... it might be a formalized version of a specific dialect but it wasn't produced largely from scratch. There are analogies to this in French, High German, American English used in legal documents, and probably most every major written and spoken language in the world.
And all languages have rules, otherwise they don't work. We can learn to speak it because it has rules. Sure there are lots of exceptions to the primary rules, but those are just more rules. BTW, spelling is not language, so neither the apostrophe rule or i-before-e relate at all to English grammar rules.
As to why no one is using Ruby? Well, it's brand new isn't it? And it mostly fills a need already met by several much older and well-established languages, does it not? I'd be glad to learn it in addition to Perl, except that I am already productive in Perl and it does a LOT of stuff really easily. I haven't found any library of extensions for Ruby that even comes close to the modules on CPAN.
My idea of a stable browser is one that works as intended, as well as not crashing. (And frankly, I'd rather risk a crashed application on Linux than Windows any day). I will give you that IE doesn't crash much, but I won't give you that it's stable-- since I cannot count the times that 5 or 5.5 have completely misdrawn pages. I think my favorite is when I've gotten moderator points on Slashdot and I go to scroll down, instead of the form elements moving with the text the text scrolls and the form elements are sticky. Before long I have a window full of form elements. That's so unusable stability is irrelevant. I also find it frequently mislocates images or has the same or similar problem with scrolling as images. I use Netscape a lot on that same machine and while it never has a rendering issue, it does frequently lose track of itself and/or crash.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, I understand that. But that's a whole different kind of detention than the "please come downtown and talk with us for a while, no we won't tell you when we're going to let you go" detention. Didn't I say I'd probaby prefer being detained to being arrested even so? (Except that AFAIK being detained is not well-defined or very formal and has the property of being therefore easily abused if not strictly regulated to mean something very different from being arrested). Sitting in my car for ten minutes while getting a traffic ticket is much different than being taken for a trip in the back of a squad car against my will. It's the latter that concerns me.
I'll go with the Steve Jobs model until there is a commodity robot hardware that runs Debian GNU/AI. The Steve Jobs model may cost a little more and not be binary compatible with the other 95% of the robots, but it will look cool as heck, be very durable, and may just take "Think Different" to a whole 'nother level.
Just because it's standard treatment doesn't necessarily mean it's legal. This stuff does vary from community to community-- the main thing is they can't use detention as a surrogate arrest. And you can probably force the issue by informing them that you do not want to go to the station (but don't resist if they insist), and asking if you're under arrest, and asking to speak to a lawyer. But then, being detained is probably a lot more fun than being arrested (which will require a court visit), which would be a real risk of being uncooperative.
Frankly, I think that any system of law where you can be detained without being arrested is just plain wrong. I mean, why not just forget the distinctions if they are basically meaningless?
I thought Napster was offline. That's not a pulse. That's e-Suicide. :)
I guess it's time to go back to the old-fashioned methods of borrowing CDs from friends and taping them (only instead of taping I'll be using Ogg Vorbis) myself. I mean, we all still have at least a couple of friends we actually see face to face, right?
NO. They should have arrested him in the middle of the presentation for maximum effect, and yes they can warn him but are under no burden to do so. However, it is unlikely that they were even present at the conference (in this capacity)-- and even if they were, maybe once they saw this complex and new "crime" being committed they felt they should wait for the okay from their own FBI lawyers (rather than the Adobe jackals) before proceeding.
The crime here is not cracking the "protection" but sharing the method used to perform the crack. While it is not a crime to describe in detail how to kill someone (if you do it without being inciteful), how to manufacture drugs, how to build a bomb, how to cheat on your wife, how to molest children, it is a crime to discuss methods of cracking anti-consumer "protections" on copyright restricted materials on digital media. This Russian guy broke that blatantly illegal law on US soil (using information he obtained at home in Russia where he may not have been violating any laws). Ergo, he gets arrested.
To quote Bulldog, "This sucks. This is total BS."
Editor's Note [from the article]: (17 July 2001 0100 PDST) Vladimir Katalov has informed Planet eBook that Dmitry Sklyarov, author of the "Advanced eBook Processor", was in fact arrested, and that he is being held in a Las Vegas prison waiting for subsequent judgement in California.
Under normal circumstances the authorities cannot detain citizens without arresting them, since doing so is paramount to an arrest. However, this case involves a non-citizen being barred from boarding a plane at an airport, and his detention was merely a temporary condition prior to his arrest.
In my version of history the preferred medium was vinyl LPs, which I recall typically paying $8 to $12 for. Nor do I recall in 1985/6 paying only $5 for cassettes-- and I wouldn't compare those cassettes with any CD I paid $20 for today (which leads me to believe you're buying imports or you're in Canada).
Music prices have quadrupled in the last 15 years? When was the price of a CD ever $5? Or even an LP for that matter? Heck, by shopping online or at large merchants like Best Buy I can still buy most new CDs for around $13, not a real dent in the pocketbook considering the prices of more important things, like food or housing, that really have experienced vast increases in price.
DRM technologies are not tools to enforce laws. They are tools to prevent other tools from working. The criminal justice system enforces laws, not private corporations producing electronic goods.
DRM technologies, once in place as standards won't go away, even if the laws regarding copyright are completely abolished. It will still be technically impossible to make copies because the tools we all purchased are crippled.
I realize I am in a minority when it comes to software usership, but I won't help you make a living writing software that is not Free Software. I simply won't pay you for software which does not also include the source code and the right to change the code as I would. If you plan on making a living coding, you should recognize that most coding does not result in widget-based product sales, it results in in-house applications for which the phrase, "Free Software", is mostly irrelevant since neither the client nor the programmers expect the code to be reused by anyone except the client. And if I'm ever in the position of directing the creation of contract code, you can bet your ass I would not allow the contractor to retain the rights to code unless I also obtain the source and full rights to make modifications for my own use.
Are you completely daft? You said copying mp3s was illegal. It is not necessarily so. Also, I spefically said that issues of morality are the province of parents -- which you completely side-step as though I said children should be made to be completely ignorant.
Children learning about law is an academic activity-- usually referred to as "Civics Class" (in the USA, anyway). Children being told blatant untruths like "copying mp3s is illegal" (end of discussion) is not learning. It is misinformation. The law is a complex thing and often what is and is not illegal is a matter for courts and juries decide. Furthermore, in a democracy how to handle unjust laws is a very necessary topic of discussion. In fact, getting a bad law repealed or nullified often requires substantial law-breaking so that there will be test cases for the judges to weigh in on.
Go ahead and slide down your slippery slope if you like, but I prefer that school stick to critical reasoning skills and skip the propaganda. If you look at the situation objectively, you'll find that most people are "good" and "do the right thing" without having it spelled out for them in excruciating detail in school. I, for one, think schools should concentrate on academia (they seem to be having enough trouble graduating literate adults) than social programming (if you can't teach them to read, what makes you think you're qualified to teach them right from wrong?).
Whether it's morally right or wrong to share MP3s/photos, the fact is that it's still illegal.
Actually there are lots of circumstances where sharing is perfectly legal, in addition to being moral. Kids should be taught to understand that laws and social mores are complicated things and require the individual to apply a little critical thinking when venturing into the grey areas.
I am SO glad now that I went to a school where HD Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" was actually a required text and where there was no DARE program. Kids shouldn't be taught anything in school except academics, trade skills, arts, and whatever you'd call what it is you learn in Phys. Ed.
Morals, right and wrong, how to deal with bullies, how to say no to drugs are all lessons that belong at home. And if the parents don't teach them this stuff, well tough. Then the kids figure it out for themselves. As a parent it disgusts me how much time I have to spend with my child going over what she "learned" in school and applying critical thinking skills to it so that my daughter has a chance to form her own opinions about what she's been told.
Yeah. if what you're doing is illegal (like sharing metallica songs), then you may find you need a username or password to get on a site, otherwise anonymous/a@b.com works as a user ID/password on most any legal FTP site. Although some of us are good netizens and we do enter our email for anonymous FTP.
That said, what makes FTP so hard to use that wasn't just as much work with Napster? What it did great was peer-to-peer indexing with search capabilities, not file sharing.
This same function is performed by Google for web sites (which could include links to files)-- except that no one wants to put up a web page of mp3s because they know it's illegal.
Even if there weren't half a million graphic interfaces to FTP (starting with the venerable favorites like "Fetch"), it is simply a sad comment on the state of computing that a program that is as hard to use as typing: /pub/metallica
ftp ftp.freemusic.com
cd
get Creeping_Death.mp3
is considered "obscure" and "hard to use". If you can't use FTP you don't deserve free music. Which is exactly your point, music goes back underground.
Even RMS might have a problem if someone started distributing a fork of GNU Emacs this way -- especially if they included proprietary add-ons.
Excuse me for wondering, but how the fsck can you have a proprietary add-on to a GPL product without violating the GPL? Doesn't this go against everything the license was intended to promote? This also occurred to me as I read the article posting... how can the Gemini table type (or whatever it was-- I don't use any version of MySQL) be non-open-source but be a feature for an open source licensed piece of software?
And BTW, Dear Slashdot, if you start using anything remotely resembling proprietary code for your site, I don't think I can look you in the eyes anymore.
More troubling than the GNU project using the name GNU on everything is the projects that use GNU but have nothing to do with the FSF (at least as far as I can see)-- like Gnutella or Gnucleus.
For the FSF to put GNU out there is to "brand" the software, which is certainly better than FSF or affixing Free to the front (which is way overdone already and would only lead to confusion).
No. It is a language because it has rules-- and yes, the rules are filled with exceptions and the rules are constantly changing: new words are made fairly often, new constructions appear (think of "verbing"). Humans learn languages through repetition and pattern recognition. Rules are inherent, because language that was not consistent from use to use and which had no recognizable patterns would be impossible to learn unless it was actually a constructed language and one had a reference book in which one could look up previously unused constructions. Whether we choose a set of those rules and make them the "right" or "official" version of the language is a different matter.
As to computer languages, I agree that the more they look like English the worse they have done... but oddly there are languages like Perl which are natural language oriented (with things like pronouns, context, etc) and seem to be relatively successful.
Wherever Mozilla is going, Konqueror is already there. If the browser is seriously the only thing holding you back, you can switch now, why wait?
Yeah, a free service from Microsoft. Sure. Next you'll tell me that Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are free, too. Never mind that pesky OS you have to pay through the nose for.
Not that I expect an AC to check for replies, but the point is, a corporation can take the software at no cost, but if they develop proprietary software on top of that we run the risk of having their value-added version of public goods supplant our public version of the software in popular usage. I realize that they have added value and deserve compensation for same, but there is no reason they should be allowed to build a proprietary product on top of public work, thereby obscuring all of the public portions of that same work.
There is a marginal cost to producing electronic copies of data, although compared to cars it may be very small. But what difference does that make?
Well, two kinds of difference, first the public's perception of the fairness of a price is a part of what causes demand curves to fall as they do. But given that most of the public "knows" that soda at McDonald's costs them a few cents to make, but we still pay $1 a cup for soda-- obviously not a big part. The public, by and large, is not concerned with marginal cost to the producer.
Second difference it makes is that even though the marginal cost of reproducing electronic data is slight, look at the Slashdot effect. When 100,000 users suddenly go banging away at some minor server they increase the cost of providing that information enormously-- maybe way past the point at which it was affordable to provide. Same goes for making CDs-- I might make 10 CDs of my underground band on a CD-burner for just a few dollars. If those are well-received I might get 1000 pressed for a few hundred bucks at some limited-run plant. But to produce enough to go Gold by selling at Best Buy and Sam Goody is very very expensive all told. Yes, the unit cost may decrease, but the total cost may be out of range without some sort of capital investment (like a loan to get a large pressing done).
People will pay lots of money for valuable information, but most information is not that valuable-- and a lot of information is valuable only because of intellectual property laws. For instance, Britney Spears CDs sell well (for some unknown reason) and if I want to listen to "Hit Me Baby One More Time" I have to buy her CD. I cannot buy the Rage Against the Machine version for half the price of the official Spears version. In part because RATM knows not to do such an awful song, but mostly because they would have to license the rights to perform the song increasing their cost so that they cannot offer it at a reduced price. [This whole example is an oversimplification, but you get the idea... no knockoffs allowed in the realm of information].
Today's news is affordable because there are a lot of producers of the news, and even if there weren't it's not going to be news for long (it loses value so quickly that no one is willing to pay much for it in the first place). But imagine insider information for stock tradinng, very valuable news, which some people would pay well for, even though it is illegal but very lucrative to use the information. Some information is very valuable, just not most content online.
And I agree, we need a healthy competition in the media. The fewer players we have the more the collusion becomes implicit (legal) and less explicit (illegal).
I think the government should be able to use GPL (especially if there is a GPL piece of software they would like to work with). The original post brought up the point about the government using public money to develop a public resource and likened this to the public parks-- where public money goes to make sure the public has a place to go and do recreational stuff. The only way a corporation can prevent the public from using the park is to buy the park
The problem with a BSD-ish license is that it allows a private corporation to take advantage of a public resource without any compensation to the public. The libertarians (especially those tools that think corporations deserve the same rights as people) will argue that the corporation has theoretically paid taxes and therefore has as much right to the public resource as it needs. But when/if a corporation takes that public good and uses it to further their private development (and does not pass along the public resource in the same form they received it), then they have been given a freebie at the expense of society.
If we are going to give away public resources, we should be aware of it. And personally I'm against it. The GPL makes certain that a public resource remains a public resource, to which all users have the same right of access.
Have you ever studied Latin? The language used by Caesar, Vergil, Ovid and the like was hardly regular. The number of irregular words (often borrowed from Greek) is not insignificant. The idea that Classical Latin is "constructed" is on its face interesting, but higly suspect... it might be a formalized version of a specific dialect but it wasn't produced largely from scratch. There are analogies to this in French, High German, American English used in legal documents, and probably most every major written and spoken language in the world.
And all languages have rules, otherwise they don't work. We can learn to speak it because it has rules. Sure there are lots of exceptions to the primary rules, but those are just more rules. BTW, spelling is not language, so neither the apostrophe rule or i-before-e relate at all to English grammar rules.
As to why no one is using Ruby? Well, it's brand new isn't it? And it mostly fills a need already met by several much older and well-established languages, does it not? I'd be glad to learn it in addition to Perl, except that I am already productive in Perl and it does a LOT of stuff really easily. I haven't found any library of extensions for Ruby that even comes close to the modules on CPAN.
You are so full of it! :)
My idea of a stable browser is one that works as intended, as well as not crashing. (And frankly, I'd rather risk a crashed application on Linux than Windows any day). I will give you that IE doesn't crash much, but I won't give you that it's stable-- since I cannot count the times that 5 or 5.5 have completely misdrawn pages. I think my favorite is when I've gotten moderator points on Slashdot and I go to scroll down, instead of the form elements moving with the text the text scrolls and the form elements are sticky. Before long I have a window full of form elements. That's so unusable stability is irrelevant. I also find it frequently mislocates images or has the same or similar problem with scrolling as images. I use Netscape a lot on that same machine and while it never has a rendering issue, it does frequently lose track of itself and/or crash.
That's nice, but not as nice as this two-liner:
READY.
With a flashing box under the R.