> You are an idiot. Bill Gates's net worth is estimated to be $35 billion.
IIRC it was over $100 billion for much of the period you invoked. The drop in his net worth came with the general tech-stock crash of the past couple of years.
Do correct me if I'm wrong on that point.
> Can't you read? Post or retract, bitch!
I elected to post. Don't blame me if you don't like the results!
> No, it doesn't, you idiot. Read the post. $5.5 billion to charity. Yes, most of it was in grants of less than $1 million, but so what? The fact is that Gates has spent $5.5 billion on charity, and $400 million on promoting Microsoft software in India. Coincidentally, that's a ratio of about 14:1 as well.
Ah, but you're comparing his total donations over his entire life vs. his recent MS promotion in India alone.
Don't get me wrong: I'm glad that he's spending a big percentage of his tax-break PR-break money on AIDS research, since AIDS seems to be one of the world's worst problems these days. But don't mistake those outlays as anything other than an integral part of the cost of being an ultra-rich businessman. If you investigate a bit you'll find that they all do the same thing. In fact, one of the previous times this came up on Slashdot someone marshalled the evidence to show that Gates' donations are actually lower than the going rate for this class of individual.
Face it, they are gestures that reveal no more about his character than when a politician serves the first bowl of gruel at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. If you want to promote him to sainthood, he needs to give until it's inconvenient. I'm happy about where some of his money goes; I just don't buy it as evidence that he isn't a world-class jerk.
ps - How does it feel to realize that you have bought in to a propaganda ploy hook, line, and sinker?
> He compares artists' works to, well, raw sewage that publishers filter into something that can be later consumed by the public.
Yeah, but when the publisher in question is the RIAA they filter out all the good stuff and pass all the lip-sync dance-sync boy-band crap on to the consumer.
> I fuck your baby sister's bloody ass all day long. What exactly do you do under RMS's desk all day?
You make such an eloquent argument that I'm tempted to apply for a job at Micorsoft too!
> The Gates Foundation has given out over $5.5 billion since 1994, and over $3 billion of that went to world health. Microsoft's $400 million investment is a fucking pimple compared to those kinds of numbers. When you give five billion dollars in charitable grants, Crack Faggot, you can criticize.
As a percentage of his net worth, that's like someone making $100K/year giving a few hundred dollars per year to charity.
> Until the, wipe RMS's commie jizz off of your chin and get back to work.
I'm unemployed. Microsoft destroyed my company.
ps - My 14:1 ratio of money spent in India still stands. Shouldn't Gates also be lauded for all that money he donated toward the preservation of monopolies?
> Post or retract, asshole. You said, "his team spent about four times that much on trying to keep India loyal to the Microsoft brand name." Post some kind of URL that confirms this accusation or retract your statement. I'm sick and tired of Slashdotters spewing falsehoods whenever they feel an urge to make a point.
> Post, or retract.
I stand corrected. While looking for the relevant news in a search engine (you should learn to do that too) I discovered that my claimed 4:1 ratio was off by more a factor of three. It should actually be 14:1, since the funding ratio is $421 MM over 3 years vs. $100 MM over 10 years.
I should learn to research my posts a little better.
> Its been awhile sence I read about the subject, but isn't the Turing test just putting people in front of a terminal to talk to either a real person or a AI, and then asking which is the real person. When the same number of testers chose the AI as the real person, then the AI passes the test. Sence when did the Turing name apply to every AI competion? Am I wrong? This isn't a flame just a question about definitions...
Admit it -- you're a robot, aren't you?
Your brittle conformance to textbook definitions gave it away.
> Amazing. They are having an AI tournament, and their supported language list includes C, C++, Java, Perl, Mathematica, and something called the Gambit Command Language. Where the hell are the good AI languages? Functional languages? Lisp? Scheme? Caml? SML? Hell, I'd settle for Python.
Damn! I'm 30 million lines into my HAL 9000 emulator, but I wrote it in COBOL.
Yeah, the media made a big deal out of how much money he donated for AIDS while he was in India, but most neglected to mention that during the same trip his team spent about four times that much on trying to keep India loyal to the Microsoft brand name.
> > speaker/panelist at such prestigious educational institutions as Harvard Business School, Stanford University, The Cato Institute, University of Michigan, University of Texas,
> Bit insensitive to put crank tank financed by rich rightwing crackpots to promote partisan views ahead of Michigan and Texas Universities though.
Oh -- for a moment I thought you were going to say "at the end of the list".
> As someone who spends more time reading research papers than working with an actual Turing Test bot, I'd just like to point out that the academic community has abstracted the term "Turing Test" into something a little more useful...
Games would actually make a great Turing test. I.e., monitor a networked game and try to tell which players are humans and which are artificial agents.
For most games that would be much easier than the unrestricted conversation test, but maybe that's where we need to go to get to first base with AI.
> This basically says that the RIAA and electronic companies would rather copyright not come up in congress right now, because both would rather keep the situation as-is than allow there to be any meaningful changes in either direction.
I'd be willing to wager that they're only concerned about the possibility of meaningful changes in one direction.
> "Recursive" would mean that the GPL is explained in terms of the GPL.
"Recursive" has uses other than recursive definitions. In this case "recursive" describes the operation of the GPL. The base cases are software that is written from scratch but placed under the GPL anyway.
(OK, now that I think on it perhaps I should say "inductive" rather than "recursive", because the GPL, like induction, starts at some base case and goes on forever from there, whereas recursion starts at some arbitrary point and works toward a base case. nit = picked)
> Transitivity is a property of relations as in: "if a is related to b and b is related to c then a is related to c". Since the GPL is not a relation it cannot be transitive.
No, the GPL isn't a relation, but the transitive property is in fact a property of GPL'd code (barring license violations). Substitute "derived from" for your "related to" in your example, and you'll see why. (Notice that "derived from" is a relation.)
More to the point, "viral" is not a property of GPL'd code -- at least not by virtue of being GPL'd.
> The premise of the Dark Materials triology sounds a LOT like the root of the Gnostic Heresey
<quibble>Gnosticism is only a "heresy" from the POV of competing sects</quibble>
Yes, the brief summary does sound like a gnostic take on things. The Wikipedia link gives more stories purportedly based on gnosticism, though I don't immediately see how Twelve Monkeys fits that mold.
> The Gnostic Heresy, as I understand it:
Yes, more or less, except that there was actually a great deal of diversity to the movement, and in fact some of it lay outside Christianity altogether. (FWIW, the Revelation attributed to St. John has been analyzed as a Jewish Gnostic tract.)
> The Gnosic Heresy, btw, was propagated by a series of "revelations" about the faith, sort of like the popular image of how a witch's coven is organized.
<quibble>You mean kind sort of like all religious sects get started -- saving only those that are outright hoaxes.</quibble>
But the important thing is that gnosis (Greek for "knowledge") was supposed to be a direct revelational knowledge of God.
Ultimately that's probably why the Gnostic tradition died out, because the core belief was not amenable to any imposition of orthodoxy that would have allowed it to fight back as an unfragmented sect when the increasingly orthodox Christianity-as-we-know it decided they needed to quash Gnosticism. (IIRC, Gnosticism was the motivation behind the calling of the Council that voted on which books would be in the Bible-as-we-know it.)
> It was stamped out rather freverently in the early days of Christianity, and hasn't been a going concern as a religion for a great many years.
As were most of the early forms of Christianity, including the "primitive Christianity" described in the New Testament.
> I still have hope that television can recover from its great creeping miasma, but that hope is waning fast.
I think the broadcast networks are dead and just don't know it yet. (Or maybe they do know it.) Cable has killed them. You're starting to see informercials during prime time, for Christ's sake. And more and more of the remaining programming is the cheap-to-produce "reality" shite, sitcoms, talk shows, "entertainment" programs that are thinly disguised ads for the music and movie industries, etc., with an ever increasing erotic content to entice casual channel flippers to linger for a while.
In 10 years any of the broadcast networks that still exist will be unrecognizable as what you thought "television" meant when you were a kid.
> Let's say that the FSF has an annurism, and releases a VB workalike, with common controls and librarys and whatnot, and releases the whole sheebang with the GPL. Anyone using these common controls or libraries has to now use the GPL.
(a) No one has any inherent right to use the FSF's code. If they do that and you don't like the license, use something else.
(b) In practice the libraries would more likely be placed under the LGPL, so that you could use the widgets in your owns software without GPLing it.
[snip similarly bogus example]
> The GPL's "viral" nature propagates through the only way "code flesh" is ever exchanged--through re-use of components.
No, it propagates through the re-use of GPL'd components in a certain manner. There are lots of LGPL'd components out there that you can reuse without having to GPL your own code. And if you want to use something in a way that would require you to GPL your own work: deal with it.
"Don't like, don't use." You don't have any inherent rights to it; you have exactly the rights spelled out in the license.
> Here's a thought for you: The Open Gaming License is based on the GPL, but it has one important difference: you need to keep the actual derivations open and licensed, but not the rest of the game that wasn't derived from the OGL'd game at all.
Good for them. Except that happens to be completely irrelevant to the point under discussion. The GPL isn't going to "infect" anything, and it isn't going to "make" anyone GPL their product. "Don't like, don't use."
Microsoft is just scared shitless because in about 4 years the immense body of GPL'd code has gone from "under the radar" to "being adopted as a Microsoft replacement in high profile situations". They rightly conclude that they can't stand another four years of the same trend, so they latch on to the term that best misrepresents the nature of the GPL for their purposes.
But if you think the GPL is "viral", you need to read the GPL for comprehension.
> Fox thinks it's a real network, and holds the bar a little bit higher than an offbeat cable network like SciFi. The WB would've killed for Firefly's ratings, but Fox needs a bigger pull...
Fox mismanaged Firefly so badly that it's hard not to believe some influential exec wanted it to die. They started by running ads that grossly misrepresented the nature of the program, then they decided not to bother showing the pilot, then, right about the time people's new-season watching habits were starting to solidify they bumped it two weeks in a row for some really crappy Thanksgiving specials, and finally, after announcing that they were going to do a media blitz to try to bump up the ratings when it started showing again, they hardly bothered advertising for it on their own station, let alone any kind of "media blitz".
The only surprise is that anyone bothered watching it regularly at all. More's the shame, because it really was a good show -- but you did have to tune it in regularly and learn a bit about the characters in order to appreciate it.
[from the link:] > Known in the OSS community as a "viral" licence.
As the author points out, and as others of us have stated repeatedly: the GPL isn't viral, it's recursive. I've got lots of non-GPL software on my home system, and none of it has ever "caught" the GPL.
The simple rule is: if A is GPL'd and B is derived from A, then B is GPL'd. The rule is "recursive" or "transitive", but not "viral". The OSS community would do itself a favor to quit calling it "viral". (Though in fact the term seems to be more common among complainers than among GPLers, despite what the quoted MS document says.)
Hint to Microsoft: if you don't want to GPL your software, don't derive it from GPL'd software. It's as simple as that -- at least for people who aren't being obtuse willfully.
Slashdot Mirror
> It needs to be taken out the back and shot
Let us know when your competing system is ready for us to test.
> You are an idiot. Bill Gates's net worth is estimated to be $35 billion.
IIRC it was over $100 billion for much of the period you invoked. The drop in his net worth came with the general tech-stock crash of the past couple of years.
Do correct me if I'm wrong on that point.
> Can't you read? Post or retract, bitch!
I elected to post. Don't blame me if you don't like the results!
> No, it doesn't, you idiot. Read the post. $5.5 billion to charity. Yes, most of it was in grants of less than $1 million, but so what? The fact is that Gates has spent $5.5 billion on charity, and $400 million on promoting Microsoft software in India. Coincidentally, that's a ratio of about 14:1 as well.
Ah, but you're comparing his total donations over his entire life vs. his recent MS promotion in India alone.
Don't get me wrong: I'm glad that he's spending a big percentage of his tax-break PR-break money on AIDS research, since AIDS seems to be one of the world's worst problems these days. But don't mistake those outlays as anything other than an integral part of the cost of being an ultra-rich businessman. If you investigate a bit you'll find that they all do the same thing. In fact, one of the previous times this came up on Slashdot someone marshalled the evidence to show that Gates' donations are actually lower than the going rate for this class of individual.
Face it, they are gestures that reveal no more about his character than when a politician serves the first bowl of gruel at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. If you want to promote him to sainthood, he needs to give until it's inconvenient. I'm happy about where some of his money goes; I just don't buy it as evidence that he isn't a world-class jerk.
ps - How does it feel to realize that you have bought in to a propaganda ploy hook, line, and sinker?
> He compares artists' works to, well, raw sewage that publishers filter into something that can be later consumed by the public.
Yeah, but when the publisher in question is the RIAA they filter out all the good stuff and pass all the lip-sync dance-sync boy-band crap on to the consumer.
> > ps - What exactly do you do at Microsoft?
> I fuck your baby sister's bloody ass all day long. What exactly do you do under RMS's desk all day?
You make such an eloquent argument that I'm tempted to apply for a job at Micorsoft too!
> The Gates Foundation has given out over $5.5 billion since 1994, and over $3 billion of that went to world health. Microsoft's $400 million investment is a fucking pimple compared to those kinds of numbers. When you give five billion dollars in charitable grants, Crack Faggot, you can criticize.
As a percentage of his net worth, that's like someone making $100K/year giving a few hundred dollars per year to charity.
> Until the, wipe RMS's commie jizz off of your chin and get back to work.
I'm unemployed. Microsoft destroyed my company.
ps - My 14:1 ratio of money spent in India still stands. Shouldn't Gates also be lauded for all that money he donated toward the preservation of monopolies?
> M$ seems to not understand that viewing the source is only one third of the Open Source equation.
Hell, they still don't fully 'get' the internet. Why should we expect them to grok OSS?
> Post or retract, asshole. You said, "his team spent about four times that much on trying to keep India loyal to the Microsoft brand name." Post some kind of URL that confirms this accusation or retract your statement. I'm sick and tired of Slashdotters spewing falsehoods whenever they feel an urge to make a point.
> Post, or retract.
I stand corrected. While looking for the relevant news in a search engine (you should learn to do that too) I discovered that my claimed 4:1 ratio was off by more a factor of three. It should actually be 14:1 , since the funding ratio is $421 MM over 3 years vs. $100 MM over 10 years.
I should learn to research my posts a little better.
ps - What exactly do you do at Microsoft?
> The following is an example game file your program is supposed to output a dataset for that is "most human". I give you:
> > NFG 1 R "game1" { "1" "2" } { 2 2 }
> > 21 3 3 5 3 5 5 3
> What is the most human response? Anyone? Anyone?
1337 4um4n g4m3r5 r001!
> Its been awhile sence I read about the subject, but isn't the Turing test just putting people in front of a terminal to talk to either a real person or a AI, and then asking which is the real person. When the same number of testers chose the AI as the real person, then the AI passes the test. Sence when did the Turing name apply to every AI competion? Am I wrong? This isn't a flame just a question about definitions...
Admit it -- you're a robot, aren't you?
Your brittle conformance to textbook definitions gave it away.
> Amazing. They are having an AI tournament, and their supported language list includes C, C++, Java, Perl, Mathematica, and something called the Gambit Command Language. Where the hell are the good AI languages? Functional languages? Lisp? Scheme? Caml? SML? Hell, I'd settle for Python.
Damn! I'm 30 million lines into my HAL 9000 emulator, but I wrote it in COBOL.
> Ah the life, bribing India,
Yeah, the media made a big deal out of how much money he donated for AIDS while he was in India, but most neglected to mention that during the same trip his team spent about four times that much on trying to keep India loyal to the Microsoft brand name.
> > speaker/panelist at such prestigious educational institutions as Harvard Business School, Stanford University, The Cato Institute, University of Michigan, University of Texas,
> Bit insensitive to put crank tank financed by rich rightwing crackpots to promote partisan views ahead of Michigan and Texas Universities though.
Oh -- for a moment I thought you were going to say "at the end of the list".
> Cool--it's like a library card for food!
Except that they don't want you to bring stuff back when you're through eating it.
> As someone who spends more time reading research papers than working with an actual Turing Test bot, I'd just like to point out that the academic community has abstracted the term "Turing Test" into something a little more useful...
Games would actually make a great Turing test. I.e., monitor a networked game and try to tell which players are humans and which are artificial agents.
For most games that would be much easier than the unrestricted conversation test, but maybe that's where we need to go to get to first base with AI.
> So while each of them is concerned about one direction, the goals differ.
Good point. Looks like I dilexed right over his "and electronic companies".
> This basically says that the RIAA and electronic companies would rather copyright not come up in congress right now, because both would rather keep the situation as-is than allow there to be any meaningful changes in either direction.
I'd be willing to wager that they're only concerned about the possibility of meaningful changes in one direction.
> Needless to say, I'm fairly sceptical that this is an actual speedup of browsing.
Speeds up browsing... programs 1500 SLOC/day...
One suspects he's doing his calculations using dog years or metric time or something.
> It's much more politically feasable to say "I just need to check on the FTC powers" then to say "My funders oppose the do-not-call list".
Voters' votes, donors' funds?
Politics is one hell of an optimization problem.
> You might take a look at GVD, the GNU Visual Debugger, which can generate graphs of datastructures.
It also has pluggable language support, so $SOMEONE can add support for your favorite language to it.
> The GPL has some serious issues. While Linux has been progressing nicely and people have been making money, who is paying the developer?
Why is that supposed to be a GPL issue? The GPL says nothing about who pays the producers.
> Basically Open Source promotes takers and not givers.
Then where are all those gigabytes of GPL'd code coming from?
> Without a base investment long term OSS will have issues.....
Then Microsoft seems to be unduly worried.
> Neither of your suggestions work.
Sure they do.
> "Recursive" would mean that the GPL is explained in terms of the GPL.
"Recursive" has uses other than recursive definitions. In this case "recursive" describes the operation of the GPL. The base cases are software that is written from scratch but placed under the GPL anyway.
(OK, now that I think on it perhaps I should say "inductive" rather than "recursive", because the GPL, like induction, starts at some base case and goes on forever from there, whereas recursion starts at some arbitrary point and works toward a base case. nit = picked)
> Transitivity is a property of relations as in: "if a is related to b and b is related to c then a is related to c". Since the GPL is not a relation it cannot be transitive.
No, the GPL isn't a relation, but the transitive property is in fact a property of GPL'd code (barring license violations). Substitute "derived from" for your "related to" in your example, and you'll see why. (Notice that "derived from" is a relation.)
More to the point, "viral" is not a property of GPL'd code -- at least not by virtue of being GPL'd.
> The premise of the Dark Materials triology sounds a LOT like the root of the Gnostic Heresey
<quibble>Gnosticism is only a "heresy" from the POV of competing sects</quibble>
Yes, the brief summary does sound like a gnostic take on things. The Wikipedia link gives more stories purportedly based on gnosticism, though I don't immediately see how Twelve Monkeys fits that mold.
> The Gnostic Heresy, as I understand it:
Yes, more or less, except that there was actually a great deal of diversity to the movement, and in fact some of it lay outside Christianity altogether. (FWIW, the Revelation attributed to St. John has been analyzed as a Jewish Gnostic tract.)
> The Gnosic Heresy, btw, was propagated by a series of "revelations" about the faith, sort of like the popular image of how a witch's coven is organized.
<quibble>You mean kind sort of like all religious sects get started -- saving only those that are outright hoaxes.</quibble>
But the important thing is that gnosis (Greek for "knowledge") was supposed to be a direct revelational knowledge of God.
Ultimately that's probably why the Gnostic tradition died out, because the core belief was not amenable to any imposition of orthodoxy that would have allowed it to fight back as an unfragmented sect when the increasingly orthodox Christianity-as-we-know it decided they needed to quash Gnosticism. (IIRC, Gnosticism was the motivation behind the calling of the Council that voted on which books would be in the Bible-as-we-know it.)
> It was stamped out rather freverently in the early days of Christianity, and hasn't been a going concern as a religion for a great many years.
As were most of the early forms of Christianity, including the "primitive Christianity" described in the New Testament.
> I still have hope that television can recover from its great creeping miasma, but that hope is waning fast.
I think the broadcast networks are dead and just don't know it yet. (Or maybe they do know it.) Cable has killed them. You're starting to see informercials during prime time, for Christ's sake. And more and more of the remaining programming is the cheap-to-produce "reality" shite, sitcoms, talk shows, "entertainment" programs that are thinly disguised ads for the music and movie industries, etc., with an ever increasing erotic content to entice casual channel flippers to linger for a while.
In 10 years any of the broadcast networks that still exist will be unrecognizable as what you thought "television" meant when you were a kid.
> Let's say that the FSF has an annurism, and releases a VB workalike, with common controls and librarys and whatnot, and releases the whole sheebang with the GPL. Anyone using these common controls or libraries has to now use the GPL.
(a) No one has any inherent right to use the FSF's code. If they do that and you don't like the license, use something else.
(b) In practice the libraries would more likely be placed under the LGPL, so that you could use the widgets in your owns software without GPLing it.
[snip similarly bogus example]
> The GPL's "viral" nature propagates through the only way "code flesh" is ever exchanged--through re-use of components.
No, it propagates through the re-use of GPL'd components in a certain manner. There are lots of LGPL'd components out there that you can reuse without having to GPL your own code. And if you want to use something in a way that would require you to GPL your own work: deal with it.
"Don't like, don't use." You don't have any inherent rights to it; you have exactly the rights spelled out in the license.
> Here's a thought for you: The Open Gaming License is based on the GPL, but it has one important difference: you need to keep the actual derivations open and licensed, but not the rest of the game that wasn't derived from the OGL'd game at all.
Good for them. Except that happens to be completely irrelevant to the point under discussion. The GPL isn't going to "infect" anything, and it isn't going to "make" anyone GPL their product. "Don't like, don't use."
Microsoft is just scared shitless because in about 4 years the immense body of GPL'd code has gone from "under the radar" to "being adopted as a Microsoft replacement in high profile situations". They rightly conclude that they can't stand another four years of the same trend, so they latch on to the term that best misrepresents the nature of the GPL for their purposes.
But if you think the GPL is "viral", you need to read the GPL for comprehension.
> Fox thinks it's a real network, and holds the bar a little bit higher than an offbeat cable network like SciFi. The WB would've killed for Firefly's ratings, but Fox needs a bigger pull...
Fox mismanaged Firefly so badly that it's hard not to believe some influential exec wanted it to die. They started by running ads that grossly misrepresented the nature of the program, then they decided not to bother showing the pilot, then, right about the time people's new-season watching habits were starting to solidify they bumped it two weeks in a row for some really crappy Thanksgiving specials, and finally, after announcing that they were going to do a media blitz to try to bump up the ratings when it started showing again, they hardly bothered advertising for it on their own station, let alone any kind of "media blitz".
The only surprise is that anyone bothered watching it regularly at all. More's the shame, because it really was a good show -- but you did have to tune it in regularly and learn a bit about the characters in order to appreciate it.
[from the link:] > Known in the OSS community as a "viral" licence.
As the author points out, and as others of us have stated repeatedly: the GPL isn't viral, it's recursive. I've got lots of non-GPL software on my home system, and none of it has ever "caught" the GPL.
The simple rule is: if A is GPL'd and B is derived from A, then B is GPL'd. The rule is "recursive" or "transitive", but not "viral". The OSS community would do itself a favor to quit calling it "viral". (Though in fact the term seems to be more common among complainers than among GPLers, despite what the quoted MS document says.)
Hint to Microsoft: if you don't want to GPL your software, don't derive it from GPL'd software. It's as simple as that -- at least for people who aren't being obtuse willfully.