Don't hold me responsible for how other people think of themselves.
Don't accuse me of something I haven't done.
All I'm asking people to be responsible for is the consequences of their actions. This requires understanding what the actions are, and what the consequences are. Most so-called "white" people in the USA fail it very badly, on both counts; they perpetuate racism through their actions without understanding that they do so, all the while thinking that they're moral examples of acceptance and tolerance. That's no more vicious than it is morally virtuous, I'll grant; what does border on the vicious, however, is the energy that is spent on preserving the self-assessment whenever somebody dares to contradict them.
I would like nothing more than for minorities to think of themselves first as individuals and not as members of an ethnic group, and many of them do (immediate counterexample), but those who don't need to take responsibility for themselves.
Who said that they think of themselves first as members of a group? You're making stuff up.
The way ethnic minorities are treated, day after day after day, is full of constant reminders that they are seen as members of a racially defined group. No matter how they may choose to think of themselves, they can't control how others see them, so they have to deal with the consequences of how other people see them, in their everyday interaction. They share a forced commonality with people of the same "race" as them, whether they like it or not.
Sure, most people do identify themselves with a stereotypical group of people with undifferentiated interests and preferences, but they're supposed to outgrow it after high school.
Congratulations, you've just compared people of color to adolescents.
I think what you describe as 'white privilege' might be better described as an inferiority complex on the part of people who use that term. Note that having an inferiority complex in no way implies any actual inferiority.
No, you failed to understand the notion of white privilege. White privilege is about things that "white" people, in general, have the luxury of taking for granted, because of how they are perceived when they interact with others.
There is definitely something to what you said, but it falls under the consequences of racism on its victims, not under white privilege.
"Fuck Islam" is no more hate speech than "Fuck Creationists" or "Fuck Republicans". They both are ways to express strong rejection of a certain belief system.
Neither Republicans nor creationists in the USA are perceived in a racialized manner in the mainstream culture. Islam is. There are millions upon millions of people in the USA who could care less what the difference is betwen the statements "Fuck Islam" vs. "Fuck Arabs." Compare this with "Fuck Republicans" vs. "Fuck White People."
Merely because people label their beliefs religious doesn't magically make them immune from criticism.
It doesn't. When somebody calls a group "Fuck Islam," however, I have to be skeptical of how serious their criticism is.
More precisely the concept of hate speech is incoherent. It is impossible to at once give a definition of hate speech that makes it clear why it is significantly worse than things like "Fuck Republicans" but yet also makes it obvious that the things termed hate speech, e.g., "Fuck Islam", qualify.
In mainstream American culture, party affiliation is seen as a voluntary choice, and the choice is not conceived in a racialized way. Being Arab, however, is not a voluntary choice, and Arab ethnicity is seen as going hand-in-hand with Islam. A careful, scrupulous distinction between Arabs and Islam is not the rule in the USA; it's the exception. A careful, scrupulous distinction between whiteness and party membership, on the other hand, is taken for granted.
I agree that speech that involves the phrase "Fuck Islam" is more likely to be motivated by thoughtless prejudice than other sorts of speech but mere correlation doesn't get you very far.
The correlation gets you very far, because the contemporary understanding of racism among people who study it (or whatever you want to call it in this particular case; don't bring out the lame "Islam is not a race" non-point) isn't about the motivation of individual actions; it's about how these sorts of measurable correlations result in many very small everyday indignities which, in the aggregate, conspire to make their victims' quality of life measurably worse.
There is going to be a correlation between "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior" and ignorant prejudice as well but this doesn't make the statement of evangelical beliefs hate speech.
Christianity is not conceived in racialized terms in mainstream USA culture. If you're a Christian, people take it for granted that your religion has nothing to do with your race.
[...] the folks who want to muck things up further in the Middle East do not self-identify with white people in the way the other groups self-identify with blacks, muslims, and jews, respectively.
And this is a classic symptom of white privilege. The fact that "white people" are held to be the hegemonical race in the USA affords said "whites" the privilege of thinking of themselves in non-racial terms; members of minority groups don't have the advantage of thinking of themselves in "neutral," non-racial terms. What you point out and what I just said are also intimately related to projecting the actions and beliefs of a select subset of a minority group to the whole (using inner-city youth as the image of black people in general, assuming all Asian-Americans are good at math), or judging minority group members by how they meet or diverge from the stereotype ("You're really articulate!").
"Fuck Islam" is not hate speech, any more than "Fuck Christianity", "Fuck Scientology" or "Fuck Atheism" is.
You're assuming that vulgar racism distiguishes its targets from the rest of society at large in a careful, sophisticated, fine-grained and discerning manner. Or, in other terms, that the people who the title "Fuck Islam" appeals to, in general, give much of a fuck whether it says "Fuck Islam," "Fuck Arabs," "Fuck Towelheads," or "Fuck Sand Niggers."
Islam is a religion that's perceived through a racial lens in the USA.
Can I have a FaceBook group called "F**k Negros", to attack the inner-city black youth culture that fills the city I live in with violence? Can I have a "F**k GWB" group to attack the dumbass president who is screwing things up in the Middle East? Can I have a "F**k the Jews" group attacking the whiny Jews who scream "anti-semitism!" in order to stifle legitimate debate?
But, by your logic, shouldn't the second of these groups you propose be called "Fuck White People"?
"Fuck hate speech" is not hate speech. Hate speech is an action, freely chosen by its perpetrators, that targets a set of people on the basis of characteristics that they either do not choose (skin color), or which, in the face of their perpetrators, are so central to their identity that they cannot easily or sincerely choose otherwise (religion). To make things worse, in the latter case, the definition of the victim group in terms of religion, something where technically they could choose otherwise, is just a scapegoat; racists (religious chauvinists, xenophobes, whatever you want to call them) aren't very well known for being very precise and discerning about who they target; in the racist mind, "muslim," "towelhead" and "sand nigger" might as well mean the same thing. Just ask Christian Arabs who get shit for speaking Arabic.
The second requires deep though to understand, can't be easily debugged (unless you want to dive into a predefined function), can't be changed easily.
The example you're responding to is crummy, which is what leads you to think like this. Every language that supports functional programming in a decent way allows you to write and debug functions like map trivially. A simple implementation of map is trivial to understand too; it takes a list and a function, it creates a new list of the same length as the input list, and it fills it up with the result of calling the supplied function with the corresponding element of the input list. As long as your language allows you to pass functions as arguments to other functions in a straighforward manner (which C does not), there's no magic involved.
You want to be able to write your own higher order functions anyway, and you want to be able to debug them.
It's still a pretty minor point, because it's really easy to write functions like map, to understand them, and to unit test them. In fact, this makes the functional program easier to debug. When you split out your "looping" into a generic higher order function to provide the structure, and an argument functions to provide the case-specific logic and transitions, you can test them independently.
Have you ever written a loop?
on
Programming Erlang
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's very different, but the big advantage is that it's higher level than the stuff you confess to understanding better.
The code in question (in Python? not a great choice for doing an example!) uses two very common higher-order operations in functional programming: map and compose. A map operation takes a complex data structure (most common example: a list), and a function that applies to elements of that data structure, and returns another structure, with the same "shape," where each element in the result is related to its corresponding element in the original structure by being the result of apply the function. Thus, if you have a list [2, 3, 5, 7], and a function inc that increments a number by one, map(inc, [2, 3, 5, 7]) evaluates to [3, 4, 6, 8].
In the case of a list, map is can be implemented by creating a new list of the same length as the original, looping over the list, applying the function to each value, and storing the result in the result list. This is a kind of task that imperative programmers find themselves doing all the time. The problem with this, however, is that if you're writing code like this all the time, you're writing at a much too low level, with the all the disadvantages of that:
It takes you longer to write code. Instead of writing just result = map(fn, myList), you have to write a loop.
Your code is specifying the mechanism to convert the input list into the output list over and over, instead of describing the relation between the lists. Suppose you want to change the mechanism for doing this sort of operation, e.g., to parallelize it. In functional style, you can just rewrite map to do its work in parallel. In imperative programming, you have to work harder.
The concept of mapping a function over a structure, to produce a new structure with values related to the original by the function, applies to many kinds of data structure, not just sequences. You can write equivalents of maps for any container data function you like, even though the mechanics are different; e.g., to implement a map function over a tree you typically use recursion. This means that in the imperative style, the code for "increment all the values of this list by 1" looks very different from the code for "increment all values in this tree by 1"; in functional programming, they will at least look very similar, if not completely the same.
There are many, many other common progamming blocks that you can abstract into a function in functional programming, but not in imperative programming. For example, filtering a list to only keep the elements that satisfy a boolean function, which in functional programming is usually just a function called something like filter. For example, if you have a function called even, that returns true only for even numbers, here's how you get the even numbers in myList: filter(even, myList)
Functional programming solutions often compose more easily than imperative ones; i.e., it is easier to put them together to solve more complex tasks. For example, if you need to increment a list of numbers by one each, and only keep the ones that are even in the result, you can do that easily and transparently: filter(even, map(inc, myList)). In the imperative style, the patterns for mapping and for filtering don't combine this straightforwardly.
Functional code is usually easier to read. When I read a piece of imperative code and come across a loop, I normally have to work the steps a bit in my mind in order to see what it is that it does: "Hmm, we create a new list at the beginning, then we loop through the elements of this other list, and as we go through each one, we apply a function to it, and put the result in the list we first created. Ah, we're mapping over the list." In functional programming, these common patterns find immediate expression in a higher-order function
There isn't really an argument, it's a simple definition. Islam isn't a race. People who hate Muslims aren't racist. They could be any number of other things depending on their ideology and motivations including ignorant, bigots, or just regular old stupid, but they're NOT racist.
Who gave you the power to fix the meanings of words? What makes you think that the meaning of terms is a function of their "definitions" in the first place?
You're making a completely pointless argument. As any half-trained social scientist will tell you, the concept of "race" in the sense of the term "racism" is a socially constructed concept; a way of explaining social difference by appeal to an attributed biological difference, which may not in fact exist. But the bigger point is that "race" is just one ingredient in the palette of things that discriminatory ideologies appeal to; religion and language are no less important.
In short, there really isn't any principled important dividing line to be drawn between "racism," "xenophobia" and "anti-Islamism." Calling anti-Muslim attitudes "racism" isn't a big abuse of the term, because the (a) differences are relatively minor, given the context of the discussion, and (b) it's not like vulgar racist thought itself cares about such precise distinctions.
The gene for driving on the right would thrive in a population where it outnumbered the gene for driving on the left. For example, if a small group of people with a recessive mutation for driving on the right were to be thrown together into an isolated island, driving on the right would have a good chance of becoming epidemic among their inbred offspring.
Universal constraints on color vocabular inventories were one of the major paradigm cases of cognitive anthropology back in the 1960's (as was analysis of folk etymologies, and prototype concepts). However, it would be good if you didn't make up terms like "anthropological etymology" to refer to this sort of stuff.
[...] it's common for the first two words for color in a language to represent warmer colors (reddish) and cooler colors (bluish or greenish, although which one of these comes first is split somewhat).
Careful how you state this. In what sense are those two words "first"?
As a language evolves to have more vocabulary, it's typical that finer distinctions are made among colors and more words are added to represent them.
...and the actual evidence for this is what?
(We have cross-linguistic surveys of color vocabularies that support the hypothesis that color term systems must follow certain patterns. While this is certainly suggestive about possible patterns of language change, I don't think there is much in the way of direct evidence for what you're claiming here.)
It's possible the color words which are perceived differently by a particular race or which made the most difference to survival (think poisonous plants and animals vs. food sources) for people at the time and place of the language's early development lead to different color words coming about in different orders.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but what is so difficult about learning to spell?
That's a serious question that deserves a non-rhetorical answer, which you are obviously disqualified from providing.
Ignoring obvious developmental deficiencies, nothing is stopping you from going to the library and getting out a big fat vocab book designed for foreigners or child natives.
And what makes you think that's going to help? Have you considered the possibility that somebody without "obvious developmental deficiencies" may simply still be doomed to bad spelling? Also, what standard are you using to decide what counts as a "developmental deficiency," and does that standard fly in the face of actual average spelling skills? I.e., have you considered that perhaps you're expecting everybody to be above average?
Spelling only appears to be a trivial skill to those who master it. The relationship between the written representations of words and their phonological representations is very hard to unravel, and is typically only rational when you compare it against archaic stages of the language (i.e., when you compare it to the way people spoke 600 years ago).
What GP is saying is not some "legal theory"; it's copyright law.
The BSD license must remain, but it can be superseded by another license. If you modify BSD source, and you make your modifications GPL, the entire file is effectively GPL.
Not quite. The file is a GPL-licensed derivative work from a BSD licensed original work. The GPL applies to your modifications and to the resulting derivative work, but not to the original BSD-licensed work. The BSD license applies to the parts of your work that were taken from the original BSD-licensed work, but not to your modifications not to the overall derived work. Somebody can take your file, determine which parts are yours and which are from the original work, rip out your parts, and the original work's BSD license allows them to use those parts under the BSD license terms. If you take me to court for infringing on your copyright, you can't point at pieces of your file that you got from the BSD-licensed original as proof of infringment, even if you can prove that I copied them from your file; as long as I correctly judged that you did not own those pieces, you just don't have anything on me.
You must display the original BSD license notice in the derived work because your license to use the original BSD work requires you to display it. You are not required to license your modifications or your derived work under the BSD; if you release your modifications under the GPL, then you have to make it clear that it is a non-BSD licensed derivative of an original BSD licensed work, and reproduce the copyright and license notices of the original. It is only the fact that the original author has extended a BSD license to you and to the recipients of your modified work that allows you to modify it and distribute modifications to the original work, and to place the resulting derived work under the GPL. As long as the file contains the work of the original authors, then the whole still contains parts that are covered by those authors' license, simply because they own those parts.
"In the next few days, Pope Benedict XVI plans to issue his second encyclical, in which he is expected to denounce the use of tax havens as socially unjust and immoral in that they cheat the greater well-being of society. He is also expected to argue that the globalized economic world needs to be regulated. Prime technology companies playing the offshore 'profit laundering' game include Dell, Google, Microsoft, and Sun, who set up subsidiaries in Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is a low 12.5% and no taxes are charged on royalties (e.g. from patents)."
And of course, this is exactly equivalent to making a pronouncement that Google specifically is evil. Of course.
Ok. Why can't we get a writeup that says, briefly, who exactly said what? Because I'm pretty sure there wasn't a joint declaration by all of the music industry that said what the writeup says.
As far as I can tell, the whole fuss is due to a confusion over whether the code was covered by both licenses simultaneously (in which case it's almost but not quite identical to the GPL, because the BSD part has to remain intact), or the recipient's choice (in which case it's pretty much BSD, and either license can be removed at will).
And as far as I can tell, you yourself are confused over the matter too, by referring to the thing under contention as "the code."
The problem here is that, in terms of copyright law, the modified source file is a new work derived in part from another author's work. In order for somebody to use the derived work in a particular manner, they must have a license to use both the original and the derived work in the manner in question.
The derived work is GPL-licensed, but the original is BSD-licensed, and the parts of the GPL work that were taken from the original continue to be licensed under the BSD. When you ungraciously slap the GPL notice onto your derived work, you do not thereby give your recipients a GPL license to the parts of your work that you obtained from somebody else under the terms of the BSD; these folks have a license to use those parts because the original authors' BSD license says they do.
But wouldn't your GPL recipients be free to remove that BSD clause?
No, the GPL doesn't allow you to remove the BSD clause.
For the recipients of your derivative programs's source code to be allowed to use, distribute or modify the program, they must have two licenses:
a license from the original authors that allows them to use, distribute and modify the original work;
a license from you that allows them to use, distribute and modify the derived work that results after your changes and/or additions.
You cannot remove the BSD license from a piece of code you don't own simply because you don't own that code, and therefore, you don't have the right to license people to use that code. You have the right to use, modify and distribute the code to anybody from any purpose, but the license that allows you to do so, and that further confers your recipients the same right, comes from the authors of the original software, not from you. The only thing you own are your modifications.
After all, they received your code on the terms of the GPL which does not require keeping that BSD clause, and moreover, prohibits such additional requirements?
The problem with what you say should be clear now: what they received isn't "your code." They received a derivative work that you produced by taking the original authors' BSD-licensed work, and making GPL-licensed additions and/or modifications. Your GPL license doesn't apply to any part of the derived work that comes from the original authors, and there is nothing you can do to make it so. Anybody who takes your source file and can identify which parts of it come from the original, BSD-licensed work, can take those parts and use, modify and redistribute them under the terms of the BSD license. The only thing you've accomplished by adding a GPL license is to license the parts of the new work that you own--your modifications.
A big misconception here is that people seem to think that licenses apply to the whole files. Not quite. A license is a permission from the author of a work that allows others to do certain things with that work. Copyrighted "works" and a source code files don't correspond to each other in a one-to-one fashion. A single source file can consist of multiple works, licensed by different people under different licenses at different times. The key thing is that to use a source file you are given, you must have a license to use every work that the file comprises in the manner that you want to use it.
Having talked to a few BSD licence fans most of them like the licence because it allows another group to take their code and close it off.
Yes. That's because there are situations where it makes sense that somebody should be able to do that. The argument in this case is that this isn't one of them.
That's the problem with your reasoning. You are accusing people who've released code under the BSD of not having considered the cons of the license. In fact, you can be sure that plenty of them were well aware of the cons from day 1, but simply judged the pros to outweigh them. They've chosen to deal with the cons in question here through argument, appeal to ethics and persuasion, rather than by legal action, which would have costs they deem unacceptable.
Note what the patch is doing, very carefully. The patch is changing the copyright notices on top of the modified files to say that these files are licensed under the GPL, but are also based upon an earlier work licensed under the BSD, and then reproduce the copyright and license statements as required by the original BSD licenses. This makes completely transparent the following things:
The new work is released under the GPL license only. Anybody who uses, modifies or distributes this new work must abide by that license. They don't have any other license to that work.
The new work is based on older work whose authors released under the BSD license, and the authors of the new work received the original under that license. In order for the authors of the new work to comply with the license that allows them to release a derivative of the original work, they reproduce the copyright and license notices of the original. These license notices only apply to the portions of the new work that are taken from the original one.
If BSD-license-using coders find it "immoral" for people to use their code under other, more restrictive license schemes, then why are they using the BSD license?
Because they feel that releasing their code under a more restrictive license has bigger disadvantages than the ones of releasing it under the BSD license. Gee, that was easy, wasn't it?
Exercise for the reader: go read and find out what they think the bigger disadvantages are.
None of the explanations in question have been voiced by Microsoft in an official channel. We have a ZDNet blogger selectively quoting an alleged email he got from some unnamed person at Microsoft.
I'm ready to believe that the ZDNet blogger did get an email with those quotes from somebody at Microsoft, and that he's not distorting the content, but I'm far less ready to believe that this email represents Microsoft's official take on it. For all we know, it's a product manager making stuff up or misinterpreting the answer he got from an engineer they asked; they could be releasing information without the due cautions or without going through the correct channels; etc.
Predictions:
Microsoft will, following its ordinary processes that it would have followed anyway, judge that this is a bug, openly admit so. A fix will be issued.
Slobbering slashbots will then say that Microsoft at first officially refused to recognize that it was a bug, and only admitted it was after extensive pressure by slashbots. This once again proves how important slashbots are.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't accuse me of something I haven't done.
All I'm asking people to be responsible for is the consequences of their actions. This requires understanding what the actions are, and what the consequences are. Most so-called "white" people in the USA fail it very badly, on both counts; they perpetuate racism through their actions without understanding that they do so, all the while thinking that they're moral examples of acceptance and tolerance. That's no more vicious than it is morally virtuous, I'll grant; what does border on the vicious, however, is the energy that is spent on preserving the self-assessment whenever somebody dares to contradict them.
Who said that they think of themselves first as members of a group? You're making stuff up.
The way ethnic minorities are treated, day after day after day, is full of constant reminders that they are seen as members of a racially defined group. No matter how they may choose to think of themselves, they can't control how others see them, so they have to deal with the consequences of how other people see them, in their everyday interaction. They share a forced commonality with people of the same "race" as them, whether they like it or not.
Congratulations, you've just compared people of color to adolescents.
No, you failed to understand the notion of white privilege. White privilege is about things that "white" people, in general, have the luxury of taking for granted, because of how they are perceived when they interact with others.
There is definitely something to what you said, but it falls under the consequences of racism on its victims, not under white privilege.
Neither Republicans nor creationists in the USA are perceived in a racialized manner in the mainstream culture. Islam is. There are millions upon millions of people in the USA who could care less what the difference is betwen the statements "Fuck Islam" vs. "Fuck Arabs." Compare this with "Fuck Republicans" vs. "Fuck White People."
It doesn't. When somebody calls a group "Fuck Islam," however, I have to be skeptical of how serious their criticism is.
In mainstream American culture, party affiliation is seen as a voluntary choice, and the choice is not conceived in a racialized way. Being Arab, however, is not a voluntary choice, and Arab ethnicity is seen as going hand-in-hand with Islam. A careful, scrupulous distinction between Arabs and Islam is not the rule in the USA; it's the exception. A careful, scrupulous distinction between whiteness and party membership, on the other hand, is taken for granted.
The correlation gets you very far, because the contemporary understanding of racism among people who study it (or whatever you want to call it in this particular case; don't bring out the lame "Islam is not a race" non-point) isn't about the motivation of individual actions; it's about how these sorts of measurable correlations result in many very small everyday indignities which, in the aggregate, conspire to make their victims' quality of life measurably worse.
Christianity is not conceived in racialized terms in mainstream USA culture. If you're a Christian, people take it for granted that your religion has nothing to do with your race.
And this is a classic symptom of white privilege. The fact that "white people" are held to be the hegemonical race in the USA affords said "whites" the privilege of thinking of themselves in non-racial terms; members of minority groups don't have the advantage of thinking of themselves in "neutral," non-racial terms. What you point out and what I just said are also intimately related to projecting the actions and beliefs of a select subset of a minority group to the whole (using inner-city youth as the image of black people in general, assuming all Asian-Americans are good at math), or judging minority group members by how they meet or diverge from the stereotype ("You're really articulate!").
You're assuming that vulgar racism distiguishes its targets from the rest of society at large in a careful, sophisticated, fine-grained and discerning manner. Or, in other terms, that the people who the title "Fuck Islam" appeals to, in general, give much of a fuck whether it says "Fuck Islam," "Fuck Arabs," "Fuck Towelheads," or "Fuck Sand Niggers."
Islam is a religion that's perceived through a racial lens in the USA.
But, by your logic, shouldn't the second of these groups you propose be called "Fuck White People"?
"Fuck hate speech" is not hate speech. Hate speech is an action, freely chosen by its perpetrators, that targets a set of people on the basis of characteristics that they either do not choose (skin color), or which, in the face of their perpetrators, are so central to their identity that they cannot easily or sincerely choose otherwise (religion). To make things worse, in the latter case, the definition of the victim group in terms of religion, something where technically they could choose otherwise, is just a scapegoat; racists (religious chauvinists, xenophobes, whatever you want to call them) aren't very well known for being very precise and discerning about who they target; in the racist mind, "muslim," "towelhead" and "sand nigger" might as well mean the same thing. Just ask Christian Arabs who get shit for speaking Arabic.
The example you're responding to is crummy, which is what leads you to think like this. Every language that supports functional programming in a decent way allows you to write and debug functions like map trivially. A simple implementation of map is trivial to understand too; it takes a list and a function, it creates a new list of the same length as the input list, and it fills it up with the result of calling the supplied function with the corresponding element of the input list. As long as your language allows you to pass functions as arguments to other functions in a straighforward manner (which C does not), there's no magic involved.
It's still a pretty minor point, because it's really easy to write functions like map, to understand them, and to unit test them. In fact, this makes the functional program easier to debug. When you split out your "looping" into a generic higher order function to provide the structure, and an argument functions to provide the case-specific logic and transitions, you can test them independently.
It's very different, but the big advantage is that it's higher level than the stuff you confess to understanding better.
The code in question (in Python? not a great choice for doing an example!) uses two very common higher-order operations in functional programming: map and compose. A map operation takes a complex data structure (most common example: a list), and a function that applies to elements of that data structure, and returns another structure, with the same "shape," where each element in the result is related to its corresponding element in the original structure by being the result of apply the function. Thus, if you have a list [2, 3, 5, 7], and a function inc that increments a number by one, map(inc, [2, 3, 5, 7]) evaluates to [3, 4, 6, 8].
In the case of a list, map is can be implemented by creating a new list of the same length as the original, looping over the list, applying the function to each value, and storing the result in the result list. This is a kind of task that imperative programmers find themselves doing all the time. The problem with this, however, is that if you're writing code like this all the time, you're writing at a much too low level, with the all the disadvantages of that:
Who gave you the power to fix the meanings of words? What makes you think that the meaning of terms is a function of their "definitions" in the first place?
You're making a completely pointless argument. As any half-trained social scientist will tell you, the concept of "race" in the sense of the term "racism" is a socially constructed concept; a way of explaining social difference by appeal to an attributed biological difference, which may not in fact exist. But the bigger point is that "race" is just one ingredient in the palette of things that discriminatory ideologies appeal to; religion and language are no less important.
In short, there really isn't any principled important dividing line to be drawn between "racism," "xenophobia" and "anti-Islamism." Calling anti-Muslim attitudes "racism" isn't a big abuse of the term, because the (a) differences are relatively minor, given the context of the discussion, and (b) it's not like vulgar racist thought itself cares about such precise distinctions.
The gene for driving on the right would thrive in a population where it outnumbered the gene for driving on the left. For example, if a small group of people with a recessive mutation for driving on the right were to be thrown together into an isolated island, driving on the right would have a good chance of becoming epidemic among their inbred offspring.
"Anthropological etymology"? What's that?
Universal constraints on color vocabular inventories were one of the major paradigm cases of cognitive anthropology back in the 1960's (as was analysis of folk etymologies, and prototype concepts). However, it would be good if you didn't make up terms like "anthropological etymology" to refer to this sort of stuff.
Careful how you state this. In what sense are those two words "first"?
...and the actual evidence for this is what?
(We have cross-linguistic surveys of color vocabularies that support the hypothesis that color term systems must follow certain patterns. While this is certainly suggestive about possible patterns of language change, I don't think there is much in the way of direct evidence for what you're claiming here.)
This is rank speculation on your part.
That's a serious question that deserves a non-rhetorical answer, which you are obviously disqualified from providing.
And what makes you think that's going to help? Have you considered the possibility that somebody without "obvious developmental deficiencies" may simply still be doomed to bad spelling? Also, what standard are you using to decide what counts as a "developmental deficiency," and does that standard fly in the face of actual average spelling skills? I.e., have you considered that perhaps you're expecting everybody to be above average?
Spelling only appears to be a trivial skill to those who master it. The relationship between the written representations of words and their phonological representations is very hard to unravel, and is typically only rational when you compare it against archaic stages of the language (i.e., when you compare it to the way people spoke 600 years ago).
There's nothing non-standard with the title as written for this story. Using were is more formal; not to imply that was in that context is informal.
What GP is saying is not some "legal theory"; it's copyright law.
Not quite. The file is a GPL-licensed derivative work from a BSD licensed original work. The GPL applies to your modifications and to the resulting derivative work, but not to the original BSD-licensed work. The BSD license applies to the parts of your work that were taken from the original BSD-licensed work, but not to your modifications not to the overall derived work. Somebody can take your file, determine which parts are yours and which are from the original work, rip out your parts, and the original work's BSD license allows them to use those parts under the BSD license terms. If you take me to court for infringing on your copyright, you can't point at pieces of your file that you got from the BSD-licensed original as proof of infringment, even if you can prove that I copied them from your file; as long as I correctly judged that you did not own those pieces, you just don't have anything on me.
You must display the original BSD license notice in the derived work because your license to use the original BSD work requires you to display it. You are not required to license your modifications or your derived work under the BSD; if you release your modifications under the GPL, then you have to make it clear that it is a non-BSD licensed derivative of an original BSD licensed work, and reproduce the copyright and license notices of the original. It is only the fact that the original author has extended a BSD license to you and to the recipients of your modified work that allows you to modify it and distribute modifications to the original work, and to place the resulting derived work under the GPL. As long as the file contains the work of the original authors, then the whole still contains parts that are covered by those authors' license, simply because they own those parts.
And of course, this is exactly equivalent to making a pronouncement that Google specifically is evil. Of course.
Ok. Why can't we get a writeup that says, briefly, who exactly said what? Because I'm pretty sure there wasn't a joint declaration by all of the music industry that said what the writeup says.
And as far as I can tell, you yourself are confused over the matter too, by referring to the thing under contention as "the code."
The problem here is that, in terms of copyright law, the modified source file is a new work derived in part from another author's work. In order for somebody to use the derived work in a particular manner, they must have a license to use both the original and the derived work in the manner in question.
The derived work is GPL-licensed, but the original is BSD-licensed, and the parts of the GPL work that were taken from the original continue to be licensed under the BSD. When you ungraciously slap the GPL notice onto your derived work, you do not thereby give your recipients a GPL license to the parts of your work that you obtained from somebody else under the terms of the BSD; these folks have a license to use those parts because the original authors' BSD license says they do.
No, the GPL doesn't allow you to remove the BSD clause.
For the recipients of your derivative programs's source code to be allowed to use, distribute or modify the program, they must have two licenses:
You cannot remove the BSD license from a piece of code you don't own simply because you don't own that code, and therefore, you don't have the right to license people to use that code. You have the right to use, modify and distribute the code to anybody from any purpose, but the license that allows you to do so, and that further confers your recipients the same right, comes from the authors of the original software, not from you. The only thing you own are your modifications.
The problem with what you say should be clear now: what they received isn't "your code." They received a derivative work that you produced by taking the original authors' BSD-licensed work, and making GPL-licensed additions and/or modifications. Your GPL license doesn't apply to any part of the derived work that comes from the original authors, and there is nothing you can do to make it so. Anybody who takes your source file and can identify which parts of it come from the original, BSD-licensed work, can take those parts and use, modify and redistribute them under the terms of the BSD license. The only thing you've accomplished by adding a GPL license is to license the parts of the new work that you own--your modifications.
A big misconception here is that people seem to think that licenses apply to the whole files. Not quite. A license is a permission from the author of a work that allows others to do certain things with that work. Copyrighted "works" and a source code files don't correspond to each other in a one-to-one fashion. A single source file can consist of multiple works, licensed by different people under different licenses at different times. The key thing is that to use a source file you are given, you must have a license to use every work that the file comprises in the manner that you want to use it.
Yes. That's because there are situations where it makes sense that somebody should be able to do that. The argument in this case is that this isn't one of them.
That's the problem with your reasoning. You are accusing people who've released code under the BSD of not having considered the cons of the license. In fact, you can be sure that plenty of them were well aware of the cons from day 1, but simply judged the pros to outweigh them. They've chosen to deal with the cons in question here through argument, appeal to ethics and persuasion, rather than by legal action, which would have costs they deem unacceptable.
Now please stop setting up strawmen.
The Linux code is being patched to fix the license problem, says TFA. Here's the content of the patch.
Note what the patch is doing, very carefully. The patch is changing the copyright notices on top of the modified files to say that these files are licensed under the GPL, but are also based upon an earlier work licensed under the BSD, and then reproduce the copyright and license statements as required by the original BSD licenses. This makes completely transparent the following things:
Because they feel that releasing their code under a more restrictive license has bigger disadvantages than the ones of releasing it under the BSD license. Gee, that was easy, wasn't it?
Exercise for the reader: go read and find out what they think the bigger disadvantages are.
Work. (As opposed to "fiddle with a computer.")
None of the explanations in question have been voiced by Microsoft in an official channel. We have a ZDNet blogger selectively quoting an alleged email he got from some unnamed person at Microsoft.
I'm ready to believe that the ZDNet blogger did get an email with those quotes from somebody at Microsoft, and that he's not distorting the content, but I'm far less ready to believe that this email represents Microsoft's official take on it. For all we know, it's a product manager making stuff up or misinterpreting the answer he got from an engineer they asked; they could be releasing information without the due cautions or without going through the correct channels; etc.
Predictions: