Now if MS was to integrate Cygwin inside Windows, so that it was an integral part of it, then Windows would become GPL'd.
Knowing MS, the would. Or, rather, knowing some Linux zealots, the case would be made that for Microsoft, based on past practices, any two pieces of software on the same CD and distributed under the same license can be assumed to be parts of the same OS.
Let's all try to get along...I'm personally getting tired of those condescending OS X users who look down on Linux despite the great progress it has made, and is still making at a breakneck pace (fortunately, they're a minority). Instead, we should all stand united as Unix or at least alternate OS users. If the enemy is the Monopoly, then the goal is Diversity. That includes Linux, the BSDs, OS X, BeOS (if it can get back from the dead), commerical Unices, and even Windows, as long as its market share drops below 50%...
I'm currently looking for a good secondary OS, to wean myself away from Windows. Linux isn't quite there yet (OO isn't quite up to snuff--and from what little I saw of it, kOffice is neither), but as soon as I boot into Linux & burn a CD, I'll give Be a try.
We should all get along. A hundred years from now I expect that all PCs will run basically the same OS--or at least, as "same" as Linux and UNIX and BSD's multitude of distributions are.
"The leading principle of our Constitution is the independence of the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary of each other." -- Thomas Jefferson
And I'm not even American.
The three independant bodies of the Federal system must, by simple virtue of being part of the same goverment, influence them. The three independent bodies working on each other is the all-too-necesssary "System of Checks and balances."
I could kill someone, and Gov. Pataki could pardon me for the murder at the 11th hour--but I'd still be a felon, still have a record, and probably still get hit with wrongful death suits.
MS could be orderd to be broken up, appeal to the S.C, lose, be pardoned--and then repeat the steps much, much quicker if they mess up again in two, five, ten, or even twenty years.
It is quite clear that there will be no noteworthy changes to the original settlement
No, it isn't. When both higher courts toss it out, THEN it'll be clear. Until then, its' worth pursuing.
It is also quite clear that the main loser is going to be the taxpayer.
The lawyers pursuing the case the government lawyers paid a salary, not hourly wages. The taxpayers don't pay much extra by pursuing this case... and since MS has to reimburse the legal expenses of the government at market rate, the taxpayers will, if anything, MAKE money.
.A president should have nothing to do with the wheels of justice.
Wrong. Executives across the country are empowered with discharging mercy where due--a breakup is a death sentence for a corporation, and Bush would be in his right to give MS a pardon to avert their breakup if he felt it was good for the country. That's his call, and if we don't like it we can pick someone else in two years.
Justice should also be a lot swifter than this. That Microsoft case should have been over in at least 6 months.
Yes, it should have. Jackson should have mentioned future versions in his original consent decree way back when, he should have kept his mouth shut so his original antitrust ruling could stand, and President Bush should have left the extant prosecution stay on to finish the re-trial.
Financial luck or hard work? I don't know about my ancestor, but looking around at my aquaintances who own their own businesses, those who work the hardest have the more successful shops, on average.
And all of them--successful or not--had a measure of luck to even be able to start their business. And even if everyone got an equal opportunity, we'd still have random chance determining how good a marketplace each business gets to play in.
Regardless of how you slice it, simple finance is a piss poor way to stratify social classes. Maybe not as poor as who can best be in favor with the tenth-generation inbred descendent of a long-dead war hero, but far from perfect.
(A "perfect" stratification would be with a direction relationship to work and choice, with blind luck largely eliminated. I'd be a lot more supportive of capitalism if everyone got a flat, set ammount when they turned 21/graduated from college, and inhertances were illegal... in that kind of structure, there'd be no doubt that the better-off got there on their own. Or a family-based system that rewarded service and art and loyalty and allowed marriages between any two members of the society... bugger me if I know how to get to either one, though.)
Also you will find that the GPL is not viral at all: The worst that could happen is that MicroSoft could not distribute their Cygwin tools. IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER can anybody get the rights to any of their source, even the source to their cygwin rip-off!
Wrong. If MS were to make cygwin part of windows, thus using GPL'd code, the FSF could (and very well might) take them to court and force compliance with the terms of the GPL--anyone who got a copy of that version of windows would get the source code to _the entire product._
A whole bunch of careful legal structure or just bullying the judge might avert the problem, but it's still a very real problem. If you use GPL'd code in your project, a very real possibility of you being forced to give your customers your source code for that project occurs.
(This is intentional on the part of the FSF. It's also why the BSD license is 'more free'--you aren't compelled to pass on the same universal benefits to someone else that the FSF gives to you.)
The GPL cannot be more powerful than copyright law because it is not a signed contract, it simply allos exceptions to coyright, giving the user of the software the rights to do a few more things than normal US law does.
The GPL, AFAIK (IANAL), is every bit as binding as if it were a signed contract. It doesn't allow any exceptions to copyright law at all--it works just like any other contract in the country.
You have the contractee (folks who've released GPL'd code), contractor (folks who use GPL'd code), consideration (the trade of 'use of GPL'd code' for 'releasing derivitie works as GPL'd code') and legal purpose (fostering OSS is not, and most likely never will be, criminal.)
The GPL is a license, just like the EULA on Windows XP. If you EVER use the GPL--either by making a new program or just distributing GPL'd software--it behooves you to read the GPL version that comes with your copy of the code you're using. It's a legal binding contract, and you violate it's (rather loose) terms at your own peril.
Now, all that said--I personally can't stand the "root" structure of Linux/UNIX/wherever the hell it came from. My computer has a hard drive and a bunch of devices, and all of my programs & files and stuff that isn't a device is on my HDD, and I want it to look that way, god damn it! If there's going to be an "everything as a file" concept, then let the root point be the bus, with the IDE and PCI and memory and processor all visible and NOTHING ELSE--and let the system files show up inside the HDD where they really physically are! Forcing "mount points" and a superuser named "root" just make things more complex than necessary, especially when using a desktop OS that isn't going to have its system drive hotswapped out (which I don't think any non-bastardized flavor of Linux can do, either, seeing as it's a friggin' x86 based macrokernel UNIX distribution...)
Imagine if you could assumme a Windows system had all the Cygwin tools, I don't think Linux would last more than a few months. Honestly. But (perhaps fortunately) MicroSoft has too much arrogance and ego for their own good.
Remember: "The GPL is viral."
MS would probably LOVE to bundle Cygwin with Windows, (or at least hack Cygwin to windows-customizable.) But doing that would open them up to a huge range of headaches--not the least of which would be some Linux zealot with spare cash suing them for the whole MS source bundle.
One of the givaways IMNSHO is that people always compare OS-X to Gnome and KDE, as though those are the only things to run on Linux. Serious Linux/Unix users often use less pretty but more usable, far more configurable, and faster systems to get real work done.
Oh, it's a given that these are, for the most part, casual Linux users. Not a one of them doesn't (or didn't) have at least a windows partition for gaming.
The only real "professional" Linux user (a better term would be "admin") uses Linux for clustering at work--which is where Linux is well-suited.
I don't really care if the Linux world loses the people who installed one version of RedHat and never booted into it anyway. If you don't want to actually tweak your system or expect great throughput or practical networked or headless operations, perhaps OS-X is better for you anyway...
I don't (currently) have any need for non-enduser network boxes or headless operations. I've tried Linux, but the darn thing is harder to configure than the old DOS 6 / Win 3.11 combo.
I'm sure you'll agree with me that "linux isn't ready for the desktop", especially when we define "the desktop" as "userland for folks who aren't admin'ing a multi-box system."
God, our own crappy language has a hard time expressing these concepts!
That's probably because we're used to getting our freedoms for free, and we have a tendency to think that when something's free getting it without paying for it is a matter of freedom.;)
Either that, or the Englishmen were Communist without knowing it.
So what? Your world is not the real world. It's viewed through your own subjective, rose-colored lenses. In other words, your anecdotal evidence isn't meaningful.
Actually, my world IS the real world--well, MY real world. It's a heck of a lot more "real" than the world of statistics, news, or/. Maybe not as useful to you as these other worlds are, but I suspect that YOUR world is more important to you than these fictional worlds or my real world.
1. See Amendment[10]. See the federalist papers, etc. You are wrong.
Come again? The President has the power to wage war once Congress has declared it--and IIRC, Congress DID issue a declaration of war against the rebellion. (Either directly or through a pre-existing statute. I don't recall.)
The ONLY real violation of rights was the President's undue delcaration of martial law--which the S.C. later chastised him post-humously. And as far as violations-of-rights go, wartime need is a rather plausible excuse and understandable error.
2. _The Patriot_ was revolutionary war. Yer off approx 100 years.
Well, yeah. But "uncivilized war" is uncivilized war. The rather atrocious "total war" campaign the North did on the South is hardly a compromize of a founding princible.
3. If you check the document (the constitution), you will find it went to great lengths to spell out the *LIMITS* of federal executive power. And just in case, there was any doubt, they did that whole Amendment[10] thing for the hard-of-thinking.
See Article II, Section 2:
"The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States"
(Remember, Lincon was a lawyer.)
The logic could have worked like this: * The militia is every able-bodied citizen. * The section says "called into service", not "serving actively." * The President, when commanding a war on American soil, could order a good percent of the militia to "continue supporting the army through non-military means" - i.e., "keep working." * Since everyone working is now part of the militia, and therefore in military service, the President can order them to follow the party line and treat them as soldiers--similiarly to how militiamen in the revolutionary war could be shot for treason if they left.
There really isn't a lot in the Constitution saying what the President can or cannot do with this soldiers--just that they have to be armed even in peacetime, and that they can't be forced into private citizen's homes.
So... what clearly held power did the USA usurp in the Civil War? The assumed veto power of the states? The assumed power of states to ceceede violently? These are hardly powers that members of a nation-state, through historical international law, can assume that they hold.
The PROPER method of the South, if they wanted to withdraw, would have been to send a request to Congress to leave. But they chose to use violence, and so the federal government--who was attacked, btw--responded in kind...
Despite the unflinching moral declarations of the FSF, most users of so-called "Free Software" care about the gratis a heck of a lot more than the libre... or, at least, they care about the "UNIXyness" rather than either sort of freedom.
In the real world, every Linux-user I know has or wants to have a Mac--and they're not putting PPC Linux on them, they're leaving OSX as-is, save for adding a few utilities.
I do. But it's not really relevant to the discussion. A serf in "ye olde anicent times" could find himself married to a noble (noble's choice, not the serfs), or display sufficient skill to be granted an elevation in class. Serfs became freemen, freemen became minor nobles, etc, etc.
It didn't happen often--but neither do people go from rags-to-riches in modern america, either.
The ability to leave a situation does not change the fact that the situation itself is piss shit--or that unions helped change that situation so those necessary jobs could be done and still support the worker's family.
One came over to the US as an indentured servant and ended up owning his own business and marrying the cousin of a prominent financier.
So instead of a class structure of birthright we have a class strucutre based on financial luck. BIG improvement...
Actually, the USA lost the Civil War, because it had to axe a great number of its founding principals in order to enforce the Holy Federal Will(tM) on the South. It's not so much the "United States of America" so much as the "People's Republic of America" since then, particularly with the continually increasing power of a centralized Federal bureacracy.
Read what I said again.
The North literally won the Civil War--the south didn't get to leave the USA. But the South managed to change the political landscape of the north so much that another hundred years passed before the changes decreed at the end of the Civil War came to pass.
But aside from a shift in politics--WHAT founding principles were "axe"'d to win the Civil War? Priority of State over Federal? (Never a founding prinicple). Civilized War? (The southern campaign of the revolution was rather remarkeably harsh--_The Patriot_ got that part right at least). Or maybe having a weak executive who couldn't take action in times of national crisis--no, wait, that one was tossed out the Articles of Confederation.
I've worked with my state government, and it's easy enough to peek at local government. Given the choice between the three levels, I'd pick handing govermental power over to the feds any day. At least they're big enough to do what they do right, for the most part.
Keeping wars away from America, save for two attacks and a dozen or so USA-initated offenses, is a worthy enough record for me. If you don't like the way the Republicans are running the country, run for office, volunteer to help get someone else elected, or leave.
And you need to stop blindly accepting the history fed to you. Certainly the 19th century was not perfect, but it was by no means the feudalistic serfdom portrayed in the High School history books.
No, it wasn't serfdom. Serfs couldn't drop everything and become vagabonds. Other than that... well...
hmm... nope, can't think of all that many real good differences between "poor person in 1000 who wasn't a serf" and "poor person in 1850 who wasn't black."
Unions helped change that rather bleak outlook to what we have today. I think you need to stop disregarding history just because it's taught in high school--they're not ALL lies, you know, and even the lies aren't all that far from the truth.
If you're talking about the company owner, then it's up to him/her to set pay structure... and it's up to employees to decide whether or not they want to work there. That's it. The system works remarkably well, and is the basis of all the successful economies in the world. Class War rhetoric is the hallmark of the world's economic basket cases.
You obviously need a history lesson.
Not all that long ago--well, a century and a half or so ago, but who's counting--the US did rely on business owners to set their pay and salary schedules. And you know what happened? By and large, they set them as low as possible, made their employees into virtual slaves, and got filthy rich off of the suffering of others.
This is where unions came in. Unless you're a business owner or a capital-P Professional (who, by and large, had their own "unions" for quite a bit longer), you owe your current pay rate to the unions and organized labor.
The system we have DOES work remarkeably well. And a vital part of it is organized labor to keep the "going rate" for most jobs at a liveable level.
The cold war, with its "capitalism vs communism" rhetoric, ended much like the civil war. The USA won, but we wound up with all of the desired goals of the other side, anyway.
Sure some people will kill themselves over this game, just like some willl spend $9000 on a character on ebay.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Everquest. It is, as I am told, a fine game that's a lot of fun, and if you've got the time to spare well worth the monthly fee.
Now, that said, it IS dangerous--as dangerous as any other internet-only social relationship. If my only contacts were through e-mails and IMs, no one would be able to tell if I was getting sickly, acting overly errattically, etc, etc. It's like having friends, without all of the benefits of having friends.
want to play EQ? Go right ahead. Just don't think that its a substitute for real interaction. (Real tabletop RPGs, or wargames, or chess, or LAN parties, ARE real interaction.)
Lastly, as for discovers of America, it would have to be the Native Americans I think, who numbered in the millions before any Europeans showed up. Plus they got there the hard way -- they walked! But "discoverer" has different meanings depending on the context.
If you speak English, you're operating in the 1500 year old civilization that was once known as "Christendom" but now, since we beat up or absorbed just about everyone else, we simply call ourselves "civilization."
Besides which, our Asian-American ancestors didn't discover the Americas as much as they moved here. No one back in Aisa ever got a return-ship saying "look what we found!"
"Neither Linux nor Unix ties the operating system to hardware," he said. The way he puts it, you'd almost think it was a good thing.
It is, really. The PC crashes and crashes and crashes--I've seen Linux crash on a 2nd boot, for X's sake!
Tied-to-hardware OS's are good in every way except for (sometimes) economics. My Dreamcast never crashes. Palm OS never crashes (Quickword did, which is why I stopped using it), my old 8-bit Nintendo never crashed, even if it did get dirty and flicker...
The fact is, there's a whole different level of security that you can get to if you add in hardware designed for that task. (Surest way to stop a virus from spreading? unplug the infected computer from the network.) Bundling secure hardware with an insecure OS would be foolhardy--but making the sort of semi-secure OSes we have today with semi-secure hardware should give us a much higher level of securty than what we have today.
Sure, there are bugs that will be ran into--but common flaws to today's model shouldn't doom tomorrow's model.
Nowhere does it say it has to be a single document.
That's because the word has changed meaning. Language does that.
You obviously don't understand how the British constitution works.
Of course I do. You obviously can't seperate someone not agreeing with your chosen title for your core governmental system from someone who simply doesn't understand it.
Don't get me wrong, the writers of that constitution did an amazing job and showed great foresight, yet it is still too rigid for me as it is a document from a different time when people had a increasingly different values.
For the most part, the values of the late 18th century are identical to the values of the early 21st century. There have been some notable changes, and once those changes have gained sufficient momentum, the Constitution was amended.
The parliamentary system goes against much of the grain of the American system by allowing the partial merging of the executive and legislative branches of goverment.
You obviously don't understand how the american government is set up, do you? There is merging and oversight and balances of all three branches of government, all the time. (The President had to have congress pass a law to have a new Exectuive division, the President can veto just about anything congress passes, etc, etc.)
However, this doesn't mean that the constitution is any less weak at preventing abuse of power. In fact, I see far more abuse going on right now with GWB and his cronies than in the parliamentary democracies. He surely cares little for individual's rights, whether defined by the constitution or it's intents, or not.
Hardly. After the first major attack on American soil from a foreign body since Perl Harbor, we shifted our priority a bit from pure unfettered liberty to actually surviving. The Republican wins in Bush's midterm elections--a historical first--are a clear enough message that he's got some sort of mandate from the American people and that he's done something right in the past two years.
Trampling individual rights of everyone in the name of everyone's security might be too much--but it's not abuse of power. Heck, I think that privacy and even a five-minute warning before the police come in is a priviledge and not a right.
Besides which, I don't hear of G.W. Bush forcing the USA to join the European Union against the whole country's wishes...
I don't see that this is different. In the US they have one document to refer to. In the UK they have many many documents, etc to refer to. So? That doesn't make it any less a constitution, although it differs considerably in implementation and philosophy to the American one. That doesn't mean either is better or worse.
I didn't say either one is better or worse (I personally think that my country's is better, but I haven't said that in this discussion until now.)
What I DID say is that a bunch of different documents pieced together isn't a "constitution", especially in the same way that the USA's doc is.
The usage of "constitution" to mean "the defining documents of a national government" is something that, AFAIK, arose after the rise of the USA as a major world concern--sometime after 1800, IIRC.
I believe the final say in these matters are actually made by the Law Lords. Of course, knowing the British constitution is a much harder task than knowing the American one. The constitution is considerably more flexible than the American one, meaning it is able to evolve more easily with time and be more representative of the day. Of course, with this flexibility comes the increased risk of abuse.
If it's the easily flexible part of the law, then it's not part of the "constitution", even in the sense that the word can be used when describing the UK's gov't. You need to drop common law, local law, and most parlimentary law--heck, drop everything that isn't right up there that can be revised throuh a process less complex than that required for the abolition of of parliment, and you've got what you could call your "constitution."
Even with the linquistic shift my country's inflicted on our shared language, it's not proper to group every law in with "constitution."
OpenOffice already is a good office suite! It has all the features that the great majority of MS-Office users require and that makes OpenOffice a good replacement for MS-Office at home computers.
So is MS Works--but Works has more than OO or office for the home.
Again, please come at your advocacy with "OO has all these cool things that make the switch worthwhile!" and not "It's just as good as MS... no, really, it is..."
You need a scriptable text editor. Makes things like this so much easier. Hit one keystroke and it inserts the basic structure...
Which is useless for editing or revising a table.
Feel free to respond with your divine Emacs solution for merging two arbitrary adjoining cells, or for altering an entire table's per-cell format.
(Yes, CSS and all that should work, and yes, XML should do it all better--but for at least the next five years, we're stuck with HTML.:(
And for the record, I do my work-HTML either as straight-from-office [for efficency of staff time] or in 1stpage, which has a better code-view than Moz, even if it doesn't have a WYSIWYG mode.)
But in this case, Phoenix the Web Browser can never cause confusion because there is no possibility of a web browser-item being confused with a bios-item.
Not to you. Not to me.
But to a common person on the street, it's easy to get "computer part named Phoenix" and "computer part named Phoenix" confused.
Britain does have a constitution, but it's not a single written document - it's an uncodified constitution
Then it's no more a constitution than the British Commonwealth (or the European Union) is a nation.
Every country has a "final authority" on its law--a 'highest law' that trumps all others. USA's is the constition--in the UK, I think it might still, technically, be the crown...
Oh, and we have the United States Code, the rules of Congress, and common law, too--and prior to 1776, common law is (shockingly) identical to the UK's!
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Now if MS was to integrate Cygwin inside Windows, so that it was an integral part of it, then Windows would become GPL'd.
Knowing MS, the would. Or, rather, knowing some Linux zealots, the case would be made that for Microsoft, based on past practices, any two pieces of software on the same CD and distributed under the same license can be assumed to be parts of the same OS.
Let's all try to get along...I'm personally getting tired of those condescending OS X users who look down on Linux despite the great progress it has made, and is still making at a breakneck pace (fortunately, they're a minority). Instead, we should all stand united as Unix or at least alternate OS users. If the enemy is the Monopoly, then the goal is Diversity. That includes Linux, the BSDs, OS X, BeOS (if it can get back from the dead), commerical Unices, and even Windows, as long as its market share drops below 50%...
I'm currently looking for a good secondary OS, to wean myself away from Windows. Linux isn't quite there yet (OO isn't quite up to snuff--and from what little I saw of it, kOffice is neither), but as soon as I boot into Linux & burn a CD, I'll give Be a try.
We should all get along. A hundred years from now I expect that all PCs will run basically the same OS--or at least, as "same" as Linux and UNIX and BSD's multitude of distributions are.
"The leading principle of our Constitution is the independence of the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary of each other." -- Thomas Jefferson
And I'm not even American.
The three independant bodies of the Federal system must, by simple virtue of being part of the same goverment, influence them. The three independent bodies working on each other is the all-too-necesssary "System of Checks and balances."
I could kill someone, and Gov. Pataki could pardon me for the murder at the 11th hour--but I'd still be a felon, still have a record, and probably still get hit with wrongful death suits.
MS could be orderd to be broken up, appeal to the S.C, lose, be pardoned--and then repeat the steps much, much quicker if they mess up again in two, five, ten, or even twenty years.
It is quite clear that there will be no noteworthy changes to the original settlement
No, it isn't. When both higher courts toss it out, THEN it'll be clear. Until then, its' worth pursuing.
It is also quite clear that the main loser is going to be the taxpayer.
The lawyers pursuing the case the government lawyers paid a salary, not hourly wages. The taxpayers don't pay much extra by pursuing this case... and since MS has to reimburse the legal expenses of the government at market rate, the taxpayers will, if anything, MAKE money.
.A president should have nothing to do with the wheels of justice.
Wrong. Executives across the country are empowered with discharging mercy where due--a breakup is a death sentence for a corporation, and Bush would be in his right to give MS a pardon to avert their breakup if he felt it was good for the country. That's his call, and if we don't like it we can pick someone else in two years.
Justice should also be a lot swifter than this. That Microsoft case should have been over in at least 6 months.
Yes, it should have. Jackson should have mentioned future versions in his original consent decree way back when, he should have kept his mouth shut so his original antitrust ruling could stand, and President Bush should have left the extant prosecution stay on to finish the re-trial.
Financial luck or hard work? I don't know about my ancestor, but looking around at my aquaintances who own their own businesses, those who work the hardest have the more successful shops, on average.
And all of them--successful or not--had a measure of luck to even be able to start their business. And even if everyone got an equal opportunity, we'd still have random chance determining how good a marketplace each business gets to play in.
Regardless of how you slice it, simple finance is a piss poor way to stratify social classes. Maybe not as poor as who can best be in favor with the tenth-generation inbred descendent of a long-dead war hero, but far from perfect.
(A "perfect" stratification would be with a direction relationship to work and choice, with blind luck largely eliminated. I'd be a lot more supportive of capitalism if everyone got a flat, set ammount when they turned 21/graduated from college, and inhertances were illegal... in that kind of structure, there'd be no doubt that the better-off got there on their own. Or a family-based system that rewarded service and art and loyalty and allowed marriages between any two members of the society... bugger me if I know how to get to either one, though.)
Also you will find that the GPL is not viral at all: The worst that could happen is that MicroSoft could not distribute their Cygwin tools. IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER can anybody get the rights to any of their source, even the source to their cygwin rip-off!
Wrong. If MS were to make cygwin part of windows, thus using GPL'd code, the FSF could (and very well might) take them to court and force compliance with the terms of the GPL--anyone who got a copy of that version of windows would get the source code to _the entire product._
A whole bunch of careful legal structure or just bullying the judge might avert the problem, but it's still a very real problem. If you use GPL'd code in your project, a very real possibility of you being forced to give your customers your source code for that project occurs.
(This is intentional on the part of the FSF. It's also why the BSD license is 'more free'--you aren't compelled to pass on the same universal benefits to someone else that the FSF gives to you.)
The GPL cannot be more powerful than copyright law because it is not a signed contract, it simply allos exceptions to coyright, giving the user of the software the rights to do a few more things than normal US law does.
The GPL, AFAIK (IANAL), is every bit as binding as if it were a signed contract. It doesn't allow any exceptions to copyright law at all--it works just like any other contract in the country.
You have the contractee (folks who've released GPL'd code), contractor (folks who use GPL'd code), consideration (the trade of 'use of GPL'd code' for 'releasing derivitie works as GPL'd code') and legal purpose (fostering OSS is not, and most likely never will be, criminal.)
The GPL is a license, just like the EULA on Windows XP. If you EVER use the GPL--either by making a new program or just distributing GPL'd software--it behooves you to read the GPL version that comes with your copy of the code you're using. It's a legal binding contract, and you violate it's (rather loose) terms at your own peril.
Now, all that said--I personally can't stand the "root" structure of Linux/UNIX/wherever the hell it came from. My computer has a hard drive and a bunch of devices, and all of my programs & files and stuff that isn't a device is on my HDD, and I want it to look that way, god damn it! If there's going to be an "everything as a file" concept, then let the root point be the bus, with the IDE and PCI and memory and processor all visible and NOTHING ELSE--and let the system files show up inside the HDD where they really physically are! Forcing "mount points" and a superuser named "root" just make things more complex than necessary, especially when using a desktop OS that isn't going to have its system drive hotswapped out (which I don't think any non-bastardized flavor of Linux can do, either, seeing as it's a friggin' x86 based macrokernel UNIX distribution...)
Ok, done ranting...
Imagine if you could assumme a Windows system had all the Cygwin tools, I don't think Linux would last more than a few months. Honestly. But (perhaps fortunately) MicroSoft has too much arrogance and ego for their own good.
Remember: "The GPL is viral."
MS would probably LOVE to bundle Cygwin with Windows, (or at least hack Cygwin to windows-customizable.) But doing that would open them up to a huge range of headaches--not the least of which would be some Linux zealot with spare cash suing them for the whole MS source bundle.
Ah, well.
One of the givaways IMNSHO is that people always compare OS-X to Gnome and KDE, as though those are the only things to run on Linux. Serious Linux/Unix users often use less pretty but more usable, far more configurable, and faster systems to get real work done.
Oh, it's a given that these are, for the most part, casual Linux users. Not a one of them doesn't (or didn't) have at least a windows partition for gaming.
The only real "professional" Linux user (a better term would be "admin") uses Linux for clustering at work--which is where Linux is well-suited.
I don't really care if the Linux world loses the people who installed one version of RedHat and never booted into it anyway. If you don't want to actually tweak your system or expect great throughput or practical networked or headless operations, perhaps OS-X is better for you anyway...
I don't (currently) have any need for non-enduser network boxes or headless operations. I've tried Linux, but the darn thing is harder to configure than the old DOS 6 / Win 3.11 combo.
I'm sure you'll agree with me that "linux isn't ready for the desktop", especially when we define "the desktop" as "userland for folks who aren't admin'ing a multi-box system."
God, our own crappy language has a hard time expressing these concepts!
;)
/. Maybe not as useful to you as these other worlds are, but I suspect that YOUR world is more important to you than these fictional worlds or my real world.
That's probably because we're used to getting our freedoms for free, and we have a tendency to think that when something's free getting it without paying for it is a matter of freedom.
Either that, or the Englishmen were Communist without knowing it.
So what? Your world is not the real world. It's viewed through your own subjective, rose-colored lenses. In other words, your anecdotal evidence isn't meaningful.
Actually, my world IS the real world--well, MY real world. It's a heck of a lot more "real" than the world of statistics, news, or
(Man, I'm getting punchy this late in the day...)
1. See Amendment[10]. See the federalist papers, etc. You are wrong.
Come again? The President has the power to wage war once Congress has declared it--and IIRC, Congress DID issue a declaration of war against the rebellion. (Either directly or through a pre-existing statute. I don't recall.)
The ONLY real violation of rights was the President's undue delcaration of martial law--which the S.C. later chastised him post-humously. And as far as violations-of-rights go, wartime need is a rather plausible excuse and understandable error.
2. _The Patriot_ was revolutionary war. Yer off approx 100 years.
Well, yeah. But "uncivilized war" is uncivilized war. The rather atrocious "total war" campaign the North did on the South is hardly a compromize of a founding princible.
3. If you check the document (the constitution), you will find it went to great lengths to spell out the *LIMITS* of federal executive power. And just in case, there was any doubt, they did that whole Amendment[10] thing for the hard-of-thinking.
See Article II, Section 2:
"The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States"
(Remember, Lincon was a lawyer.)
The logic could have worked like this:
* The militia is every able-bodied citizen.
* The section says "called into service", not "serving actively."
* The President, when commanding a war on American soil, could order a good percent of the militia to "continue supporting the army through non-military means" - i.e., "keep working."
* Since everyone working is now part of the militia, and therefore in military service, the President can order them to follow the party line and treat them as soldiers--similiarly to how militiamen in the revolutionary war could be shot for treason if they left.
There really isn't a lot in the Constitution saying what the President can or cannot do with this soldiers--just that they have to be armed even in peacetime, and that they can't be forced into private citizen's homes.
So... what clearly held power did the USA usurp in the Civil War? The assumed veto power of the states? The assumed power of states to ceceede violently? These are hardly powers that members of a nation-state, through historical international law, can assume that they hold.
The PROPER method of the South, if they wanted to withdraw, would have been to send a request to Congress to leave. But they chose to use violence, and so the federal government--who was attacked, btw--responded in kind...
I think it's just a great object lesson:
Despite the unflinching moral declarations of the FSF, most users of so-called "Free Software" care about the gratis a heck of a lot more than the libre... or, at least, they care about the "UNIXyness" rather than either sort of freedom.
In the real world, every Linux-user I know has or wants to have a Mac--and they're not putting PPC Linux on them, they're leaving OSX as-is, save for adding a few utilities.
I don't know this from history books
I do. But it's not really relevant to the discussion. A serf in "ye olde anicent times" could find himself married to a noble (noble's choice, not the serfs), or display sufficient skill to be granted an elevation in class. Serfs became freemen, freemen became minor nobles, etc, etc.
It didn't happen often--but neither do people go from rags-to-riches in modern america, either.
The ability to leave a situation does not change the fact that the situation itself is piss shit--or that unions helped change that situation so those necessary jobs could be done and still support the worker's family.
One came over to the US as an indentured servant and ended up owning his own business and marrying the cousin of a prominent financier.
So instead of a class structure of birthright we have a class strucutre based on financial luck. BIG improvement...
Actually, the USA lost the Civil War, because it had to axe a great number of its founding principals in order to enforce the Holy Federal Will(tM) on the South. It's not so much the "United States of America" so much as the "People's Republic of America" since then, particularly with the continually increasing power of a centralized Federal bureacracy.
Read what I said again.
The North literally won the Civil War--the south didn't get to leave the USA. But the South managed to change the political landscape of the north so much that another hundred years passed before the changes decreed at the end of the Civil War came to pass.
But aside from a shift in politics--WHAT founding principles were "axe"'d to win the Civil War? Priority of State over Federal? (Never a founding prinicple). Civilized War? (The southern campaign of the revolution was rather remarkeably harsh--_The Patriot_ got that part right at least). Or maybe having a weak executive who couldn't take action in times of national crisis--no, wait, that one was tossed out the Articles of Confederation.
I've worked with my state government, and it's easy enough to peek at local government. Given the choice between the three levels, I'd pick handing govermental power over to the feds any day. At least they're big enough to do what they do right, for the most part.
Keeping wars away from America, save for two attacks and a dozen or so USA-initated offenses, is a worthy enough record for me. If you don't like the way the Republicans are running the country, run for office, volunteer to help get someone else elected, or leave.
And you need to stop blindly accepting the history fed to you. Certainly the 19th century was not perfect, but it was by no means the feudalistic serfdom portrayed in the High School history books.
No, it wasn't serfdom. Serfs couldn't drop everything and become vagabonds. Other than that... well...
hmm... nope, can't think of all that many real good differences between "poor person in 1000 who wasn't a serf" and "poor person in 1850 who wasn't black."
Unions helped change that rather bleak outlook to what we have today. I think you need to stop disregarding history just because it's taught in high school--they're not ALL lies, you know, and even the lies aren't all that far from the truth.
If you're talking about the company owner, then it's up to him/her to set pay structure... and it's up to employees to decide whether or not they want to work there. That's it. The system works remarkably well, and is the basis of all the successful economies in the world. Class War rhetoric is the hallmark of the world's economic basket cases.
You obviously need a history lesson.
Not all that long ago--well, a century and a half or so ago, but who's counting--the US did rely on business owners to set their pay and salary schedules. And you know what happened? By and large, they set them as low as possible, made their employees into virtual slaves, and got filthy rich off of the suffering of others.
This is where unions came in. Unless you're a business owner or a capital-P Professional (who, by and large, had their own "unions" for quite a bit longer), you owe your current pay rate to the unions and organized labor.
The system we have DOES work remarkeably well. And a vital part of it is organized labor to keep the "going rate" for most jobs at a liveable level.
The cold war, with its "capitalism vs communism" rhetoric, ended much like the civil war. The USA won, but we wound up with all of the desired goals of the other side, anyway.
Sure some people will kill themselves over this game, just like some willl spend $9000 on a character on ebay.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Everquest. It is, as I am told, a fine game that's a lot of fun, and if you've got the time to spare well worth the monthly fee.
Now, that said, it IS dangerous--as dangerous as any other internet-only social relationship. If my only contacts were through e-mails and IMs, no one would be able to tell if I was getting sickly, acting overly errattically, etc, etc. It's like having friends, without all of the benefits of having friends.
want to play EQ? Go right ahead. Just don't think that its a substitute for real interaction. (Real tabletop RPGs, or wargames, or chess, or LAN parties, ARE real interaction.)
Lastly, as for discovers of America, it would have to be the Native Americans I think, who numbered in the millions before any Europeans showed up. Plus they got there the hard way -- they walked! But "discoverer" has different meanings depending on the context.
If you speak English, you're operating in the 1500 year old civilization that was once known as "Christendom" but now, since we beat up or absorbed just about everyone else, we simply call ourselves "civilization."
Besides which, our Asian-American ancestors didn't discover the Americas as much as they moved here. No one back in Aisa ever got a return-ship saying "look what we found!"
"Neither Linux nor Unix ties the operating system to hardware," he said.
The way he puts it, you'd almost think it was a good thing.
It is, really. The PC crashes and crashes and crashes--I've seen Linux crash on a 2nd boot, for X's sake!
Tied-to-hardware OS's are good in every way except for (sometimes) economics. My Dreamcast never crashes. Palm OS never crashes (Quickword did, which is why I stopped using it), my old 8-bit Nintendo never crashed, even if it did get dirty and flicker...
The fact is, there's a whole different level of security that you can get to if you add in hardware designed for that task. (Surest way to stop a virus from spreading? unplug the infected computer from the network.) Bundling secure hardware with an insecure OS would be foolhardy--but making the sort of semi-secure OSes we have today with semi-secure hardware should give us a much higher level of securty than what we have today.
Sure, there are bugs that will be ran into--but common flaws to today's model shouldn't doom tomorrow's model.
Nowhere does it say it has to be a single document.
That's because the word has changed meaning. Language does that.
You obviously don't understand how the British constitution works.
Of course I do. You obviously can't seperate someone not agreeing with your chosen title for your core governmental system from someone who simply doesn't understand it.
Don't get me wrong, the writers of that constitution did an amazing job and showed great foresight, yet it is still too rigid for me as it is a document from a different time when people had a increasingly different values.
For the most part, the values of the late 18th century are identical to the values of the early 21st century. There have been some notable changes, and once those changes have gained sufficient momentum, the Constitution was amended.
The parliamentary system goes against much of the grain of the American system by allowing the partial merging of the executive and legislative branches of goverment.
You obviously don't understand how the american government is set up, do you? There is merging and oversight and balances of all three branches of government, all the time. (The President had to have congress pass a law to have a new Exectuive division, the President can veto just about anything congress passes, etc, etc.)
However, this doesn't mean that the constitution is any less weak at preventing abuse of power. In fact, I see far more abuse going on right now with GWB and his cronies than in the parliamentary democracies. He surely cares little for individual's rights, whether defined by the constitution or it's intents, or not.
Hardly. After the first major attack on American soil from a foreign body since Perl Harbor, we shifted our priority a bit from pure unfettered liberty to actually surviving. The Republican wins in Bush's midterm elections--a historical first--are a clear enough message that he's got some sort of mandate from the American people and that he's done something right in the past two years.
Trampling individual rights of everyone in the name of everyone's security might be too much--but it's not abuse of power. Heck, I think that privacy and even a five-minute warning before the police come in is a priviledge and not a right.
Besides which, I don't hear of G.W. Bush forcing the USA to join the European Union against the whole country's wishes...
I don't see that this is different. In the US they have one document to refer to. In the UK they have many many documents, etc to refer to. So? That doesn't make it any less a constitution, although it differs considerably in implementation and philosophy to the American one. That doesn't mean either is better or worse.
I didn't say either one is better or worse (I personally think that my country's is better, but I haven't said that in this discussion until now.)
What I DID say is that a bunch of different documents pieced together isn't a "constitution", especially in the same way that the USA's doc is.
The usage of "constitution" to mean "the defining documents of a national government" is something that, AFAIK, arose after the rise of the USA as a major world concern--sometime after 1800, IIRC.
I believe the final say in these matters are actually made by the Law Lords. Of course, knowing the British constitution is a much harder task than knowing the American one. The constitution is considerably more flexible than the American one, meaning it is able to evolve more easily with time and be more representative of the day. Of course, with this flexibility comes the increased risk of abuse.
If it's the easily flexible part of the law, then it's not part of the "constitution", even in the sense that the word can be used when describing the UK's gov't. You need to drop common law, local law, and most parlimentary law--heck, drop everything that isn't right up there that can be revised throuh a process less complex than that required for the abolition of of parliment, and you've got what you could call your "constitution."
Even with the linquistic shift my country's inflicted on our shared language, it's not proper to group every law in with "constitution."
OpenOffice already is a good office suite! It has all the features that the great majority of MS-Office users require and that makes OpenOffice a good replacement for MS-Office at home computers.
So is MS Works--but Works has more than OO or office for the home.
Again, please come at your advocacy with "OO has all these cool things that make the switch worthwhile!" and not "It's just as good as MS... no, really, it is..."
You need a scriptable text editor. Makes things like this so much easier. Hit one keystroke and it inserts the basic structure...
:(
Which is useless for editing or revising a table.
Feel free to respond with your divine Emacs solution for merging two arbitrary adjoining cells, or for altering an entire table's per-cell format.
(Yes, CSS and all that should work, and yes, XML should do it all better--but for at least the next five years, we're stuck with HTML.
And for the record, I do my work-HTML either as straight-from-office [for efficency of staff time] or in 1stpage, which has a better code-view than Moz, even if it doesn't have a WYSIWYG mode.)
what does M$office do that you need?
em-dashes. It's simply unacceptable that OOo can't handle em-dashes, ellipses, or any of the two-dozen odd other special characters in the font set.
Plus, the question isn't "what does MS office do", but "what does OO do to encourage me to switch?"
But in this case, Phoenix the Web Browser can never cause confusion because there is no possibility of a web browser-item being confused with a bios-item.
Not to you. Not to me.
But to a common person on the street, it's easy to get "computer part named Phoenix" and "computer part named Phoenix" confused.
Britain does have a constitution, but it's not a single written document - it's an uncodified constitution
Then it's no more a constitution than the British Commonwealth (or the European Union) is a nation.
Every country has a "final authority" on its law--a 'highest law' that trumps all others. USA's is the constition--in the UK, I think it might still, technically, be the crown...
Oh, and we have the United States Code, the rules of Congress, and common law, too--and prior to 1776, common law is (shockingly) identical to the UK's!