You mean those corporate guys who sent my butt down on that robot-filled hell-hole, alone!?!??
Do you really think that (1) those guys would be any less evil if they weren't lawyers or (2) that any amount of "lawyers are evil" will keep evil folk from becoming lawyers?
The argument is the exact same one as the one for owning guns. The bad guys are already heavily armed; the good guys should stop whining and arm themselves as counterpoint.
The basic point of the ruling is that you need to be able to have plausible deniability when it comes to promoting illegal actions.
No. The point of the ruling is that if a judge & jury think that you're trying to encourage illegal activity, you'll be responsible for it when it happens.
BitTorrent gets buy because Brian DOESN'T encourage illegal use of bittorrent. He may not DISCOURAGE it, and he may even utilize his technology that way, but he doesn't beat a drum for folk to use BitTorrent for illegal file sharing.
IMO, all that anyone who develops a file-sharing tool needs to do is to encourage LEGAL use of their tool. Such as, for example, encouraging and facilitating creative commons verification within the tool.
The question was for user-interface changes. And MS has done a fair bit in the last decade--.NET, ActiveDirectory, DirectX, WYSWIG HTML editing that doesn't completely suck, being an actual microkernal, etc, etc.
Your comment about OS X is especially telling. For better or for worse, MS is tossing out their entire development environment and replacing it with a java-like intermediary. And, of course, MS DID toss out the entire paper shack that was DOS, and replaced it with the new foundation that was NT. All without requiring everyone and their brother to write code from scratch or run in an emulator.
Yes, MS code is rather crappy and annoying once you get past the "office worker drone" that they wrote it for. But to say it hasn't changed in ten years is patently false. (Especially if you extend it to twelve years, and group Windows 95 in their path of change.)
But maybe she will reconsider going into such a low and deceitful and filthy "profession".
There is no profresion in the world with as high and ethical standard, as stringent and effective an enforcement mechanism, and as low a standing in the public eye.
By sooth, when you discourage moral and honest people from becoming lawyers, you do nothing more than diminish the qotent of moral and upstanding lawyers. So, logically, you should just shut the hell up and encourage MORE descent folk to become lawyers.
(And before a bunch of non-lawyers start demanding "loser pays", remember that "loser pays" just introduces other unfairnesses when the poor can't sue the rich.)
You know the right to have a lawyer at trial? It doesn't only apply to criminal cases.
In New York, if you get sued or someone does something so bad that you need to go to court, TALK TO THE JUDGE IF YOU CAN'T AFFORD A LAWYER!
Yes, if you can afford one it will be expensive. But if it's so expensive that it would drive you to bankruptcy, the judge may order a member of the bar to represent you.
(This is one of the reasons why legal fees are so high--because every law firm in the state is reqired to give a certain amount of pro bono work.)
He will probably not even consider any other logic or argument because it threatens the integrity of his.
That's fine. This is why just about any court action gets run before a Jury first. It doesn't matter really what the law says--dispute his facts, and then he has to argue his case before tweleve of our peers.
And, btw, this is why you SHOULD perform Jury Duty.
The grandparent argued that there were NO significant changes whatsoever.
1, 2, and 7 are copies, no argument.
3 and 4 may not be mind-blowing ideas, but they do change the user experience.
5: no, you couldn't re-arrange the Start Menu. You could alter your Programs folder, but that was it.
6--now, 6 is a great example of why MS chose the word "innovate" and not "invent." They make a bunch of small changes, that make the thing marginally better. Hence, "innovation."
As for 8--there's a button to show them, and you can turn it off right there. In fact, I should add a 9th "innovation" -- you can turn off all the new things.
Really, though, most of MS's R&D and "innovation" is in wholly new things. Some of these suck, others are great ideas done badly, and still others are done very very well. (Wheel mice, for example. And yes I know they were someone else's idea first.)
Windows has improved a heck of a lot in the 6 years after Windows 95 came out, but not through innovation.
Actually, the 95-2000 improvements are classifiably solid innovation. MS and IBM decided to toss out DOS and re-build it from scratch, and the microkernel OS that Windows is today is a result of that work.
Other than a green "start" button, what's the difference in terms of *user experience*? Where's the innovation? I can't find it.
From 95 to XP? Man, you obviously haven't used 95 in quite awhile.
Can now view and kill programs and processes
Can have multiple user accounts with actual security
Has a web browser built in
Plug and Play is no longer "plug and pray"
You can now re-organize the start menu
there's a sidebar that shows you more information while browsing in explorer
You can "stop" what you're doing, let someone else log on for a second, and then go right back to what you were doing
The system tray now auto-hides itself, with each icon individually able to be "shown" or "hidden"
Yes, a lot of the changes are things that UNIX had before DOS or MAC has ages ago. So what? They're significant changes, and if you can't see them then you're really just trying not to.
I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels.
That's only because you have a maladjusted sense of what "reasonable" is. That, or you drive a huge top-heavy truck.
Speed limits have been intentionally set 5-15 mph too low in all but the most settled areas, where a low speed really is a safety concern.
But on many, many, MANY of the roads in this counry, a halfway incompetent driver can still be as safe at +10 as they are at 0 or -10 (relative to the current posted speed limit.)
Why are the limits set where they are? Not because it makes drivers safer--it doesn't, those that die in high speed will ignore whatever limit you set--but because it generates revenue for the local court system.
During the summer of 1945, Ambassador J. Reuben Clark, Jr., one of America's foremost scholars in the field of international law, prepared an analysis of the UN Charter. His learned appraisal and cogent remarks fly in the face of popular platitudes and conventional "wisdom" concerning the "revered" document. Ambassador Clark's examination led him to conclude that the Charter "is a war document not a peace document," and that it "is built to prepare for war, not to promote peace." The Ambassador noted...:
I did not say the UN would prevent war. I never called its charter a revered document.
I said that it was supposed to prevent World War III. And it did, by ensuring that the two cascading networks of alliances that caused WWI were instead one single worldwide network of alliances, with two big sub-knots of communists and democracies.
I don't recall the UN ever stepping in and doing anything.
They weren't supposed to. They were supposed to be the place that Krushchev would go and bang his shoe, instead of nuking Britian.
Let's not forget that the UN was the second implementation of another American president's idea, one that only worked because the USA signed onto it.
(And, for the record, the reason people hate the USA is how double-faced we acted during the cold war. It's not that we're free or any shit like that--it's that we were jerks with most of the world.)
I always thought that the fact that if they did go nuclear, there wouldn't be enough left of either side to say they "won".
Depends on when and at what scale. For instance, nuking Afghanistan and Vietnam likely would not have resulted in nuking the USSR or the USA.
Heck, it's entirely possible that, sans UN, the USSR and the USA would have traded nukes a few at a time at first--and by "at first" I mean "during or before the Korean war."
And let's not forget that the main reason the Cold War didn't heat up was that the USA and the USSR were able to communicate--something that the UN was intended to do, and did well enough.
It has become part of a world body that has done precious little to actually help the world
The UN was designed to do one thing: prevent World War III.
It did that exceptionally well. The USSR and the USA never had a huge tank/nuke war in Europe, and their proxy wars were fought with unusual restraint given that each side had nuclear arms.
The fact that the UN has been used to do some other things is a comparative footnote.
So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?
No, only the ones you actually send e-mail to.
And if you only send e-mail to those that explicity give you an e-mail address, you can probably rely on them to tell you where they're from.
If the Democrats go for 'obstuctionist' to 'revolutionary' they will be thrown out on their ear.
If they did it without provocation, yes.
But, as I said, if the Republicans make it so that the Democrats can do longer do ANYTHING--i.e., every act of congress gets decided on well before it goes to Congress, by the Republicans, and debate is no longer even possible--then they would be smart to make that fact as public as possible, by refusing to participate in the farce of a system.
Note that this won't happen, because the last thing even the most idiotic republican wants is to make Howard Dean 100% right about them--and that means that they need to keep the Democrats in Washington.
If the Democrats aren't very careful in its application, they may may lose it forever.
Both houses of Congress have impressively low quorum rules. If the Republicans give the Democrats no reason to stay in Washington--i.e., by being hardcore party-line all the time--then the Democrats can simply withdraw from washington and campaign full-time.
Which, really, will mean that Republicans will lose both houses of Congress. If the Democrats go from "obstructionist" to "revolutionary", they'll win faster than if the Republicans required everyone to become a Scientologist.
And the Republicans were looking for a fight to get rid of the Filibuster--and the media's done a crappy job pointing out that Bush's "straight up or down vote" was never given any President's slate of nominees, party majority or not.
Imagine a million bugs fighting. These bugs keep killing each other, and also keep multiplying. As we watch, the bugs start fighting on the back of others bugs, and gradually the insect melee becomes higher and higher.
Time is up: we move foward because we are buyoed by the actions of the past.
Or, to put it another way: Time is different because everything moves through all points in time; at different rates, perhaps, but if you could stand outside of the universe wiht a clockwatch, you could examine any bit of matter/energy at a specific time and find that it's in one and only one location.
Which means that you agree with the original poster that people are pretty bad at differentiating friendly from enemy fire.
As the original "grandparent" poster, I have one thing to say to that:
Humans may suck as telling friend from foe in the heat of combat, but right now AI is worse.
In the past, AI has not allowed people to make calmer, more objective decisions. Landmines, to take one example, kill civilians more easily than they kill soldiers, and without the accountability.
How do you mix landmines with AI? "Smart" landmines don't have any AI, they just have a timer or a radio frequency reciever so they can be safety disarmed after the war.
Anyway, the way of the future is going to be soldiers and AI working together, not competing against each other. Kind of like how they do now in the USAF. (The F-22 through the A-10 all have computers to help the pilot; the UAVs have a human to direct the killing.)
Two big ideas of note are the "Future Soldier" program, which is going to introduce a whole host of new tech to the army's riflemen, incudling a live-feed wireless situation transponder. (Kind of like those cameras on Aliens, but not as sucky.)
The second big idea (please pardon my sentence strucutre; it's too early in the am) is a robot-controlled sentry. AI is great for this mindless, repetitive job of looking for movement and firing when given a certain situation. (I.e., "kill anything that crosses that line"). And as with the UAVs, the robot can recieve live guidance from an officer of the military if it is found to have a questionable situation (i.e., "there's a person standing on the edge of the line, not moving forward.")
The DOD will get interested, and use a similar technique to train -real- robots?
The DOD is perfectly capable of creating robots that kill people. The hard part is making those robots NOT kill the people you don't want them to kill.
When a user sets themselves up this way and then installs programs as an Administrator, they find that they can't run the programs completely or correctly as the lower privilege user.
Try installing some of Microsoft's software in Windows, as Administrator, and then log in as a user and see if you can use it.
You'll be able to use it just fine. Perfectly well. Exactly as if you were logged in as an Admin, save you'll have a few files you can't update or change.
The problem with Windows isn't Microsoft, it's everybody else. The folks who wrote that cat care program didn't bother to read up on the software-side changes, and so they do things like storing user-editable information in the registry, keeping documents in the program's subfolder, or just generally writing horrible software.
As an easy fix for crappy software, btw, is to install it into a folder such as c:\insecure\ or somesuch, and allow everyone to have full access to that folder. Usually fixes the problem with running as guest, and less likley to bork windows itself.
FWIW, though, yes, MS messed up on the fix for these things. There SHOULD be a log kept of programs that didn't run, including the files they accessed and who tried to run them. A small administrator program that can set permissions for all of those would be a boon, too.
So, Planesdragon, would you care to identify the part of the post quoted above which you are managing to read as advocating distributing GPL'd code without the GPL?
Sure.
The question was "how do I get the university to publish my code using the GPL?"
Noksgat's answer was "use the GPL, and force them to do it." Which, in a situation where the University has rights to all work done on their dime (as describied in the article), is an attempted mingling of GPL and non-GPL code to be released without the GPL.
A comparable situation would be if a programmer at Microsoft started using GPL'd code. They'd be fired for the same reason I described, and possibly have criminal charges brought aginst them if MS was angry enough.
(And, really, if you're at a University and you find yourself running into prohibitions against using the GPL, then you're likely at a University that MS has a fair hand in supporting.)
Since well before Shakesphere's time we have used technology to overcome our physical shortcomings. First it was our inability to kill a dog, then our inability to stay warm in the winter, and so and so forth until our inability to count the census in a week caused us to create the computer.
Today, there is no doubt in my mind that technological solutions are the only way to overcome individual disabilities, be they malfunctioning limbs or poor eyesight or even paralysis. However, there is only so much that an automatic ledger-book can do, and computers are only part of the solution.
Without knowing more about your disability it's hard to say, but philisophically, I'd suggest you simply remember that Shakesphere never lived in a world where a small old man could stand up from church and kill a huge menacing man; he never thought that men would fly, machines would be more than curiosities for the rich, voices could ever be recorded and played back, or that it would ever be possible to disguise the fact that one cannot stand up straight or hold a pen.
If F/OSS is fine with your superiors then you don't have the same perspective as someone who doesn't. This entire discussion hinged on what to do if the powers-that-be DON'T like copyleft, for whatever reason they may have.
Second:
Please also realize that when it IS time to argue against the GPL, you can make perfectly logical and ideological reasons for why one might choose it without telling blatent lies.
There is no better reason not to use the GPL than "you could be fired for doing so." If you WON'T be fired for doing so--and the right way for this is to ask, not go ahead and do it--then it's a moot discussion.
But it is quite possible for someone to be tossed out on their ear--or simply not hired--if they don't mesh with the political and legal orientation of the then-in-power administration.
Sheesh.
Do you even know how grants are obtained?
Yes. It was a slip of the tongue. Substitute "money" for "grant money."
And, btw, there ARE universities that have written and sold software or other technologies to help fund themselves. I beleve the most common comparable modern arrangement is "research partnerships" with private industry.
Please realize this isn't the time or place to argue for/against the GPL. nonlnear wants to put his software under that license, and you won't change his mind.
Actually, nonlinear asked for GPL-friendly universiites. He would probably be quite happy with BSD-style friendly universities--and if he decides to stay with his alma mater, then arguing for them to allow BSD-style licenses will probably be much easier than GPL-style licenses.
And, last because it's the only one I really would continue a conversation about:
The GPL is a politically motivated license.
As are ALL licenses
You're apparantly far too deep in the ivory tower to realize the difference between "law" and "politics."
MOST licenses are written so as to permit and define a certain range of allowable activity, as well as ensuring the waiver of liability / ensuremnt of payment that the licensor wishes.
The GPL is unusual in that, rather that simply letting Stallman keep from paying for his own freeware code, it has a purposeful political motivation--it wants to change the way the whole indusry works.
Licenses such as Microsoft's EULA, the BSD, the Mozilla license, and even Hasbro's Open Gaming License are all NOT politically motivated. They are intended either to (in order) spell out the terms of a sale, preserve ownership over free software, encourage community adaptation, and encourage the creation of support products.
Not a one of them tries to change the way the world was before it was created. Not a one of them has a manifesto, a revolutionary take on the world, or anything more than cold-hearted pragmatism driving them.
(This would be the point where, like many GPL zealots, you might conclude that I'm an evil man against copyleft. I'm not. I think it's a great idea, and there is a lot to be said for collaborative computing--in five hundred years, it won't matter if your software is GPL'd or not because the innovation spike will be over and ALL software will be free.
(I just happen to be able to discuss the shortcomings of the GPL without presuming everyone is either all for it or all against it.)
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You mean those corporate guys who sent my butt down on that robot-filled hell-hole, alone!?!??
Do you really think that (1) those guys would be any less evil if they weren't lawyers or (2) that any amount of "lawyers are evil" will keep evil folk from becoming lawyers?
The argument is the exact same one as the one for owning guns. The bad guys are already heavily armed; the good guys should stop whining and arm themselves as counterpoint.
The basic point of the ruling is that you need to be able to have plausible deniability when it comes to promoting illegal actions.
No. The point of the ruling is that if a judge & jury think that you're trying to encourage illegal activity, you'll be responsible for it when it happens.
BitTorrent gets buy because Brian DOESN'T encourage illegal use of bittorrent. He may not DISCOURAGE it, and he may even utilize his technology that way, but he doesn't beat a drum for folk to use BitTorrent for illegal file sharing.
IMO, all that anyone who develops a file-sharing tool needs to do is to encourage LEGAL use of their tool. Such as, for example, encouraging and facilitating creative commons verification within the tool.
They are not significant changes
The question was for user-interface changes. And MS has done a fair bit in the last decade--.NET, ActiveDirectory, DirectX, WYSWIG HTML editing that doesn't completely suck, being an actual microkernal, etc, etc.
Your comment about OS X is especially telling. For better or for worse, MS is tossing out their entire development environment and replacing it with a java-like intermediary. And, of course, MS DID toss out the entire paper shack that was DOS, and replaced it with the new foundation that was NT. All without requiring everyone and their brother to write code from scratch or run in an emulator.
Yes, MS code is rather crappy and annoying once you get past the "office worker drone" that they wrote it for. But to say it hasn't changed in ten years is patently false. (Especially if you extend it to twelve years, and group Windows 95 in their path of change.)
But maybe she will reconsider going into such a low and deceitful and filthy "profession".
There is no profresion in the world with as high and ethical standard, as stringent and effective an enforcement mechanism, and as low a standing in the public eye.
By sooth, when you discourage moral and honest people from becoming lawyers, you do nothing more than diminish the qotent of moral and upstanding lawyers. So, logically, you should just shut the hell up and encourage MORE descent folk to become lawyers.
(And before a bunch of non-lawyers start demanding "loser pays", remember that "loser pays" just introduces other unfairnesses when the poor can't sue the rich.)
You know the right to have a lawyer at trial? It doesn't only apply to criminal cases.
In New York, if you get sued or someone does something so bad that you need to go to court, TALK TO THE JUDGE IF YOU CAN'T AFFORD A LAWYER!
Yes, if you can afford one it will be expensive. But if it's so expensive that it would drive you to bankruptcy, the judge may order a member of the bar to represent you.
(This is one of the reasons why legal fees are so high--because every law firm in the state is reqired to give a certain amount of pro bono work.)
He will probably not even consider any other logic or argument because it threatens the integrity of his.
That's fine. This is why just about any court action gets run before a Jury first. It doesn't matter really what the law says--dispute his facts, and then he has to argue his case before tweleve of our peers.
And, btw, this is why you SHOULD perform Jury Duty.
I should have published my book by it's working title "XML by Stealth" - might have given this guy indigestion as you can't copyright book titles!
The guy has a trademark claim, not a copyright claim. You can't copyright short phrases, title or not. You CAN, however, trademark them.
Just FYI.
The grandparent argued that there were NO significant changes whatsoever.
1, 2, and 7 are copies, no argument.
3 and 4 may not be mind-blowing ideas, but they do change the user experience.
5: no, you couldn't re-arrange the Start Menu. You could alter your Programs folder, but that was it.
6--now, 6 is a great example of why MS chose the word "innovate" and not "invent." They make a bunch of small changes, that make the thing marginally better. Hence, "innovation."
As for 8--there's a button to show them, and you can turn it off right there. In fact, I should add a 9th "innovation" -- you can turn off all the new things.
Really, though, most of MS's R&D and "innovation" is in wholly new things. Some of these suck, others are great ideas done badly, and still others are done very very well. (Wheel mice, for example. And yes I know they were someone else's idea first.)
Windows has improved a heck of a lot in the 6 years after Windows 95 came out, but not through innovation.
Actually, the 95-2000 improvements are classifiably solid innovation. MS and IBM decided to toss out DOS and re-build it from scratch, and the microkernel OS that Windows is today is a result of that work.
From 95 to XP? Man, you obviously haven't used 95 in quite awhile.
- Can now view and kill programs and processes
- Can have multiple user accounts with actual security
- Has a web browser built in
- Plug and Play is no longer "plug and pray"
- You can now re-organize the start menu
- there's a sidebar that shows you more information while browsing in explorer
- You can "stop" what you're doing, let someone else log on for a second, and then go right back to what you were doing
- The system tray now auto-hides itself, with each icon individually able to be "shown" or "hidden"
Yes, a lot of the changes are things that UNIX had before DOS or MAC has ages ago. So what? They're significant changes, and if you can't see them then you're really just trying not to.I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels.
That's only because you have a maladjusted sense of what "reasonable" is. That, or you drive a huge top-heavy truck.
Speed limits have been intentionally set 5-15 mph too low in all but the most settled areas, where a low speed really is a safety concern.
But on many, many, MANY of the roads in this counry, a halfway incompetent driver can still be as safe at +10 as they are at 0 or -10 (relative to the current posted speed limit.)
Why are the limits set where they are? Not because it makes drivers safer--it doesn't, those that die in high speed will ignore whatever limit you set--but because it generates revenue for the local court system.
During the summer of 1945, Ambassador J. Reuben Clark, Jr., one of America's foremost scholars in the field of international law, prepared an analysis of the UN Charter. His learned appraisal and cogent remarks fly in the face of popular platitudes and conventional "wisdom" concerning the "revered" document. Ambassador Clark's examination led him to conclude that the Charter "is a war document not a peace document," and that it "is built to prepare for war, not to promote peace." The Ambassador noted...:
I did not say the UN would prevent war. I never called its charter a revered document.
I said that it was supposed to prevent World War III. And it did, by ensuring that the two cascading networks of alliances that caused WWI were instead one single worldwide network of alliances, with two big sub-knots of communists and democracies.
I don't recall the UN ever stepping in and doing anything.
They weren't supposed to. They were supposed to be the place that Krushchev would go and bang his shoe, instead of nuking Britian.
Let's not forget that the UN was the second implementation of another American president's idea, one that only worked because the USA signed onto it.
(And, for the record, the reason people hate the USA is how double-faced we acted during the cold war. It's not that we're free or any shit like that--it's that we were jerks with most of the world.)
I always thought that the fact that if they did go nuclear, there wouldn't be enough left of either side to say they "won".
Depends on when and at what scale. For instance, nuking Afghanistan and Vietnam likely would not have resulted in nuking the USSR or the USA.
Heck, it's entirely possible that, sans UN, the USSR and the USA would have traded nukes a few at a time at first--and by "at first" I mean "during or before the Korean war."
And let's not forget that the main reason the Cold War didn't heat up was that the USA and the USSR were able to communicate--something that the UN was intended to do, and did well enough.
It has become part of a world body that has done precious little to actually help the world
The UN was designed to do one thing: prevent World War III.
It did that exceptionally well. The USSR and the USA never had a huge tank/nuke war in Europe, and their proxy wars were fought with unusual restraint given that each side had nuclear arms.
The fact that the UN has been used to do some other things is a comparative footnote.
So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?
No, only the ones you actually send e-mail to.
And if you only send e-mail to those that explicity give you an e-mail address, you can probably rely on them to tell you where they're from.
If the Democrats go for 'obstuctionist' to 'revolutionary' they will be thrown out on their ear.
If they did it without provocation, yes.
But, as I said, if the Republicans make it so that the Democrats can do longer do ANYTHING--i.e., every act of congress gets decided on well before it goes to Congress, by the Republicans, and debate is no longer even possible--then they would be smart to make that fact as public as possible, by refusing to participate in the farce of a system.
Note that this won't happen, because the last thing even the most idiotic republican wants is to make Howard Dean 100% right about them--and that means that they need to keep the Democrats in Washington.
If the Democrats aren't very careful in its application, they may may lose it forever.
Both houses of Congress have impressively low quorum rules. If the Republicans give the Democrats no reason to stay in Washington--i.e., by being hardcore party-line all the time--then the Democrats can simply withdraw from washington and campaign full-time.
Which, really, will mean that Republicans will lose both houses of Congress. If the Democrats go from "obstructionist" to "revolutionary", they'll win faster than if the Republicans required everyone to become a Scientologist.
And the Republicans were looking for a fight to get rid of the Filibuster--and the media's done a crappy job pointing out that Bush's "straight up or down vote" was never given any President's slate of nominees, party majority or not.
My favourite is why does time have an arrow?
Because "time" is a dimension all its own.
Imagine a million bugs fighting. These bugs keep killing each other, and also keep multiplying. As we watch, the bugs start fighting on the back of others bugs, and gradually the insect melee becomes higher and higher.
Time is up: we move foward because we are buyoed by the actions of the past.
Or, to put it another way: Time is different because everything moves through all points in time; at different rates, perhaps, but if you could stand outside of the universe wiht a clockwatch, you could examine any bit of matter/energy at a specific time and find that it's in one and only one location.
Everything still supports it.
Except for the mac.
And the PC built by someone trying to save $50 on a floppy drive they'd only use to flash their BIOS.
Which means that you agree with the original poster that people are pretty bad at differentiating friendly from enemy fire.
As the original "grandparent" poster, I have one thing to say to that:
Humans may suck as telling friend from foe in the heat of combat, but right now AI is worse.
In the past, AI has not allowed people to make calmer, more objective decisions. Landmines, to take one example, kill civilians more easily than they kill soldiers, and without the accountability.
How do you mix landmines with AI? "Smart" landmines don't have any AI, they just have a timer or a radio frequency reciever so they can be safety disarmed after the war.
Anyway, the way of the future is going to be soldiers and AI working together, not competing against each other. Kind of like how they do now in the USAF. (The F-22 through the A-10 all have computers to help the pilot; the UAVs have a human to direct the killing.)
Two big ideas of note are the "Future Soldier" program, which is going to introduce a whole host of new tech to the army's riflemen, incudling a live-feed wireless situation transponder. (Kind of like those cameras on Aliens, but not as sucky.)
The second big idea (please pardon my sentence strucutre; it's too early in the am) is a robot-controlled sentry. AI is great for this mindless, repetitive job of looking for movement and firing when given a certain situation. (I.e., "kill anything that crosses that line"). And as with the UAVs, the robot can recieve live guidance from an officer of the military if it is found to have a questionable situation (i.e., "there's a person standing on the edge of the line, not moving forward.")
The DOD will get interested, and use a similar technique to train -real- robots?
The DOD is perfectly capable of creating robots that kill people. The hard part is making those robots NOT kill the people you don't want them to kill.
When a user sets themselves up this way and then installs programs as an Administrator, they find that they can't run the programs completely or correctly as the lower privilege user.
Try installing some of Microsoft's software in Windows, as Administrator, and then log in as a user and see if you can use it.
You'll be able to use it just fine. Perfectly well. Exactly as if you were logged in as an Admin, save you'll have a few files you can't update or change.
The problem with Windows isn't Microsoft, it's everybody else. The folks who wrote that cat care program didn't bother to read up on the software-side changes, and so they do things like storing user-editable information in the registry, keeping documents in the program's subfolder, or just generally writing horrible software.
As an easy fix for crappy software, btw, is to install it into a folder such as c:\insecure\ or somesuch, and allow everyone to have full access to that folder. Usually fixes the problem with running as guest, and less likley to bork windows itself.
FWIW, though, yes, MS messed up on the fix for these things. There SHOULD be a log kept of programs that didn't run, including the files they accessed and who tried to run them. A small administrator program that can set permissions for all of those would be a boon, too.
So, Planesdragon, would you care to identify the part of the post quoted above which you are managing to read as advocating distributing GPL'd code without the GPL?
Sure.
The question was "how do I get the university to publish my code using the GPL?"
Noksgat's answer was "use the GPL, and force them to do it." Which, in a situation where the University has rights to all work done on their dime (as describied in the article), is an attempted mingling of GPL and non-GPL code to be released without the GPL.
A comparable situation would be if a programmer at Microsoft started using GPL'd code. They'd be fired for the same reason I described, and possibly have criminal charges brought aginst them if MS was angry enough.
(And, really, if you're at a University and you find yourself running into prohibitions against using the GPL, then you're likely at a University that MS has a fair hand in supporting.)
Since well before Shakesphere's time we have used technology to overcome our physical shortcomings. First it was our inability to kill a dog, then our inability to stay warm in the winter, and so and so forth until our inability to count the census in a week caused us to create the computer.
Today, there is no doubt in my mind that technological solutions are the only way to overcome individual disabilities, be they malfunctioning limbs or poor eyesight or even paralysis. However, there is only so much that an automatic ledger-book can do, and computers are only part of the solution.
Without knowing more about your disability it's hard to say, but philisophically, I'd suggest you simply remember that Shakesphere never lived in a world where a small old man could stand up from church and kill a huge menacing man; he never thought that men would fly, machines would be more than curiosities for the rich, voices could ever be recorded and played back, or that it would ever be possible to disguise the fact that one cannot stand up straight or hold a pen.
And where, precisely, did I advise doing that?
Right here.
Three other things worth noting.
First:
F/OSS is fine with them
If F/OSS is fine with your superiors then you don't have the same perspective as someone who doesn't. This entire discussion hinged on what to do if the powers-that-be DON'T like copyleft, for whatever reason they may have.
Second:
Please also realize that when it IS time to argue against the GPL, you can make perfectly logical and ideological reasons for why one might choose it without telling blatent lies.
There is no better reason not to use the GPL than "you could be fired for doing so." If you WON'T be fired for doing so--and the right way for this is to ask, not go ahead and do it--then it's a moot discussion.
But it is quite possible for someone to be tossed out on their ear--or simply not hired--if they don't mesh with the political and legal orientation of the then-in-power administration.
Sheesh.
Do you even know how grants are obtained?
Yes. It was a slip of the tongue. Substitute "money" for "grant money."
And, btw, there ARE universities that have written and sold software or other technologies to help fund themselves. I beleve the most common comparable modern arrangement is "research partnerships" with private industry.
Please realize this isn't the time or place to argue for/against the GPL. nonlnear wants to put his software under that license, and you won't change his mind.
Actually, nonlinear asked for GPL-friendly universiites. He would probably be quite happy with BSD-style friendly universities--and if he decides to stay with his alma mater, then arguing for them to allow BSD-style licenses will probably be much easier than GPL-style licenses.
And, last because it's the only one I really would continue a conversation about:
The GPL is a politically motivated license.
As are ALL licenses
You're apparantly far too deep in the ivory tower to realize the difference between "law" and "politics."
MOST licenses are written so as to permit and define a certain range of allowable activity, as well as ensuring the waiver of liability / ensuremnt of payment that the licensor wishes.
The GPL is unusual in that, rather that simply letting Stallman keep from paying for his own freeware code, it has a purposeful political motivation--it wants to change the way the whole indusry works.
Licenses such as Microsoft's EULA, the BSD, the Mozilla license, and even Hasbro's Open Gaming License are all NOT politically motivated. They are intended either to (in order) spell out the terms of a sale, preserve ownership over free software, encourage community adaptation, and encourage the creation of support products.
Not a one of them tries to change the way the world was before it was created. Not a one of them has a manifesto, a revolutionary take on the world, or anything more than cold-hearted pragmatism driving them.
(This would be the point where, like many GPL zealots, you might conclude that I'm an evil man against copyleft. I'm not. I think it's a great idea, and there is a lot to be said for collaborative computing--in five hundred years, it won't matter if your software is GPL'd or not because the innovation spike will be over and ALL software will be free.
(I just happen to be able to discuss the shortcomings of the GPL without presuming everyone is either all for it or all against it.)