So, you agree that no industrialized country with universal health coverage has actually banned any of the activities and products you listed?
Let's say that universal health care will pass, that it's relatively expensive, and that it must be paid for. What would you rather tax to raise the necessary revenue? A) junk food, B) green, leafy vegetables, C) the products of your labor and investments, D) heart attacks and cancer?
Moving on. You think that any messages a person receives that makes them feel bad about their current lifestyle are "abusive, or at least bothersome?" Sit down to any hour of network TV, and tell me what you see in the commercials. Your house is filthy. You need to lose weight. You are unappealing to the opposite sex. You should live in constant fear of body odor. Your acne makes you repulsive. Your job sucks. Your car sucks. Your Internet is too slow. You're out of shape. Your hair is insufficiently silky and/or lustrous. Ladies, your makeup is of inferior quality, and makes you look like a whore. Your hair is the wrong color. Your dishes are coming out of the washer with stains. You are throwing away your money by not shopping at Big Box. You should be eating more cheeseburgers. You should quit smoking. You're paying too much money for your car insurance. By not choosing our cellular plan, you're telling everyone you love to leave you the hell alone. Your restless leg syndrome could be fatal.
Did I leave any out? Yes, by the thousands.
And you want to kvetch about government PSAs? Molehill, meet mountain.
If they've engineered this thing properly -- and hey, it's Google, they don't hire much stupid -- they'll be sanitizing the comments to yank out any malicious scripts the users try to inject.
Cross-site scripting is not magic pixie dust, and will not allow the terrorists to launch our nukes. Just sayin'.
>> So much of an education is had by being around others who are also interested in the same things and eager to talk about it.
Absolutely true. What a shame that there aren't places on the Internet where people who are interested in different topics could meet and discuss them.
I'm confused. Why are we discussing depictions of education in Star Trek as though they actually indicate anything?
>> The final point is that the business model demands that such distance learning evolves from the brick-and-mortar campuses, not from some entrepreneur with a limited vision.
That makes about as much sense as saying "the business model demands that online music evolves from the brick-and-mortar music industry..." If the current university system manages to leverage its stranglehold on higher education into the online world, the online classes will forever be the cheap knockoffs of the "real" courses, and will continue to cost nearly as much as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Right now rates for higher education are going up faster than even health care costs, and online courses are treated as cash cows.
>> "Customers" (students and their parents) select colleges for many reasons. The expense and the awkwardness of travel are part of the positive factors involved in making the decision. For niche markets the customers will seek value based on brutal economic decisions. For most full-time undergrads, however, the adventure is the whole point. Not much adventure in a videogame education.
You make the assumption that the kid has to stay home to get an online education, and has to leave home to get a proper university education. Me, I lived at home for several years during my college education, and did a sixty mile commute almost every day. In retrospect it was a stupid setup, but it was the cheapest option for me, and lots of young people do essentially the same thing.
In the same way, if you want to give the kid "adventure," and have the money to do it, send them to live in another city to take their online classes. The possibilities are endless. How is being tied to a single location (whether with family, or living on campus) particularly "adventurous"? Example: one of my friends has been itching to go to Burning Man for years, but couldn't bring herself to because it always happens during the second week of classes. In other words, she had to bind herself to a particular time and place. This year she took the plunge, but she had to lighten her classload, and she's still trying to dig herself out of the hole that got dug when she missed those classes.
Online or offline, it's idiocy to have a sixteen week course of study that everyone in a class goes through at the same pace. The only advantage is that the lecturer only has to give the same lecture a few times a year. Throw in pre-recorded lectures, and suddenly there is no reason for it whatsoever. If the material were broken up into smaller, self-study chunks, a one week vacation wouldn't have buried my friend, nobody would have to sit through hour long lectures on material they've already mastered, and people could go off and have real adventures, not the pseudo-adventure of "OMG! I'm on campus and away from my parents for the first time! Quick, somebody buy me a keg!"
You're absolutely right. Same goes for math. I mean, where are people going to find dry erase boards large enough to demonstrate an entire differential equation problem? And don't even get me started on English. Where are they going to find all those books? Online? Hah!
I remember my chemistry labs taking up about 1/4th of the actual coursework, and I never found them particularly illuminating. I also remember doing a physics lab, but I got even less out of that. Yep, gravity works. Okay, friction still exists, and can be measured. Wow! A pendulum really does swing at the same rate regardless of the mass at the bottom of the rope.
I would say that 95% of my college education was done without labs, or with "labs" that could have run on my home computer. CS major, so that's to be expected. I don't deny the value of labs. If anything, there should have been more of them. But there's so little of it in some courses of study that we could leave all the labwork intact and still have students spend less than a month on campus.
Absolutely. The big hits are the big hits because they are (usually unlike anything in the long tail) known quantities. People you know have read and recommended them, or they base their recommendations on previous, related work. You tell people that District 9 is a movie about alien apartheid, you may not get much of a response. Tell them that it's a Peter Jackson movie, and interest skyrockets, because people have enjoyed his work before.
People want to know that their time and money is about to be well spent, and that's tough to do without guidance. Say an online book store has thirty million books in their catalogue, and no real information about the lower 29M, aside from maybe a description and a few sample pages. Wandering at random, and assuming that only a few percent of the books will seem promising given the information given, you'll probably have to read about fifty pages or so just to find a book worth buying, which is a pretty pricey investment.
1) There are an estimated 12M illegal immigrants, and it's safe to assume that not all of them are working. The overall size of the workforce is about 140M. I'm having trouble believing that illegals hugely depress everyone else's wages or inhibits automation, especially compared to offshoring.
2) On your last point, there is already a mechanism for doing this, called "border adjustments". We should be pushing for them to be added to the Waxman/Markey bill. What it would do is add a tariff on goods produced in countries which lack CO2 reduction schemes, which is (theoretically) just enough to negate any advantage they gain from avoiding our CO2 regulations.
3) Automation itself has a negative effect on the wages of the unskilled. I think within, say, fifty years, we're going to have an economy where unskilled labor has almost no economic value. At that point, we'll have to either have the technology to make everyone capable of skilled labor, or rewrite the social contract so that work becomes optional.
Why speak you this thing? Can not a man conceal those affectations of his writing mannerisms just as said man can subvert the so natural loops and lines that emanate from the hand which writes? What draws you to this belief, that the prior speaker did mean the scribbles of the hand, not the selection and arrangements of the letters and the words?
Somebody fairly well versed in these techniques ought to create a tool to help spoof another person. Upload the spoofing text, a substantial volume of the spoof victim's writing, hit go, and it comes back with a match rating, and perhaps suggestions for improving it (e.g.: longer sentences, compound sentences, more frequent use of the word "unfortunately", etc.)
That would pretty much doom the whole enterprise (or at least force it to advance beyond the current state of the art).
Want to know why medical costs are so high? Because hospitals pay out their ass for malpractice suits.
Really? Everything I've read says that it's a very small slice of the problem. For example, Texas passed a law that severely limited malpractice damages a few years back.
They haven't seen a significant increase in the quality of care or cost control. They have, however, seen a big spike in doctors coming to practice in Texas.
That's probably a good thing, since Texas has a high obesity rate and fewer doctors per capita than average. But would you want your life in the hands of a doctor who came to your city specifically because it's harder to sue him for malpractice there? I wouldn't.
It sounds to me like you don't think consumers should have any protections at all. If you can't sue a company for a) sending their representative who b) punches you in the face and then c) chokes you and finally d) chases you down a flight of stairs, then the company e) does not fire the representative who chased, choked, and punched you, then what do you think would be worthy of a lawsuit?
This lawsuit will no doubt add fractions of a penny to your monthly Verizon bill, so I can see why you're indignant about it. But perhaps you'd happily a slightly lower bill for a slight increase in Verizon techs punching you in the face. I wouldn't make that trade, though.
I think the key here is that Verizon told the customer that they would be able to fix it without sending a tech out. Then somebody comes out unannounced to fix the problem? He had every right to have his guard up.
>> If something is taken away, is it then given back after the baby has a fit? This could also ingrain the sense of, "I have to work to hold on to the things I want".
That's a bit pop psychologish for my tastes. The studies I've heard reported about only children, for example, contradict the intuition that having the extra attention would make them more demanding of attention. It actually seems that they're less demanding of it, perhaps because they expect they'll get it eventually, whereas a child with siblings often has to work for the attention of their parents.
In your example, having the toy not come back could make it harder for the child to learn to share, because they learn that sometimes people take things and don't give them back.
In short, while formative experiences may be important, we don't often know exactly what influence they're having.
Re:GPL is the kiss of death for commerical softwar
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 1
>> Not really if I'm reading GPL correctly. What I _think_ you are saying is that since I'm the one writing the code and setting the rules for the license I can put out a license saying "this is under GPL for anybody but me" or something to that account, but that's not really GPL but a modification or a dual license.
No, no, no. The GPL is an agreement between the author and another person. The GPL does not prohibit the author from making any other agreement she wants with any other person. You can license it to Barry under the GPL, to Bill under the MIT license, to Mabel under the super-top-secret-you-will-not-admit-to-having-seen-this-code-under-penalty-of-death license.
It's your code. You can do absolutely anything that you like with your own code. The GPL only restricts the recipient. That means you can even go so far as to release your entire app under the GPL, then sell an enhanced shrinkwrap copy for $50 a pop. Nobody else can without your permission, but you absolutely can.
A dual license means that you grant the recipient the option of using one license or another. It doesn't mean they can pick and choose terms from both licenses, and it doesn't mean they are forbidden for requesting the same code under a different license.
[note: in such a case, you'd have to be very careful about accepting patches, and require that the submitter assign you the copyright.]
>> But more important, people that use my library would effectively be forced to use GPL.
You don't want to license your code under the GPL, because it would force the recipient to abide by the terms of the GPL? Okay, I'll grant that one.
>> As somebody that creates and sells software, that's exactly what I don't like done to me. I never was one of the kids to take their ball and go home because they don't like how the game is played. (And yes, I do send patches back to any libraries I use even when they are not GPL.)
>>>> It's one thing to be okay with others making money off your code. >>>> It's another thing to be okay with another company pulling an "embrace, >>>> extend, extinguish" on you
>> People here use that phrase a lot, but I think it's an oversimplification. While I have seen MS do crazy shit (the original MFC license comes to mind), in the case of the browser, people forget how shitty Netscape was. IE won because it was a better product at that time.
That's not "embrace, extend, extinguish." The browser wars were mostly a case of "leverage monopoly X to increase market share in an unrelated field." Which is illegal under antitrust law.
The only part of the browser wars that were really EEE were the ActiveX debacle and the various formatting differences.
>> Also, embrace & extend is a pretty good page for any software shop's playbook. For example, adding load & save for competing (closed source) product file formats to Word and Excel was a stroke of brilliance. FireFox, for example, did a similar thing when they supported IE's shortcut keys from day zero, and I applauded that move when switching to it. I wish more open-source GUI products did the same thing when trying to compete with the market leader.
Also not examples of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Here.
In EEE, you (E1) take a popular protocol, one that allows several products to interoperate happily. You release your own product using that protocol. Next, when your market share is great enough, you add undocumented "features" (E2) that make your tools more useful, while causing competing products to go "WTF?" Finally, you hope, people start using your product exclusively (E3), in order to ensure that everything works.
Microsoft did it with Kerberos, they did it with ActiveX, and they're even now trying to do it with ODF.
>> But back to my main point: I don't spend one moment thinking about MS or Apple when releasing a
Re:GPL is the kiss of death for commerical softwar
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 1
If you have a software product and publish any of its libraries as GPL, then your product must effectively become GPL'ed.
You're saying that you wrote a bunch of libraries yourself, included those libraries in your own commercial products, then released them under BSD because releasing them under the GPL would have forced the GPL-ification of the products?
That's not how it works. You own the copyright, you can use the code as you like, including packing it into proprietary products. The hoops you're complaining about having to jump through are imaginary.
If Microsoft shareholders profit to an infinitesimal amount from something I gave away for free, I don't really give a fuck.
It's one thing to be okay with others making money off your code. It's another thing to be okay with another company pulling an "embrace, extend, extinguish" on you, effectively ripping your work out from under you and everyone else participating in the ecosystem you created. If you're okay with that as well, then BSD or MIT licensing is fine.
A handy and useful list. But did you actually read the "non-nerd's guide to computers?" I'm astonished that so much misinformation, bad writing, and inappropriate advertising for Intel could be squeezed into... the whole "book" must weigh in at less than 1000 words, and I'm sure 200 of them are devoted to a really confused explanation of hyperthreading.
Plus, it doesn't look like it's been updated since late 2007.
The book needs either vast quantities of TLC, or a merciful death.
The first link, though, seems like a good book. A+++++ WOULD DOWNLOAD AGAIN!!!
Given the number of links to various introductions to computer science, or even -- omilord -- beginning Java, I don't see how this lack of information is an impediment to answering.
Seriously, though. If you have a resource that you think might fit the bill, post it. The dude will have to figure out for himself whether the book is right for his needs in any event.
Open source doesn't really mean either of those things, but I understand the confusion. The term seems to be getting looser as it makes its way into popular culture, and it's being applied to things where the official OSI definition doesn't really apply (textbooks, pictures, movies, etc.)
If the discussion were about software, we'd be best to adhere to the OSI definition. None of this "Microsoft Shared Source" crap. But for a textbook, here's what "open source" means to me:
* It is available to the user in a user-modifiable format. Tex, Quark, InDesign, whatever. The software itself needn't be free or open source, but it helps.
* All text in the book, and the layout, are under a license that allows redistribution and modification. Ideally, Creative Commons.
* All images in the book are available under a license that allows redistribution. Graphs should be available under a format and license that allows easy modification. Think SVG as opposed to, say, JPG.
Free beer textbooks are awesome, but I think we should be firm on the fact that they're not open source.
>> What ID brings to the table is a new reexamination of facts.
Okay, I'll bite.
>> Why are clam fossils at the top of very young mountains?
Because the "age" of a mountain refers to when the plate material was pushed up, not when the plate material was created. A 10M year old mountain can be made out of 1B year old granite.
>> What is the evolutionary progression of DNA?
I think I speak for the entire board when I say, "huh?"
>> Why are there still discrepancies in the geologic and biologic record where we would expect certain types of data but find none?
Ask a non-specific question, get a non-specific answer. When the IDers complain about "missing data", they usually mean missing links in the fossil record. They often go through great contortions to assert that there is no "intermediate" for a given stage. For example, they'll say "there is no transitional fossil between bird and reptile." When confronted with Archaeopteryx, they'll point to certain features and claim that it's clearly a bird. Or they'll point to other features and claim that it's essentially a reptile.
If an ID'er decides that the form really is an intermediate, he'll simply move the goalposts again and say, "okay, where are the transitional fossils between X and Y, and between Y and Z.
This has zero to do with the scientific method.
>> ID brushes away the dogma of science and brings the scientific method back to it.
ID rejects the scientific method, by posting no testable hypotheses. They simply try to cast aspersions on evolution, in the hopes that if they poke enough holes, evolution will crumble, and "God did it" (an untestable and therefore a-scientific hypothesis) will be the only thing left standing.
To the extent that it forces evolutionary theorists to push forward, ID could be argued to serve a useful purpose. But most of the ID movement involves pushing scientific falsehoods in non-scientific forums, causing people to doubt the basics of science and the honesty of its practitioners without good cause.
Slashdot Mirror
Making the proposer a... what was the word again?
I propose that people stop proposing ideas that rely on groups of people to stop being idiots.
So, you agree that no industrialized country with universal health coverage has actually banned any of the activities and products you listed?
Let's say that universal health care will pass, that it's relatively expensive, and that it must be paid for. What would you rather tax to raise the necessary revenue? A) junk food, B) green, leafy vegetables, C) the products of your labor and investments, D) heart attacks and cancer?
Moving on. You think that any messages a person receives that makes them feel bad about their current lifestyle are "abusive, or at least bothersome?" Sit down to any hour of network TV, and tell me what you see in the commercials. Your house is filthy. You need to lose weight. You are unappealing to the opposite sex. You should live in constant fear of body odor. Your acne makes you repulsive. Your job sucks. Your car sucks. Your Internet is too slow. You're out of shape. Your hair is insufficiently silky and/or lustrous. Ladies, your makeup is of inferior quality, and makes you look like a whore. Your hair is the wrong color. Your dishes are coming out of the washer with stains. You are throwing away your money by not shopping at Big Box. You should be eating more cheeseburgers. You should quit smoking. You're paying too much money for your car insurance. By not choosing our cellular plan, you're telling everyone you love to leave you the hell alone. Your restless leg syndrome could be fatal.
Did I leave any out? Yes, by the thousands.
And you want to kvetch about government PSAs? Molehill, meet mountain.
You are so right. Germany has the world's oldest universal health care system, and it's illegal to buy beer there.
Show me the European country that has banned any of the activities you listed.
If they've engineered this thing properly -- and hey, it's Google, they don't hire much stupid -- they'll be sanitizing the comments to yank out any malicious scripts the users try to inject.
Cross-site scripting is not magic pixie dust, and will not allow the terrorists to launch our nukes. Just sayin'.
>> So much of an education is had by being around others who are also interested in the same things and eager to talk about it.
Absolutely true. What a shame that there aren't places on the Internet where people who are interested in different topics could meet and discuss them.
>> Consider the Star Fleet Academy
I'm confused. Why are we discussing depictions of education in Star Trek as though they actually indicate anything?
>> The final point is that the business model demands that such distance learning evolves from the brick-and-mortar campuses, not from some entrepreneur with a limited vision.
That makes about as much sense as saying "the business model demands that online music evolves from the brick-and-mortar music industry..." If the current university system manages to leverage its stranglehold on higher education into the online world, the online classes will forever be the cheap knockoffs of the "real" courses, and will continue to cost nearly as much as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Right now rates for higher education are going up faster than even health care costs, and online courses are treated as cash cows.
>> "Customers" (students and their parents) select colleges for many reasons. The expense and the awkwardness of travel are part of the positive factors involved in making the decision. For niche markets the customers will seek value based on brutal economic decisions. For most full-time undergrads, however, the adventure is the whole point. Not much adventure in a videogame education.
You make the assumption that the kid has to stay home to get an online education, and has to leave home to get a proper university education. Me, I lived at home for several years during my college education, and did a sixty mile commute almost every day. In retrospect it was a stupid setup, but it was the cheapest option for me, and lots of young people do essentially the same thing.
In the same way, if you want to give the kid "adventure," and have the money to do it, send them to live in another city to take their online classes. The possibilities are endless. How is being tied to a single location (whether with family, or living on campus) particularly "adventurous"? Example: one of my friends has been itching to go to Burning Man for years, but couldn't bring herself to because it always happens during the second week of classes. In other words, she had to bind herself to a particular time and place. This year she took the plunge, but she had to lighten her classload, and she's still trying to dig herself out of the hole that got dug when she missed those classes.
Online or offline, it's idiocy to have a sixteen week course of study that everyone in a class goes through at the same pace. The only advantage is that the lecturer only has to give the same lecture a few times a year. Throw in pre-recorded lectures, and suddenly there is no reason for it whatsoever. If the material were broken up into smaller, self-study chunks, a one week vacation wouldn't have buried my friend, nobody would have to sit through hour long lectures on material they've already mastered, and people could go off and have real adventures, not the pseudo-adventure of "OMG! I'm on campus and away from my parents for the first time! Quick, somebody buy me a keg!"
You're absolutely right. Same goes for math. I mean, where are people going to find dry erase boards large enough to demonstrate an entire differential equation problem? And don't even get me started on English. Where are they going to find all those books? Online? Hah!
I remember my chemistry labs taking up about 1/4th of the actual coursework, and I never found them particularly illuminating. I also remember doing a physics lab, but I got even less out of that. Yep, gravity works. Okay, friction still exists, and can be measured. Wow! A pendulum really does swing at the same rate regardless of the mass at the bottom of the rope.
I would say that 95% of my college education was done without labs, or with "labs" that could have run on my home computer. CS major, so that's to be expected. I don't deny the value of labs. If anything, there should have been more of them. But there's so little of it in some courses of study that we could leave all the labwork intact and still have students spend less than a month on campus.
Absolutely. The big hits are the big hits because they are (usually unlike anything in the long tail) known quantities. People you know have read and recommended them, or they base their recommendations on previous, related work. You tell people that District 9 is a movie about alien apartheid, you may not get much of a response. Tell them that it's a Peter Jackson movie, and interest skyrockets, because people have enjoyed his work before.
People want to know that their time and money is about to be well spent, and that's tough to do without guidance. Say an online book store has thirty million books in their catalogue, and no real information about the lower 29M, aside from maybe a description and a few sample pages. Wandering at random, and assuming that only a few percent of the books will seem promising given the information given, you'll probably have to read about fifty pages or so just to find a book worth buying, which is a pretty pricey investment.
Are you sure?
Not bad, but I'd argue on a couple of points:
1) There are an estimated 12M illegal immigrants, and it's safe to assume that not all of them are working. The overall size of the workforce is about 140M. I'm having trouble believing that illegals hugely depress everyone else's wages or inhibits automation, especially compared to offshoring.
2) On your last point, there is already a mechanism for doing this, called "border adjustments". We should be pushing for them to be added to the Waxman/Markey bill. What it would do is add a tariff on goods produced in countries which lack CO2 reduction schemes, which is (theoretically) just enough to negate any advantage they gain from avoiding our CO2 regulations.
3) Automation itself has a negative effect on the wages of the unskilled. I think within, say, fifty years, we're going to have an economy where unskilled labor has almost no economic value. At that point, we'll have to either have the technology to make everyone capable of skilled labor, or rewrite the social contract so that work becomes optional.
Why speak you this thing? Can not a man conceal those affectations of his writing mannerisms just as said man can subvert the so natural loops and lines that emanate from the hand which writes? What draws you to this belief, that the prior speaker did mean the scribbles of the hand, not the selection and arrangements of the letters and the words?
Somebody fairly well versed in these techniques ought to create a tool to help spoof another person. Upload the spoofing text, a substantial volume of the spoof victim's writing, hit go, and it comes back with a match rating, and perhaps suggestions for improving it (e.g.: longer sentences, compound sentences, more frequent use of the word "unfortunately", etc.)
That would pretty much doom the whole enterprise (or at least force it to advance beyond the current state of the art).
Really? Everything I've read says that it's a very small slice of the problem. For example, Texas passed a law that severely limited malpractice damages a few years back.
They haven't seen a significant increase in the quality of care or cost control. They have, however, seen a big spike in doctors coming to practice in Texas.
That's probably a good thing, since Texas has a high obesity rate and fewer doctors per capita than average. But would you want your life in the hands of a doctor who came to your city specifically because it's harder to sue him for malpractice there? I wouldn't.
[src]
It sounds to me like you don't think consumers should have any protections at all. If you can't sue a company for a) sending their representative who b) punches you in the face and then c) chokes you and finally d) chases you down a flight of stairs, then the company e) does not fire the representative who chased, choked, and punched you, then what do you think would be worthy of a lawsuit?
This lawsuit will no doubt add fractions of a penny to your monthly Verizon bill, so I can see why you're indignant about it. But perhaps you'd happily a slightly lower bill for a slight increase in Verizon techs punching you in the face. I wouldn't make that trade, though.
I think the key here is that Verizon told the customer that they would be able to fix it without sending a tech out. Then somebody comes out unannounced to fix the problem? He had every right to have his guard up.
I have to congratulate you on conducting such excellent performance art. Your parody of Objectivists as narcissistic, cocky fools is spot on!
I would argue with you, but I'm impatient to get this post submitted.
But what about William Henry Harrison?
>> If something is taken away, is it then given back after the baby has a fit? This could also ingrain the sense of, "I have to work to hold on to the things I want".
That's a bit pop psychologish for my tastes. The studies I've heard reported about only children, for example, contradict the intuition that having the extra attention would make them more demanding of attention. It actually seems that they're less demanding of it, perhaps because they expect they'll get it eventually, whereas a child with siblings often has to work for the attention of their parents.
In your example, having the toy not come back could make it harder for the child to learn to share, because they learn that sometimes people take things and don't give them back.
In short, while formative experiences may be important, we don't often know exactly what influence they're having.
>> Not really if I'm reading GPL correctly. What I _think_ you are saying is that since I'm the one writing the code and setting the rules for the license I can put out a license saying "this is under GPL for anybody but me" or something to that account, but that's not really GPL but a modification or a dual license.
No, no, no. The GPL is an agreement between the author and another person. The GPL does not prohibit the author from making any other agreement she wants with any other person. You can license it to Barry under the GPL, to Bill under the MIT license, to Mabel under the super-top-secret-you-will-not-admit-to-having-seen-this-code-under-penalty-of-death license.
It's your code. You can do absolutely anything that you like with your own code. The GPL only restricts the recipient. That means you can even go so far as to release your entire app under the GPL, then sell an enhanced shrinkwrap copy for $50 a pop. Nobody else can without your permission, but you absolutely can.
A dual license means that you grant the recipient the option of using one license or another. It doesn't mean they can pick and choose terms from both licenses, and it doesn't mean they are forbidden for requesting the same code under a different license.
[note: in such a case, you'd have to be very careful about accepting patches, and require that the submitter assign you the copyright.]
>> But more important, people that use my library would effectively be forced to use GPL.
You don't want to license your code under the GPL, because it would force the recipient to abide by the terms of the GPL? Okay, I'll grant that one.
>> As somebody that creates and sells software, that's exactly what I don't like done to me. I never was one of the kids to take their ball and go home because they don't like how the game is played. (And yes, I do send patches back to any libraries I use even when they are not GPL.)
>>>> It's one thing to be okay with others making money off your code.
>>>> It's another thing to be okay with another company pulling an "embrace,
>>>> extend, extinguish" on you
>> People here use that phrase a lot, but I think it's an oversimplification. While I have seen MS do crazy shit (the original MFC license comes to mind), in the case of the browser, people forget how shitty Netscape was. IE won because it was a better product at that time.
That's not "embrace, extend, extinguish." The browser wars were mostly a case of "leverage monopoly X to increase market share in an unrelated field." Which is illegal under antitrust law.
The only part of the browser wars that were really EEE were the ActiveX debacle and the various formatting differences.
>> Also, embrace & extend is a pretty good page for any software shop's playbook. For example, adding load & save for competing (closed source) product file formats to Word and Excel was a stroke of brilliance. FireFox, for example, did a similar thing when they supported IE's shortcut keys from day zero, and I applauded that move when switching to it. I wish more open-source GUI products did the same thing when trying to compete with the market leader.
Also not examples of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Here.
In EEE, you (E1) take a popular protocol, one that allows several products to interoperate happily. You release your own product using that protocol. Next, when your market share is great enough, you add undocumented "features" (E2) that make your tools more useful, while causing competing products to go "WTF?" Finally, you hope, people start using your product exclusively (E3), in order to ensure that everything works.
Microsoft did it with Kerberos, they did it with ActiveX, and they're even now trying to do it with ODF.
>> But back to my main point: I don't spend one moment thinking about MS or Apple when releasing a
You're saying that you wrote a bunch of libraries yourself, included those libraries in your own commercial products, then released them under BSD because releasing them under the GPL would have forced the GPL-ification of the products?
That's not how it works. You own the copyright, you can use the code as you like, including packing it into proprietary products. The hoops you're complaining about having to jump through are imaginary.
It's one thing to be okay with others making money off your code. It's another thing to be okay with another company pulling an "embrace, extend, extinguish" on you, effectively ripping your work out from under you and everyone else participating in the ecosystem you created. If you're okay with that as well, then BSD or MIT licensing is fine.
A handy and useful list. But did you actually read the "non-nerd's guide to computers?" I'm astonished that so much misinformation, bad writing, and inappropriate advertising for Intel could be squeezed into... the whole "book" must weigh in at less than 1000 words, and I'm sure 200 of them are devoted to a really confused explanation of hyperthreading.
Plus, it doesn't look like it's been updated since late 2007.
The book needs either vast quantities of TLC, or a merciful death.
The first link, though, seems like a good book. A+++++ WOULD DOWNLOAD AGAIN!!!
Given the number of links to various introductions to computer science, or even -- omilord -- beginning Java, I don't see how this lack of information is an impediment to answering.
Seriously, though. If you have a resource that you think might fit the bill, post it. The dude will have to figure out for himself whether the book is right for his needs in any event.
Open source doesn't really mean either of those things, but I understand the confusion. The term seems to be getting looser as it makes its way into popular culture, and it's being applied to things where the official OSI definition doesn't really apply (textbooks, pictures, movies, etc.)
If the discussion were about software, we'd be best to adhere to the OSI definition. None of this "Microsoft Shared Source" crap. But for a textbook, here's what "open source" means to me:
* It is available to the user in a user-modifiable format. Tex, Quark, InDesign, whatever. The software itself needn't be free or open source, but it helps.
* All text in the book, and the layout, are under a license that allows redistribution and modification. Ideally, Creative Commons.
* All images in the book are available under a license that allows redistribution. Graphs should be available under a format and license that allows easy modification. Think SVG as opposed to, say, JPG.
Free beer textbooks are awesome, but I think we should be firm on the fact that they're not open source.
Yeah, the idea that a professor might actually want to save his students money just doesn't pass the sniff test. There must be a conspiracy afoot.
>> What ID brings to the table is a new reexamination of facts.
Okay, I'll bite.
>> Why are clam fossils at the top of very young mountains?
Because the "age" of a mountain refers to when the plate material was pushed up, not when the plate material was created. A 10M year old mountain can be made out of 1B year old granite.
>> What is the evolutionary progression of DNA?
I think I speak for the entire board when I say, "huh?"
>> Why are there still discrepancies in the geologic and biologic record where we would expect certain types of data but find none?
Ask a non-specific question, get a non-specific answer. When the IDers complain about "missing data", they usually mean missing links in the fossil record. They often go through great contortions to assert that there is no "intermediate" for a given stage. For example, they'll say "there is no transitional fossil between bird and reptile." When confronted with Archaeopteryx, they'll point to certain features and claim that it's clearly a bird. Or they'll point to other features and claim that it's essentially a reptile.
If an ID'er decides that the form really is an intermediate, he'll simply move the goalposts again and say, "okay, where are the transitional fossils between X and Y, and between Y and Z.
This has zero to do with the scientific method.
>> ID brushes away the dogma of science and brings the scientific method back to it.
ID rejects the scientific method, by posting no testable hypotheses. They simply try to cast aspersions on evolution, in the hopes that if they poke enough holes, evolution will crumble, and "God did it" (an untestable and therefore a-scientific hypothesis) will be the only thing left standing.
To the extent that it forces evolutionary theorists to push forward, ID could be argued to serve a useful purpose. But most of the ID movement involves pushing scientific falsehoods in non-scientific forums, causing people to doubt the basics of science and the honesty of its practitioners without good cause.