I'll remember that next time I'm holding a TV transmitter up to my ear.
Personally, I don't see RF exposure as a serious threat to the health, but comparisons like this aren't very helpful to those trying to understand why.
That's like asking why, after millions of years without defenses against a disease that never existed, such defenses would become "essential" after the disease begins propagating.
Back before humanity gelled into large civilizations, we didn't need roads or police or professional bureaucrats. Then things started getting complicated, and there wasn't a way back. They couldn't just tear up the roads, fire the scribes, and go back to remembering stuff in their heads.
The more complex things are, the more the complexity becomes necessary. We couldn't go back to an agrarian society now if we wanted to, unless we were willing to sacrifice 90% of the world's population to bring demand back down to a level that could be supported by stone age technology.
In short, we've got the wolf by the ears. Enjoy the ride, folks, cuz there's no getting off.
Evolution was designed to fully replace MSOutlook. And you're complaining because a highly informative article spent a lot of time comparing Evolution and Outlook, and explaining the advantages/disadvantages of switching between them.
IANAL. AYAL? Apparently, you're not, otherwise you'd have filled half your post with legalese saying that it did not constitute legal advice.
I think you're wrong. If you write an independent work that just happens to rely on a previous work for a great deal of its information, it isn't automatically a "derivative work." It would be nice if you cited the original as a source, but that's a separate issue.
If I were creating a new work that covered the same information, I would make sure that as little information as possible came from the Microsoft CIFS document. Find alternate sources of information wherever possible, and list the alternates as sources as well.
However, such an endeavor probably isn't necessary. The Samba team itself claims that a more complete and accurate document exists: The SNIA CIFS document (pdf).
How about translating the whole thing into "Yoda-speak," and then claiming original rights as a parody? That would lead to an interesting legal battle, if nothing else. "Read this document into the court record, I will."
You're not nearly paranoid enough. If I were you, I'd also hire bodyguards to keep an eye on the bodyguards. And then hire a couple of PIs to spy on them (and each other, to make sure they're doing their jobs properly). And then I would fake my own death and go live in the Bahamas, just to be sure.
Flamebait. Everyone go back to using whichever distributed client you feel best benefits the world at large or your own ego gratification. Seti@Home, Folding@Home, RenderVirtualValerie@Home, Distributed.net, CalculateBillGatesNetWorth@Home. . . doesn't matter.
3) The article you cite is quite informative, but the most important sentence, IMHO, is "For most terms, we have no way of reliably estimating their true value..." There is so much we don't know about all the factors (and their relative importance, since some of them just make intelligent life less likely, not impossible). This is one indirect way to make a guess about the factors we can't yet study any other way.
True, but false as well. The number of possible games is orders of magnitude greater than the number of games that make sense. Sure, there are times when a move may violate some cherished rule and still be advantageous. But just eliminating the completely boneheaded moves might be enough to make it tractable (for a computer the size of, say, our solar system).
However, if you set a small group of humans who had never played chess before to the same task, without being able to study the strategies evolved by others, it would be a long time before they came up with these openings either. Computers and humans both use knowledge gained by players throughout history to bootstrap themselves into becoming better chess players than they could be on their own.
Also, your assertion of "millions of years" is grossly hyperbolic, if not downright dishonest. Learning machines start out using brute force, but quickly stumble upon certain interesting features of the problem space that lead to success. As the rules get more elaborate, the problem space diminishes, and I think it's very likely that it would eventually converge on a handful of optimum opening strategies very similar to the ones popular today.
Deciding on moves based on a mixture of well-understood strategies, general rules, and deeply considering the most likely scenarios? Sounds like a great definition of "playing chess" to me.
"There's a team of engineers inside?" The engineers weren't telling Deep Blue which moves to make. Sure, it was playing according to algorithms designed and perfected by another entity. But for the most part, so was Kasparov.
Admittedly, chess is a relatively narrow domain, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't require intelligence in order to navigate it.
One of the tactics of the anti-AI side is to simply redefine any problem that a computer manages to solve as "not requiring intelligence." Facial and voice recognition required intelligence until suddenly computers were able to do it. Then they became "narrow domains".
My theory is that, if you took one of these chess-playing mainframes, slapped on some facial and voice recognition, and threw in some scripting on the level you find in many video games, you'd have a computer at least as socially adept as the most eccentric grandmaster. I mean no disrespect to them, but the brain is well designed as a general purpose machine. Focusing it exclusively on a narrow problem domain like chess causes it to suffer in other domains.
Being on the short end of a 28.8 modem, how does this information help me at all?:)
Seriously, I've been trying to get all the up2date packages for a couple of months now. Is there somewhere I can just order a CD? I'm willing to pay money at this point.
Unfortunately, this appears to be exactly what Microsoft is doing. Here's the article summary:
from the must-eat-more-money dept. razvedchik writes: "As reported in this article in the Portland, OR newspaper, The Oregonian, Microsoft is pressuring 24 school districts in the northwest to agree to their Microsoft School Agreement licensing scheme or undergo an audit in 60 days. Multnomah ESD, which covers the greater Portland area and has around 25,000 computers, has to either decide to accept the license at about $500,000 or undergo the audit which it does not have time to prepare for. Of significant interest is the fact that a significant majority of these schools are experimenting with using Linux. Multnomah ESD has its own thin-client Linux distro called K12LTSP."
No need. We just have everyone in America fill out form 1040-SF and declare how the space program improved their lives in the previous year. Then we have geeks fill out a form that says exactly how much sci-fi related taxes they paid the previous year. All this is shipped to the IRS, who throws all the forms into a burn barrel and sends everyone a bill for $300.
It's a simple and eminently fair system. I'm behind this 100%.
I can see many uses for this style of taxation. For example, all Medicare/Medicaid programs should be paid by people over 50, since they're responsible for the vast majority of medical expenses. All government funded research into clean energy should be paid by card-carrying Greenpeace members. Why should a Texas oil mogul pay for research that actually hurts his bottom line? That goes double for protecting endangerd species. And screw the idea of having property taxes to fund education. There is no reason why somebody who has ten kids should pay the same amount in taxes as someone who has none, so let's fund all education through per-child taxes.
And don't even get me started on the farce that is welfare. The taxes to fund welfare should be paid entirely by those who actually *use* the system. A simple 90% tax on being poor should be enough to fund the welfare program completely. Money for enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act should come from the handicapped. We could fund the CIA by taxing all the terrorists secretly living in America. Finally, we could have saved Joe Taxpayer a grundle of money by financing the recent war in Afghanistan by taxing Americans of Middle East origin.
This sort of system of taxation is both needlessly complex, and overlooks the fact that the Government ostensibly funds all these programs because they benefit America as a whole. I would say that fewer than 10% of the people I know have any interest in science, and I'd like to think I hang with a pretty bright crowd. But the knowledge gained by NASA and the technologies researched in discovering that knowledge has benefitted everyone.
You misunderstand. The GPL only restricts the way software is redistributed. Unless Dreamworks starts selling or licensing their modifications to others, they're under no obligation to release anything.
However, releasing their modifications back to the community will eventually end up improving Dreamworks' own situation, as the modifications are debugged, widely adopted, and improved upon.
"Instead of revoking access to users we like to label as "stupid", maybe we as IT Managers, Sys Admins, etc. should spend more time training our people rather than browsing Slashdot all day."
Maybe if we trained them to browse Slashdot all day. . . Never mind.
Where do you get off calling Jar Jar "ugly?" Star Wars is supposed to have aliens in it, and from an entirely aesthetic standpoint, Jar Jar is a very cool looking alien.
We hate him primarily for three reasons. First, his whiny, nasal, pseudo-Jamaican voice. Second, his entirely unfunny clumsiness and Jerry Lewis-esque pratfalls. Finally, there's his "How rude" catchphrase, which was ripped off a mediocre sitcom that nobody on/. would ever admit having watched.
Jar Jar, I believe, can be saved. There's a good decade between Episodes I and II, which provides plenty of time for character development. First, we lower his voice an octave or two. Since we know nothing of Gungan physiology, it's possible that Binks was on the tail end of adolesence, and his vocal cords weren't fully developed. Then, ship him off to war. He is a general, after all. A few years in the trenches and he might toughen up and learn just enough to be more dangerous to the enemy than himself. Finally, war has made him cynical and bitter, so we can replace "how rude" with "kiss my amphibious ass."
Make those changes, and I think everyone would agree that Jar Jar would be tolerable, and possibly even cool.
Or go to plan B, which has Jar Jar meet his decapatastic demise at the hands of the Emperor in the first thirty seconds of the movie.
Neither will happen, of course. But can't I dream?
Re:ABC AND Slashdot get taken in
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
Wow. I've been reading/. religiously for the last couple of years, and I've never before seen a +5 troll. It's actually kind of cool.
Hydrogen under the surface of the Earth? I don't see how that's any more a renewable resource than fossil fuels. So we'll start sucking that out of the ground when it becomes more economical than collecting oil. Then it's gone, and where will we be?
Cold fusion never worked. What this guy's proposal lacks is funding, not scientific validity. Comparing the two is unfair in the extreme.
Building codes requiring solar panels on every roof? Not a bad idea, but there are some logistical problems to sort out. First, you need more than just solar panels. You also need some pretty expensive equipment to regulate the energy coming in from those panels and transform it into the "flavor" of energy used by the power grid. The fewer such setups required, the better.
Then there's the fact that every homeowner would now be responsible for maintaining another system. Putting them under the control of Joe Wwfwatcher is an error-prone proposition, and one person's mistakes can cause problems on the whole grid. Example: the electric folk are trying to maintain the power grid, but can't because somebody's faulty equipment is still pumping power into the system.
Finally, your plan shares problems common to any earth-based system. The atmosphere absorbs the majority of the energy before it can even reach the solar panels.
I think a better system would be to require solar installations on buildings exceeding a certain square footage of roofing, with the solar installation taking up about 10-20% of the available area. The average homeowner wouldn't have to get involved, but the local Wal-Marts and Home Depots would. A few relatively large installations are going to be much more effective than millions of tiny ones, and indescribably easier to maintain.
Then give the stores the right to sell the energy to the power companies so they don't feel too put out by the "unfunded government mandate," and things might work out.
Don't complain that your post is being labelled a troll. If I grok the essence of trolling, it is the posting of extreme views in order to elicit a reaction from a forum. I'm sure you're a very sincere troll, who believes what he's saying. But "this'll never work,/. sucks, dump the article and fire the editor, how could anyone take such a stupid idea seriously, take this guy's funding" certainly constitutes "extreme views." The proposal is much better than you make it sound. It requires little new technology, has several logical points in its favor, and just requires that Americans show some cajones and put some of their DVD-buying money into it.
If you want to argue that your plan is more cost effective, then argue that instead of trying to compare the plan to cold fusion. It is the Not-Trolling Way.
But cheap lunar energy doesn't give freckle-faced American children the dream of honing their athletic skills so they can make a hundred million dollars smacking a little ball around a big field, now does it? DOES IT?
Where the hell are your priorities?
[sorry, feeling a bit goofy today.]
How did it get moderated insightful? Easy. The moderators don't read the articles either.
The Moon, as you admit yourself, is being bombarded day and night (okay, maybe not night) with intense, people-frying radiation. Now this man wants to collect up all that dangerous radiation and point it back at Earth!
He wants to kill us all, and he must be stopped. It will mean a great sacrifice, but I am fully willing to accept a Nobel Peace Prize for cutting through this web of lies and exposing this madman for what he really is.
I really don't see any difference between energy that would otherwise remain underground and energy that would otherwise be hitting the moon. The fact that one set of watts was supposed to have worked its way back out of the system a hundred million years ago isn't important.
But if the energy added to the system ends up causing problems, there's nothing to stop us from putting up orbiting reflectors (I mean, as long as we're shooting junk off into space anyways. ..)
Otherwise, a very informative post. It's people like you who are ruining the Slashdot Blackout for everyone.
This is a terrible idea. If implemented, the First Post trolls will have to put their money where their mouths are. They won't, of course, and Slashdot's hit count will drop like a stone.
Seriously, though. It's an interesting idea. I'm sure that some people will find a way around it, but at least then they'd be paying for the bandwidth.
Another possibility would be for people to support the site by buying their own banner ads. I wouldn't mind seeing ads for the SCA or ads to the effect of "Open Source Project X needs C++ programmer with m4d XML 5k177z." I can think of quite a few advocacy sites I'd be willing to help advertise. Help yourself, help Slashdot.
Maybe if OSDN started throwing in a free subscription with every banner ad purchase. . .
Re:pointless
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 3, Informative
D00D! RTFA!
The GPL is different from other licenses. The GPL grants rights of redistribution that copyright law does not. Most proprietary licenses restrict your behavior in ways that copyright does not, and hence may be unenforcable. Things like restrictions on reverse engineering, not using the software to promote [insert icky cause X], allowing the licensor to change the terms of the agreement at will and without notification, etc., should all be struck down in court.
In short, the article is claiming that the GPL is on far more stable legal footing than any other license in the proprietary world.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll remember that next time I'm holding a TV transmitter up to my ear.
Personally, I don't see RF exposure as a serious threat to the health, but comparisons like this aren't very helpful to those trying to understand why.
That's like asking why, after millions of years without defenses against a disease that never existed, such defenses would become "essential" after the disease begins propagating.
Back before humanity gelled into large civilizations, we didn't need roads or police or professional bureaucrats. Then things started getting complicated, and there wasn't a way back. They couldn't just tear up the roads, fire the scribes, and go back to remembering stuff in their heads.
The more complex things are, the more the complexity becomes necessary. We couldn't go back to an agrarian society now if we wanted to, unless we were willing to sacrifice 90% of the world's population to bring demand back down to a level that could be supported by stone age technology.
In short, we've got the wolf by the ears. Enjoy the ride, folks, cuz there's no getting off.
Evolution was designed to fully replace MSOutlook. And you're complaining because a highly informative article spent a lot of time comparing Evolution and Outlook, and explaining the advantages/disadvantages of switching between them.
You have a problem with this, why?
IANAL. AYAL? Apparently, you're not, otherwise you'd have filled half your post with legalese saying that it did not constitute legal advice.
I think you're wrong. If you write an independent work that just happens to rely on a previous work for a great deal of its information, it isn't automatically a "derivative work." It would be nice if you cited the original as a source, but that's a separate issue.
If I were creating a new work that covered the same information, I would make sure that as little information as possible came from the Microsoft CIFS document. Find alternate sources of information wherever possible, and list the alternates as sources as well.
However, such an endeavor probably isn't necessary. The Samba team itself claims that a more complete and accurate document exists: The SNIA CIFS document (pdf).
How about translating the whole thing into "Yoda-speak," and then claiming original rights as a parody? That would lead to an interesting legal battle, if nothing else. "Read this document into the court record, I will."
Don't forget to rate the license!
You're not nearly paranoid enough. If I were you, I'd also hire bodyguards to keep an eye on the bodyguards. And then hire a couple of PIs to spy on them (and each other, to make sure they're doing their jobs properly). And then I would fake my own death and go live in the Bahamas, just to be sure.
Flamebait. Everyone go back to using whichever distributed client you feel best benefits the world at large or your own ego gratification. Seti@Home, Folding@Home, RenderVirtualValerie@Home, Distributed.net, CalculateBillGatesNetWorth@Home. . . doesn't matter.
1) The government isn't sponsoring Seti@Home.
2) I think it does benefit society.
3) The article you cite is quite informative, but the most important sentence, IMHO, is "For most terms, we have no way of reliably estimating their true value..." There is so much we don't know about all the factors (and their relative importance, since some of them just make intelligent life less likely, not impossible). This is one indirect way to make a guess about the factors we can't yet study any other way.
Don't forget to write the sum off your taxes as a "charitable donation."
True, but false as well. The number of possible games is orders of magnitude greater than the number of games that make sense. Sure, there are times when a move may violate some cherished rule and still be advantageous. But just eliminating the completely boneheaded moves might be enough to make it tractable (for a computer the size of, say, our solar system).
However, if you set a small group of humans who had never played chess before to the same task, without being able to study the strategies evolved by others, it would be a long time before they came up with these openings either. Computers and humans both use knowledge gained by players throughout history to bootstrap themselves into becoming better chess players than they could be on their own.
Also, your assertion of "millions of years" is grossly hyperbolic, if not downright dishonest. Learning machines start out using brute force, but quickly stumble upon certain interesting features of the problem space that lead to success. As the rules get more elaborate, the problem space diminishes, and I think it's very likely that it would eventually converge on a handful of optimum opening strategies very similar to the ones popular today.
Deciding on moves based on a mixture of well-understood strategies, general rules, and deeply considering the most likely scenarios? Sounds like a great definition of "playing chess" to me.
"There's a team of engineers inside?" The engineers weren't telling Deep Blue which moves to make. Sure, it was playing according to algorithms designed and perfected by another entity. But for the most part, so was Kasparov.
Admittedly, chess is a relatively narrow domain, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't require intelligence in order to navigate it.
One of the tactics of the anti-AI side is to simply redefine any problem that a computer manages to solve as "not requiring intelligence." Facial and voice recognition required intelligence until suddenly computers were able to do it. Then they became "narrow domains".
My theory is that, if you took one of these chess-playing mainframes, slapped on some facial and voice recognition, and threw in some scripting on the level you find in many video games, you'd have a computer at least as socially adept as the most eccentric grandmaster. I mean no disrespect to them, but the brain is well designed as a general purpose machine. Focusing it exclusively on a narrow problem domain like chess causes it to suffer in other domains.
Being on the short end of a 28.8 modem, how does this information help me at all? :)
Seriously, I've been trying to get all the up2date packages for a couple of months now. Is there somewhere I can just order a CD? I'm willing to pay money at this point.
Can someone explain the purpose of putting the space in the URL, or of not just linking directly to the comment? I've just always wondered.
No need. We just have everyone in America fill out form 1040-SF and declare how the space program improved their lives in the previous year. Then we have geeks fill out a form that says exactly how much sci-fi related taxes they paid the previous year. All this is shipped to the IRS, who throws all the forms into a burn barrel and sends everyone a bill for $300.
It's a simple and eminently fair system. I'm behind this 100%.
I can see many uses for this style of taxation. For example, all Medicare/Medicaid programs should be paid by people over 50, since they're responsible for the vast majority of medical expenses. All government funded research into clean energy should be paid by card-carrying Greenpeace members. Why should a Texas oil mogul pay for research that actually hurts his bottom line? That goes double for protecting endangerd species. And screw the idea of having property taxes to fund education. There is no reason why somebody who has ten kids should pay the same amount in taxes as someone who has none, so let's fund all education through per-child taxes.
And don't even get me started on the farce that is welfare. The taxes to fund welfare should be paid entirely by those who actually *use* the system. A simple 90% tax on being poor should be enough to fund the welfare program completely. Money for enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act should come from the handicapped. We could fund the CIA by taxing all the terrorists secretly living in America. Finally, we could have saved Joe Taxpayer a grundle of money by financing the recent war in Afghanistan by taxing Americans of Middle East origin.
This sort of system of taxation is both needlessly complex, and overlooks the fact that the Government ostensibly funds all these programs because they benefit America as a whole. I would say that fewer than 10% of the people I know have any interest in science, and I'd like to think I hang with a pretty bright crowd. But the knowledge gained by NASA and the technologies researched in discovering that knowledge has benefitted everyone.
You misunderstand. The GPL only restricts the way software is redistributed. Unless Dreamworks starts selling or licensing their modifications to others, they're under no obligation to release anything.
However, releasing their modifications back to the community will eventually end up improving Dreamworks' own situation, as the modifications are debugged, widely adopted, and improved upon.
Where do you get off calling Jar Jar "ugly?" Star Wars is supposed to have aliens in it, and from an entirely aesthetic standpoint, Jar Jar is a very cool looking alien.
/. would ever admit having watched.
We hate him primarily for three reasons. First, his whiny, nasal, pseudo-Jamaican voice. Second, his entirely unfunny clumsiness and Jerry Lewis-esque pratfalls. Finally, there's his "How rude" catchphrase, which was ripped off a mediocre sitcom that nobody on
Jar Jar, I believe, can be saved. There's a good decade between Episodes I and II, which provides plenty of time for character development. First, we lower his voice an octave or two. Since we know nothing of Gungan physiology, it's possible that Binks was on the tail end of adolesence, and his vocal cords weren't fully developed. Then, ship him off to war. He is a general, after all. A few years in the trenches and he might toughen up and learn just enough to be more dangerous to the enemy than himself. Finally, war has made him cynical and bitter, so we can replace "how rude" with "kiss my amphibious ass."
Make those changes, and I think everyone would agree that Jar Jar would be tolerable, and possibly even cool.
Or go to plan B, which has Jar Jar meet his decapatastic demise at the hands of the Emperor in the first thirty seconds of the movie.
Neither will happen, of course. But can't I dream?
Wow. I've been reading /. religiously for the last couple of years, and I've never before seen a +5 troll. It's actually kind of cool.
/. sucks, dump the article and fire the editor, how could anyone take such a stupid idea seriously, take this guy's funding" certainly constitutes "extreme views." The proposal is much better than you make it sound. It requires little new technology, has several logical points in its favor, and just requires that Americans show some cajones and put some of their DVD-buying money into it.
Hydrogen under the surface of the Earth? I don't see how that's any more a renewable resource than fossil fuels. So we'll start sucking that out of the ground when it becomes more economical than collecting oil. Then it's gone, and where will we be?
Cold fusion never worked. What this guy's proposal lacks is funding, not scientific validity. Comparing the two is unfair in the extreme.
Building codes requiring solar panels on every roof? Not a bad idea, but there are some logistical problems to sort out. First, you need more than just solar panels. You also need some pretty expensive equipment to regulate the energy coming in from those panels and transform it into the "flavor" of energy used by the power grid. The fewer such setups required, the better.
Then there's the fact that every homeowner would now be responsible for maintaining another system. Putting them under the control of Joe Wwfwatcher is an error-prone proposition, and one person's mistakes can cause problems on the whole grid. Example: the electric folk are trying to maintain the power grid, but can't because somebody's faulty equipment is still pumping power into the system.
Finally, your plan shares problems common to any earth-based system. The atmosphere absorbs the majority of the energy before it can even reach the solar panels.
I think a better system would be to require solar installations on buildings exceeding a certain square footage of roofing, with the solar installation taking up about 10-20% of the available area. The average homeowner wouldn't have to get involved, but the local Wal-Marts and Home Depots would. A few relatively large installations are going to be much more effective than millions of tiny ones, and indescribably easier to maintain.
Then give the stores the right to sell the energy to the power companies so they don't feel too put out by the "unfunded government mandate," and things might work out.
Don't complain that your post is being labelled a troll. If I grok the essence of trolling, it is the posting of extreme views in order to elicit a reaction from a forum. I'm sure you're a very sincere troll, who believes what he's saying. But "this'll never work,
If you want to argue that your plan is more cost effective, then argue that instead of trying to compare the plan to cold fusion. It is the Not-Trolling Way.
But cheap lunar energy doesn't give freckle-faced American children the dream of honing their athletic skills so they can make a hundred million dollars smacking a little ball around a big field, now does it? DOES IT?
Where the hell are your priorities?
[sorry, feeling a bit goofy today.]
How did it get moderated insightful? Easy. The moderators don't read the articles either.
Okay, I'm wise to his evil plan.
The Moon, as you admit yourself, is being bombarded day and night (okay, maybe not night) with intense, people-frying radiation. Now this man wants to collect up all that dangerous radiation and point it back at Earth!
He wants to kill us all, and he must be stopped. It will mean a great sacrifice, but I am fully willing to accept a Nobel Peace Prize for cutting through this web of lies and exposing this madman for what he really is.
I really don't see any difference between energy that would otherwise remain underground and energy that would otherwise be hitting the moon. The fact that one set of watts was supposed to have worked its way back out of the system a hundred million years ago isn't important.
.)
But if the energy added to the system ends up causing problems, there's nothing to stop us from putting up orbiting reflectors (I mean, as long as we're shooting junk off into space anyways. .
Otherwise, a very informative post. It's people like you who are ruining the Slashdot Blackout for everyone.
This is a terrible idea. If implemented, the First Post trolls will have to put their money where their mouths are. They won't, of course, and Slashdot's hit count will drop like a stone.
Seriously, though. It's an interesting idea. I'm sure that some people will find a way around it, but at least then they'd be paying for the bandwidth.
Another possibility would be for people to support the site by buying their own banner ads. I wouldn't mind seeing ads for the SCA or ads to the effect of "Open Source Project X needs C++ programmer with m4d XML 5k177z." I can think of quite a few advocacy sites I'd be willing to help advertise. Help yourself, help Slashdot.
Maybe if OSDN started throwing in a free subscription with every banner ad purchase. . .
D00D! RTFA!
The GPL is different from other licenses. The GPL grants rights of redistribution that copyright law does not. Most proprietary licenses restrict your behavior in ways that copyright does not, and hence may be unenforcable. Things like restrictions on reverse engineering, not using the software to promote [insert icky cause X], allowing the licensor to change the terms of the agreement at will and without notification, etc., should all be struck down in court.
In short, the article is claiming that the GPL is on far more stable legal footing than any other license in the proprietary world.