I'm not much into BT, but it worked well for me this time. It instantly started downloading, and quickly. I was up to 222k/s when it stopped in around three minutes. 9k/s up. Not bad. I guess it's a bit saturated at this point, nobody else wants it.
Which communist country failed in the 80s? I wasn't aware that there were any...
There was Russia, but it was a totalitarianism that let a privelleged elite rule and didn't let the workers actually own anything. Doesn't sound very much like a communism to me. Ditto for the rest (China, N.Korea, etc).
The "communist" countries were all totalitarian regimes whose leaders happened to choose the then-sexy term "Communist". The countries weren't actually run in a communist fashion, or capitalist for that matter.
Show me a democratic country, acknowledged by its citizens to be communist. As far as I know there haven't been any. That might be telling in and of itself, but until there's an example you can't claim to have ever seen the system fail.
They do sound like asses. I especially hate rules forbidding reselling of products or tickets. I bought it, it's mine, let me sell it if I can't use it.
But, I doubt their legal footing in this was based on the back of a ticket. Probably more on "We're too big to sue".
SCO, or the people who make it up, have all the free speech rights. Requiring me to make my software available to them, despite my dislike of their speech, is a violation of my right to choose who I associate with. Just like you have a constitutional right to speak your mind, but I can kick you out of my house for doing so.
The people who run SCO have a constitutional right to be cock-mongers but we aren't required to play nice with them.
My ideals have me releasing GPLed software (what little I get around to writing) for the education and convenience of my community members, which includes people with some community spirit. Spoilers need not apply. Much like, if I donate to a Homeless shelter, it's for the homeless, not because I want to give money away to just anyone.
There's no reason that I feel everyone must be able to use the GPLed code, except that too many restrictions make it hard for anyone to use.
I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be a clause saying that if you violate the GPL in one instance, you lose the right to any GPLed code. Start pulling a SCO, or playing some wierd patent game, and you lose the right to distribute GPLed code. Seems fair.
Actually, you already have #1. Once you have GPLed software (provided your copy is legal) you're free to use it (as with all software, or books, etc) without agreeing to a license.
You only need to agree to the GPL to do things you couldn't otherwise, such as #2 - #4.
Send SCO a letter saying that you aren't allowed to copy Samba without agreeing to the GPL, and you can't in good faith agree to a contract you don't believe is legal. Put up or shut up. If the GPL isn't valid, Samba reverts to the individual copyrights of a ton of people, if the GPL is valid, you've given permission for any of your source, if there is any, which made it into Linux, by releasing Linux under the GPL.
I've never heard of an instance where a ticket clause was a factor, because it was on the ticket. I mean, they might say "Get drunk and we toss you out", but the law (drunk and disorderly, or whatever it is in your area) already lets them do that.
As for having seasons's tickets taken away, sometimes that's legally justified, something they just know you can't do anything about it and aren't really sure of your rights anyway. Like stores that demand to see your receipt when you leave. They're allowed to ask, but you don't have to let them.
You expect #1 and #2 to register to be tracked, to let #3 sleep better at night?
Dealers exist because there's demand. Even if you arrest someone who's dealing, there'll be another to take their place the next day. You need to either cut the demand (not gonna happen), or the upstream supply (evidence suggests this won't happen either) or control the problem so that while dealers may exist, they don't feel the need to deal in a homeless shelter.
As for the real reason behind this, as I see it, it's not money. It's more of an Ashcroftian plan to have everyone carrying picture ID and showing it any time the police ask - to stop terrorism of course.
Why do you have to uniquely identify a homeless person to let them sleep in a bunk bed in a shelter, or feed them a bowl of soup?
Afraid yuppies looking to save a few dollars are going to start sleeping at the homeless shelter?
It's really simple. You build a shelter and let anyone sleep at it. Chances are it's not going to be as nice as the Motel 6, so people aren't going to sleep there unless they need it. Once it's consistently 95% full, you build more capacity until it levels out. Buy a bunch of cots to allow for any unexpected surge in demand.
For soup kitchens. You let them buy food appropriate to feed the number of people they expect. You perform spot-checks to make sure they aren't claiming more mouths than they really feed and pocketing the money.
This stupidity behind this ID idea is offensive for a few reasons:
1) It's a huge waste of money. Why bother giving out and tracking IDs that they're going to lose, etc, when you don't really need to?
2) They're often paranoids! This isn't going to work!!! They're going to lose the cards, try to fake the ID, and in the end, avoid any kind of aid that requires them to present ID.
3) It's yet another band-aid measure for people who are afraid of terrorists. Soon you'll need ID to piss and it won't make a damn bit of difference except that you'll wet your pants trying to find the right card.
Homeless people aren't going to magically come in from the steam vents because you give them ID. Raising barriers is going to make them less likely, not more, to use the services.
This whole idea is based on the assumption that there are millions of people draining the resources of our homeless shelters. Feh, for the buck or two it costs, let them. If they lie their way into a homeless shelter they need the help.
They could put just about anything back there, and no, nobody would ever read it.
But it's also not a binding contract. If it was, they'd have to let you read it before you purchased the ticket.
If what they say fits the law, they can do it without the fancy ticket, and if it doesn't, they're not entitled to do it. Now, even if they're not entitled to throw people out there's no law stopping them from asking you to leave, and you may be intimidated by this legalese on the ticket...
It's like EULAs. Once you've bought it, it's yours. Pieces of paper that they call contracts, but which are shown to you *after* the purchase are irrelevant.
Now, this should probably be against the law. They probably shouldn't be able to pass the backs of tickets off as if they were legal agreements.
Actually, I spoof OS as well as browser. I always browse as IE6 on WinXP these days. I use this when I'm surfing in Linux with Mozilla, or Win2000 with Mozilla.
If I don't, I get browser identification code that tries to be helpful and never is. These days, pretty much the only thing that Moz won't do is run ActiveX controls, so very few sites need to actually do anything based on my browser. If I let them identify me they'll tell me to install IE, if I lie, the page works perfectly.
What I'm saying, is that because copyright law allows you to run software that you have purchased, you don't need anything from MS. You don't need to agree to their EULA, so what they say isn't important, it's after-sale restrictions and the courts don't support the idea that those are binding.
They're claiming there's stolen code, but they aren't showing it to anyone. So we're supposed to look at the old, perhaps PD code, which wasn't stolen and pretend that it's really stolen code? What?!
How about this... You don't write 890k lines of code all of which is a trade secret. C is a pretty wordy language compared to Perl, so some of that is going to be linked list implementation, or array manipulation. You know, code that while it might be part of something big, isn't secret. Just as Nuclear reactors are big and scary and contain secret parts, they've also got $.50 washers on the taps in the bathroom. Take a section of that mundane code and show us how Linux contains an exact copy of it. Trade secret protection only applies to things which could reasonable be thought of as not being known by other professionals in the industry, so a linked list handler would never get that protection unless it was special in some way. (And nobody, to my knowledge, has ever commented on how the Linux kernel has exceptional linked list handling...)
Show us some code. That they are unwilling to find at least one ten-line chunk of code in the 890,000 they claim is stolen, that doesn't contain what they think of as the crown jewels either means their code is absolutely stunning, or that they're full of shit.
Personally, I'm voting they're full of shit. If they had a case, they'd present at least bits of it. It'd up their stock price and who knows, maybe even force IBM to settle if their (IBM's) shareholders didn't think their chances were good. But instead they don't show anything except, under NDA, some similar comments....
Probably, but not for sure. If you sign an NDA, see my trade secrets, then blab, it doesn't mean my secrets lose their protection. My making you sign an NDA is likely going to be seen as taking adequate precautions. That's why everyone signs NDAs all the time.
If the person who snapped this photo was under NDA, and SCO can prove it, they might not lose protection.
However, I don't think they have that protection to being with. The Unix source code has been seen by generations of students. Even under NDA, if you have intimate access to the Unix source code you're going to learn things by reading it, things that might unintentionally make it into your future projects. You can't have trade secrets that are public knowledge. (Yes, this does contradict what I said earlier.)
In other words, if they'd kept the source as close to secret as possible, they might still have protection, if you couldn't figure out the source by disassembling it (which is legal) and if it actually did anything all that amazing. Being that they've shown so many people over the years, even under NDA, they can't legitimately claim they've been trying to keep it a secret.
It'd be important to read the license, if they were actually binding. If you buy Windows you're buying the full and unlimited right to use everything they ship it with. The only restrictions are those of copyright law, you can't make extra copies of anything, but as long as your actions don't require any copies, beyond those inherently required to use the software, you're not violating copyright.
Those licenses aren't required, and thus are binding only if you want them to be. (As in, do you want to accept that? Has MS offered you something?) You've already got all the rights you needed, at the cash register in the store where you finalized the sale.
Having a server cracked, by an exploit that lasted a week before having a patch instead of the months it would have been for closed source, argues that closed is better? And how does that even relate to opening formats like RealPlayer, or are you using the new RealSSH?
I think opening RealPlayer and Flash before they get included in Linux distros by default would be a good thing. The community would obviously be served by having the tools to create web content be open and have compatible free-software versions. By including the player for a format you're acknowledging that you support its use. I think that should only be done when the format is available for everyone to use. The neat thing about the web is that anyone with a text editor can play, you don't need to buy anything.
This has nothing to do with Sony mini-disks, unless Sony's willing to ship a free MD player with every computer. People who buy sony MDs can go to sony.com and download software to work with them, the same as they'd have to in Windows. But, on that topic, how would it hurt anyone, customers or not, if Sony opening the MD format? There'd be more software and thus more choice.
What part of "software that restricts you is bad" do you have problems with?
That's *all* of RMS's problem. Copyright law and software patents and proprietary protocols are all abused to keep the user from doing things they should be able to do, such as view DVDs they own and reverse-engineer software they bought.
If you make money selling software that doesn't do these things, why would he care about it? And it's not like that's a hollow statement. There's a ton of money to be made in writing open source applications. My company pays developers at least $500k a year to write development and testing tools. You may think of this as a cop-out, but here's a well-paying job for ten programmers full time; nothing to be scoffed at.
None of what I do in a day would bother RMS in the slightest, yet I work at least 80% of my time writing code for money.
It's you who trajically misrepresent his position. You act as if the making of money is the important issue to RMS; as if he wants to stop people from making money. If he was against people making money with GNU software he'd have a no-commercial-use clause in the GPL. Other licenses do it, he could have done it... if he wanted to.
In a proof you explain why something can't happen because smaller problem X, which can be solved from axioms, is a critical part of it.
You don't need to show every possible case of an even number plus an odd number to prove that they always add up to an odd number, you simply need to show how all even numbers are equivalent to 2, and all odd numbers are equivalent to 1, for purposed of even/odd determination. How you can keep subtracting 2 from any positive integer until arriving at 1 or 2, and that doing so lets you determine if it's even or odd.
That's a proof right there. You've shown that a complex problem is really just a simple problem with some cruft on it. You can take a problem with infinite cases and reduce it to three, or even further, to an axiom based on the definitions of the problem, or you can simply reduce the cases by a factor of two. (Showing that x and x+1 are both the same, in the context of some equation.)
The idea is that proofs reduce the complexity of a problem. You can, through experience know that even and odd numbers always make an odd number, but if you don't have a way of showing that they always must, you're left wondering if a slightly larger number might be different. This is how a computer proof is. It gives a definitive answer about a range of inputs, but doesn't allow you to extrapolate over an area. You can know the answers to x=(1..100) but that doesn't say anything about x=101.
Your question leads into the 'elegance' of a proof. This is subjective, so it's more open to debate. This is where a valid proof that simply proves 1000 axioms independently is less elegant than one that proves all 1000 are really three different cases and proves only those three. But each proof is still valid.
Microsoft is doing something like that. They're looking to phase out actual purchases of software (because they know the EULA can't be enforced on a sale, probably) and switch to licensing everything. One of the conditions of the license would be an expiry date. At this point, I think that's the date by which you must renew, or face large penalties when finally renewing. In other words, be good and pay every three years when we ask, or we'll soak you completely.
There've been article about this upcoming change, and in respectable journals, not just the Register.
How does RMS using a distribution that *can* come with non-free software, but doesn't by default, make him a hypocrit. He doesn't say they're evil, just that they don't agree with all of his views. As for the non-free software, it's kept very seperate and you are warned if you select anything from that list. It's a safe bet that Stallman isn't using any of it.
As for the link issue, he simply seemed to be mis-spoken. It's not that the FSF doesn't link to Debian (and many other projects), it's that they don't endorse Debian. They aren't saying on the front page that "Debian is everything that the Free Software Foundation wants in a Linux distro."
I don't really see anything contradictory about what RMS does. He avoids non-free software, he encourages others to do the same, and he supports those who do the best job of it.
Sterilization is a good idea. If someone asks for money, help them, but make sure they don't make their own situation worse.
That said, I'm a supporter of welfare. There are a lot of things beyond people's control that could leave them in the street, I think society owes it to itself to keep people from bottoming out so far.
Also, it's enlightened self interest. Few rich people are drug abusing wife beaters, compared to the number of poor who do this. It's not a genetic thing, but I think, a hopelessness thing. If you've got a jaguar in the garage and a ski lodge in aspen you're not going to turn to booze to dull the pain. If the only jobs available to you pay less, after expenses, than welfare would, you've got $20k in bankruptcy-proof student loans, and six kids to feed, you're much more likely to turn to drugs and violence.
If we could keep people from sinking quite that low, by guaranteeingt shelter and food, we could keep that desperation away. I don't think welfare should pay for much in the way of luxuries, and I think you should have to "work" for it. If you had to ride transit (for free) to a city job office every day, and work collecting garbage, painting over grafitti, etc, to get your welfare you'd get a lot less bums using it. Those able to work would quickly find a job, and those unable to work would at least perform a service that'd make the rest of us feel better about supporting them.
Even moms with little kids could do real work. They could stuff envelopes or something. That, combined with not having to worry about getting pregnant again until they'd been off the public dollar for a year (when you'd stop giving them the shots) would make it easier to become self sufficient. They'd have work experience, even as simple as a history of showing up on time for their make-work, and the self-confidence to know they could do it. Not having more kids woul keep them from getting in farther over their heads.
It's only because of RMS's fierce dedication to free software that you have any choice about running free or proprietary software.
Without the GPL bringing everyone together into a world of interoperability we'd all be running different, incompatible, free software. It's as important an invention as Linux, perhaps much more so.
Slashdot Mirror
The one true brace style is as follows
if (being_shot) {
run();
}
The benefits are numerous, but I shall list some of them:
I'm not much into BT, but it worked well for me this time. It instantly started downloading, and quickly. I was up to 222k/s when it stopped in around three minutes. 9k/s up. Not bad. I guess it's a bit saturated at this point, nobody else wants it.
Which communist country failed in the 80s? I wasn't aware that there were any...
There was Russia, but it was a totalitarianism that let a privelleged elite rule and didn't let the workers actually own anything. Doesn't sound very much like a communism to me. Ditto for the rest (China, N.Korea, etc).
The "communist" countries were all totalitarian regimes whose leaders happened to choose the then-sexy term "Communist". The countries weren't actually run in a communist fashion, or capitalist for that matter.
Show me a democratic country, acknowledged by its citizens to be communist. As far as I know there haven't been any. That might be telling in and of itself, but until there's an example you can't claim to have ever seen the system fail.
They do sound like asses. I especially hate rules forbidding reselling of products or tickets. I bought it, it's mine, let me sell it if I can't use it.
But, I doubt their legal footing in this was based on the back of a ticket. Probably more on "We're too big to sue".
SCO, or the people who make it up, have all the free speech rights. Requiring me to make my software available to them, despite my dislike of their speech, is a violation of my right to choose who I associate with. Just like you have a constitutional right to speak your mind, but I can kick you out of my house for doing so.
The people who run SCO have a constitutional right to be cock-mongers but we aren't required to play nice with them.
My ideals have me releasing GPLed software (what little I get around to writing) for the education and convenience of my community members, which includes people with some community spirit. Spoilers need not apply. Much like, if I donate to a Homeless shelter, it's for the homeless, not because I want to give money away to just anyone.
There's no reason that I feel everyone must be able to use the GPLed code, except that too many restrictions make it hard for anyone to use.
I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be a clause saying that if you violate the GPL in one instance, you lose the right to any GPLed code. Start pulling a SCO, or playing some wierd patent game, and you lose the right to distribute GPLed code. Seems fair.
Actually, you already have #1. Once you have GPLed software (provided your copy is legal) you're free to use it (as with all software, or books, etc) without agreeing to a license.
You only need to agree to the GPL to do things you couldn't otherwise, such as #2 - #4.
Send SCO a letter saying that you aren't allowed to copy Samba without agreeing to the GPL, and you can't in good faith agree to a contract you don't believe is legal. Put up or shut up. If the GPL isn't valid, Samba reverts to the individual copyrights of a ton of people, if the GPL is valid, you've given permission for any of your source, if there is any, which made it into Linux, by releasing Linux under the GPL.
I've never heard of an instance where a ticket clause was a factor, because it was on the ticket. I mean, they might say "Get drunk and we toss you out", but the law (drunk and disorderly, or whatever it is in your area) already lets them do that.
As for having seasons's tickets taken away, sometimes that's legally justified, something they just know you can't do anything about it and aren't really sure of your rights anyway. Like stores that demand to see your receipt when you leave. They're allowed to ask, but you don't have to let them.
You expect #1 and #2 to register to be tracked, to let #3 sleep better at night?
Dealers exist because there's demand. Even if you arrest someone who's dealing, there'll be another to take their place the next day. You need to either cut the demand (not gonna happen), or the upstream supply (evidence suggests this won't happen either) or control the problem so that while dealers may exist, they don't feel the need to deal in a homeless shelter.
As for the real reason behind this, as I see it, it's not money. It's more of an Ashcroftian plan to have everyone carrying picture ID and showing it any time the police ask - to stop terrorism of course.
Why do you have to uniquely identify a homeless person to let them sleep in a bunk bed in a shelter, or feed them a bowl of soup?
Afraid yuppies looking to save a few dollars are going to start sleeping at the homeless shelter?
It's really simple. You build a shelter and let anyone sleep at it. Chances are it's not going to be as nice as the Motel 6, so people aren't going to sleep there unless they need it. Once it's consistently 95% full, you build more capacity until it levels out. Buy a bunch of cots to allow for any unexpected surge in demand.
For soup kitchens. You let them buy food appropriate to feed the number of people they expect. You perform spot-checks to make sure they aren't claiming more mouths than they really feed and pocketing the money.
This stupidity behind this ID idea is offensive for a few reasons:
1) It's a huge waste of money. Why bother giving out and tracking IDs that they're going to lose, etc, when you don't really need to?
2) They're often paranoids! This isn't going to work!!! They're going to lose the cards, try to fake the ID, and in the end, avoid any kind of aid that requires them to present ID.
3) It's yet another band-aid measure for people who are afraid of terrorists. Soon you'll need ID to piss and it won't make a damn bit of difference except that you'll wet your pants trying to find the right card.
Homeless people aren't going to magically come in from the steam vents because you give them ID. Raising barriers is going to make them less likely, not more, to use the services.
This whole idea is based on the assumption that there are millions of people draining the resources of our homeless shelters. Feh, for the buck or two it costs, let them. If they lie their way into a homeless shelter they need the help.
They could put just about anything back there, and no, nobody would ever read it.
But it's also not a binding contract. If it was, they'd have to let you read it before you purchased the ticket.
If what they say fits the law, they can do it without the fancy ticket, and if it doesn't, they're not entitled to do it. Now, even if they're not entitled to throw people out there's no law stopping them from asking you to leave, and you may be intimidated by this legalese on the ticket...
It's like EULAs. Once you've bought it, it's yours. Pieces of paper that they call contracts, but which are shown to you *after* the purchase are irrelevant.
Now, this should probably be against the law. They probably shouldn't be able to pass the backs of tickets off as if they were legal agreements.
Actually, I spoof OS as well as browser. I always browse as IE6 on WinXP these days. I use this when I'm surfing in Linux with Mozilla, or Win2000 with Mozilla.
If I don't, I get browser identification code that tries to be helpful and never is. These days, pretty much the only thing that Moz won't do is run ActiveX controls, so very few sites need to actually do anything based on my browser. If I let them identify me they'll tell me to install IE, if I lie, the page works perfectly.
Does IIS run Apache modules? No!? Shameful.
Standard email programs don't connect to buggy proprietary email servers? The horror!
What I'm saying, is that because copyright law allows you to run software that you have purchased, you don't need anything from MS. You don't need to agree to their EULA, so what they say isn't important, it's after-sale restrictions and the courts don't support the idea that those are binding.
And here's proof of that.
Look halfway down the page for The Version 6 Unix kernel (1976), which links to code containing the comment shown.
That pretty much means there's zero trade-secret protection on it.
They're claiming there's stolen code, but they aren't showing it to anyone. So we're supposed to look at the old, perhaps PD code, which wasn't stolen and pretend that it's really stolen code? What?!
How about this... You don't write 890k lines of code all of which is a trade secret. C is a pretty wordy language compared to Perl, so some of that is going to be linked list implementation, or array manipulation. You know, code that while it might be part of something big, isn't secret. Just as Nuclear reactors are big and scary and contain secret parts, they've also got $.50 washers on the taps in the bathroom. Take a section of that mundane code and show us how Linux contains an exact copy of it. Trade secret protection only applies to things which could reasonable be thought of as not being known by other professionals in the industry, so a linked list handler would never get that protection unless it was special in some way. (And nobody, to my knowledge, has ever commented on how the Linux kernel has exceptional linked list handling...)
Show us some code. That they are unwilling to find at least one ten-line chunk of code in the 890,000 they claim is stolen, that doesn't contain what they think of as the crown jewels either means their code is absolutely stunning, or that they're full of shit.
Personally, I'm voting they're full of shit. If they had a case, they'd present at least bits of it. It'd up their stock price and who knows, maybe even force IBM to settle if their (IBM's) shareholders didn't think their chances were good. But instead they don't show anything except, under NDA, some similar comments....
Probably, but not for sure. If you sign an NDA, see my trade secrets, then blab, it doesn't mean my secrets lose their protection. My making you sign an NDA is likely going to be seen as taking adequate precautions. That's why everyone signs NDAs all the time.
If the person who snapped this photo was under NDA, and SCO can prove it, they might not lose protection.
However, I don't think they have that protection to being with. The Unix source code has been seen by generations of students. Even under NDA, if you have intimate access to the Unix source code you're going to learn things by reading it, things that might unintentionally make it into your future projects. You can't have trade secrets that are public knowledge. (Yes, this does contradict what I said earlier.)
In other words, if they'd kept the source as close to secret as possible, they might still have protection, if you couldn't figure out the source by disassembling it (which is legal) and if it actually did anything all that amazing. Being that they've shown so many people over the years, even under NDA, they can't legitimately claim they've been trying to keep it a secret.
Trade secrets are a weird bit of law.
It'd be important to read the license, if they were actually binding. If you buy Windows you're buying the full and unlimited right to use everything they ship it with. The only restrictions are those of copyright law, you can't make extra copies of anything, but as long as your actions don't require any copies, beyond those inherently required to use the software, you're not violating copyright.
Those licenses aren't required, and thus are binding only if you want them to be. (As in, do you want to accept that? Has MS offered you something?) You've already got all the rights you needed, at the cash register in the store where you finalized the sale.
Having a server cracked, by an exploit that lasted a week before having a patch instead of the months it would have been for closed source, argues that closed is better? And how does that even relate to opening formats like RealPlayer, or are you using the new RealSSH?
I think opening RealPlayer and Flash before they get included in Linux distros by default would be a good thing. The community would obviously be served by having the tools to create web content be open and have compatible free-software versions. By including the player for a format you're acknowledging that you support its use. I think that should only be done when the format is available for everyone to use. The neat thing about the web is that anyone with a text editor can play, you don't need to buy anything.
This has nothing to do with Sony mini-disks, unless Sony's willing to ship a free MD player with every computer. People who buy sony MDs can go to sony.com and download software to work with them, the same as they'd have to in Windows. But, on that topic, how would it hurt anyone, customers or not, if Sony opening the MD format? There'd be more software and thus more choice.
What part of "software that restricts you is bad" do you have problems with?
That's *all* of RMS's problem. Copyright law and software patents and proprietary protocols are all abused to keep the user from doing things they should be able to do, such as view DVDs they own and reverse-engineer software they bought.
If you make money selling software that doesn't do these things, why would he care about it? And it's not like that's a hollow statement. There's a ton of money to be made in writing open source applications. My company pays developers at least $500k a year to write development and testing tools. You may think of this as a cop-out, but here's a well-paying job for ten programmers full time; nothing to be scoffed at.
None of what I do in a day would bother RMS in the slightest, yet I work at least 80% of my time writing code for money.
It's you who trajically misrepresent his position. You act as if the making of money is the important issue to RMS; as if he wants to stop people from making money. If he was against people making money with GNU software he'd have a no-commercial-use clause in the GPL. Other licenses do it, he could have done it... if he wanted to.
In a proof you explain why something can't happen because smaller problem X, which can be solved from axioms, is a critical part of it.
You don't need to show every possible case of an even number plus an odd number to prove that they always add up to an odd number, you simply need to show how all even numbers are equivalent to 2, and all odd numbers are equivalent to 1, for purposed of even/odd determination. How you can keep subtracting 2 from any positive integer until arriving at 1 or 2, and that doing so lets you determine if it's even or odd.
That's a proof right there. You've shown that a complex problem is really just a simple problem with some cruft on it. You can take a problem with infinite cases and reduce it to three, or even further, to an axiom based on the definitions of the problem, or you can simply reduce the cases by a factor of two. (Showing that x and x+1 are both the same, in the context of some equation.)
The idea is that proofs reduce the complexity of a problem. You can, through experience know that even and odd numbers always make an odd number, but if you don't have a way of showing that they always must, you're left wondering if a slightly larger number might be different. This is how a computer proof is. It gives a definitive answer about a range of inputs, but doesn't allow you to extrapolate over an area. You can know the answers to x=(1..100) but that doesn't say anything about x=101.
Your question leads into the 'elegance' of a proof. This is subjective, so it's more open to debate. This is where a valid proof that simply proves 1000 axioms independently is less elegant than one that proves all 1000 are really three different cases and proves only those three. But each proof is still valid.
Microsoft is doing something like that. They're looking to phase out actual purchases of software (because they know the EULA can't be enforced on a sale, probably) and switch to licensing everything. One of the conditions of the license would be an expiry date. At this point, I think that's the date by which you must renew, or face large penalties when finally renewing. In other words, be good and pay every three years when we ask, or we'll soak you completely.
There've been article about this upcoming change, and in respectable journals, not just the Register.
How does RMS using a distribution that *can* come with non-free software, but doesn't by default, make him a hypocrit. He doesn't say they're evil, just that they don't agree with all of his views. As for the non-free software, it's kept very seperate and you are warned if you select anything from that list. It's a safe bet that Stallman isn't using any of it.
As for the link issue, he simply seemed to be mis-spoken. It's not that the FSF doesn't link to Debian (and many other projects), it's that they don't endorse Debian. They aren't saying on the front page that "Debian is everything that the Free Software Foundation wants in a Linux distro."
I don't really see anything contradictory about what RMS does. He avoids non-free software, he encourages others to do the same, and he supports those who do the best job of it.
Sterilization is a good idea. If someone asks for money, help them, but make sure they don't make their own situation worse.
That said, I'm a supporter of welfare. There are a lot of things beyond people's control that could leave them in the street, I think society owes it to itself to keep people from bottoming out so far.
Also, it's enlightened self interest. Few rich people are drug abusing wife beaters, compared to the number of poor who do this. It's not a genetic thing, but I think, a hopelessness thing. If you've got a jaguar in the garage and a ski lodge in aspen you're not going to turn to booze to dull the pain. If the only jobs available to you pay less, after expenses, than welfare would, you've got $20k in bankruptcy-proof student loans, and six kids to feed, you're much more likely to turn to drugs and violence.
If we could keep people from sinking quite that low, by guaranteeingt shelter and food, we could keep that desperation away. I don't think welfare should pay for much in the way of luxuries, and I think you should have to "work" for it. If you had to ride transit (for free) to a city job office every day, and work collecting garbage, painting over grafitti, etc, to get your welfare you'd get a lot less bums using it. Those able to work would quickly find a job, and those unable to work would at least perform a service that'd make the rest of us feel better about supporting them.
Even moms with little kids could do real work. They could stuff envelopes or something. That, combined with not having to worry about getting pregnant again until they'd been off the public dollar for a year (when you'd stop giving them the shots) would make it easier to become self sufficient. They'd have work experience, even as simple as a history of showing up on time for their make-work, and the self-confidence to know they could do it. Not having more kids woul keep them from getting in farther over their heads.
It's only because of RMS's fierce dedication to free software that you have any choice about running free or proprietary software.
Without the GPL bringing everyone together into a world of interoperability we'd all be running different, incompatible, free software. It's as important an invention as Linux, perhaps much more so.