Exactly. If you don't look into a field which is obviously (Uri Geller and a ton of other example...) full of fakes and frauds with a cynical eye, you're going to be duped and you results are worthless.
Experiments used to "prove" a theory to other scientists are expected to be rigorous. As the post below yours mentions, there are some very sensitive non-paranormal experiments. No matter how sure these scientists were about their results, they can't expect anyone else to be convinced until they ruled out all alternatives and got rid of the noise in the signal, to show the actual results.
There are a few semi-plausible reasons of why limited telepathy might exist. If our brains leak signals strong enough to sense with machinery, it's plausible to imagine that a very sensitive machine or perhaps trained human mind could pick up some of these signals. Being that you can move a light around on a screen by just thinking (even if the sensors are picking up commands to your eye muscles or whatever) it's possible that a sensitive person could tell the difference between you clutching an object in your hands, versus your hands being empty, through a partition.
If you write a paper talking about "energy" and using a bunch of quantum mechanical terms like "uncertainty principle" and "observer effect" and obviously don't understand them you're not going to get any scientific respect, even if you claim that water is wet. However, if you stay factual, don't wildly speculate, and perform reasonable tests you'll get attention.
So yes, your "cynical mindset" claim is true. But scientists should be cynical about new claims until they see proof.
Atheists make a counterclaim - "There is no form of divinity whatsoever."
This is the misunderstanding. Athiests don't make the claim because to make a claim requires something with which to prove the claim. Athiests, at least those like me, simply say that because of the total lack of evidence for the existance of a god, there's no reason to believe in one. Of course, they're going to phrase this in the same way as they would for a IPU (the unicorn), "there is no god", because belief in anything else is provisional on actual evidence which nobody in the history of mankind has yet provided, so it's pretty safe to assume it'll be a while in coming.
As someone else said: Have you ever taken an action based on the fact there might be "invisible pink unicorns" and it can't hurt just in case?
It's one thing to keep an open mind. If and when I see something I think is a miracle (not merely something I can't explain, but something that seems like it must be a miracle) then I may re-examine this. It's another thing to provisionally believe everything, just in case. That's like leaving cookies out for Santa every year, and feeling for the unicorn horn in front of you before you go anywhere, to avoid being stabbed as you walk.
In a strict logical sense, it doesn't matter who makes a claim. A scientologist's claim should be examined as critically as that of a person whose claims you have investigated and found to be valid before.
In the real world, the boy who cries wolf is quickly ignored. If you make claim after unjustifiable claim of alien abduction and anal probing, you're likely not going to be taken seriously when you claim that your detractors are kooks.
Being that anytime Randi has "debunked" a specific person he's provided evidence and a description of the test they failed, I think he's fairly reliable. Saying he ignores the scientific method doesn't ring true because it's exactly the opposite of what I've observed.
Is there a link to him on his own site, calling someone a fraud without offering any proof? ("Quotes" don't count, I don't trust your sources anymore than you trust mine.)
Athiests are on the sturdiest ground. They say there's no verifiable evidence for the existance of god. Without such evidence, they take the reasonable action of not believing in a god.
You think it's unreasonable to dismiss a view like this, but really it's the only thing to do. What if I tell you that the world doesn't actually exist anywhere you're not looking or sensing? Do you take my word for it? What if I offer poorly documented third-party claims, and first-person claims from people who "just know" it's true, but are unwilling to try to prove it?
The only reasonable action to take is to act as if a claim like this isn't true unless you can get proof. This is how athiests view the claim of the existance of god.
The fact that it's crooked doesn't excuse it. You may need to know how to effectively bribe to get anywhere, but it's still bribes.
I can complain about car thieves without having to be an expert car thief. Why can't I complain about dirty politicians without being a master at bribery?
Politics is a hard job, but nowhere near being a cop. We don't excuse dirty cops, so why the double-standard? If anything, politicians can do much more damage.
If you give a politician money, it *is* buying their favor and should be illegal. The fact that other people are doing it and trying to cancel out your donation/bribe is irrelevant. Just because your $1000 doesn't actually change anything doesn't mean it's not intended to, and intent is the deciding factor in bribery laws.
Substitute politician and police officer. Everyone knows it's bribery to give a cop money to influence his actions. Why is it different when it's a politician?
Re:Knuth is only one foundation that won't be lost
on
Software Archaeology
·
· Score: 1
Without an understanding of the fundamentals of how a computer works, a person can't understand the true impact of the code they write. For a db front-end this may not matter, but unless they understand how sorts work, they may waste a ton of time, or they may reinvent (badly) the wheel.
For instance, a print"foo"; and a sort Array; command are the same length, yet one may take a day to execute. Why, and how do you prevent this, or at least limit the worst-case scenario?
The problem isn't multiple declarations on one line. The problem is that there are multiple types of declarations on one line.
int a, b, c;
saves time, and makes it clear at first glance that all three variables are the same. (Or it would, if people didn't try to break this.)
int a, *b;
I agree, is stupid. It's like putting a float and an int on one line, differing only in some piece of punctuation. Like 'num a,.b;' or something.
So break out all different declarations (pointers, declarations with assignments, etc) onto different line, and keep all identical declarations on a single line.
Or, broken up by functionality...
int i, j, k; int Cats, Dogs; int *PetPointer; int ErrorCode;
Declaring identical variables on a single line is imho, clearer than a line for each. It's not really any easier to read
int a; int b; int c;
than
int a, b, c;
and the second syntax lets you look at one type (int) and see that everything declared on the line is the same.
But, for this to be a valid style, you need to break out the different declarations.
int a, b = 0, *c, d, e, *f;
should really be
int a, d, e; int *c, *f; int b=0;
Moving d, e, and *f, onto their own lines just makes the program longer without making it clearer.
Even with large monitors and 80+ line screens, vertical space is still at a premium. It's a lot easier to write or debug a function if it fits onto the screen. There's no need to jump back and forth, losing your place, to see what the declarations were, or what exactly it returns.
Just like, while
if (foo == bar) {
code; } if (foo == baz) {
code2; }
is a better style than what follows
if (foo == bar) { code; } if (foo == baz) { code2; }
if you're writing twenty of those, ala a switch type statement, and 'code;' is short it makes sense to put them on one line. It's a deviation from "proper" style, but you make the program more readable to having all the conditions right in line with each other, and all the actions in line with each other, without anything in the way.
Rules are made to be broken, but you should learn the rules (and the reasoning behind them) before breaking them.
This is why copyright should be an either/or kind of thing. If you want copyright, you rely on the courts to police copying. If you go with DRM you release it into the public domain, if people can crack the protection.
Failing that, which would never happen, you should at least have to give an archivable, unprotected, copy to LoC in order to get copyright protection on a published work.
There are some fairly good rally racing games for the PC. Colin McRae Rally 2 was pretty sweet. I'm haven't seen the current crop, but I bet they're pretty sweet.
I don't like console games because of the design philosophy I see in them. They're all about making you jump through hoops to play the little bit of fun game at the end. They give you a dinky car, on a dinky course, and you have to win a championship to open up the next tier of cars, and then another championship to get slightly better tracks, etc. (CMR2 did this, but at least it let you cheat and didn't try to penalize you for it.)
I like playing PC games where most of them either present a fun game from the beginning, or have a way of jumping into the cool stuff at the end. (For example, you can't play a championship with the coolest car until you unlock it, but you can play a single race with any car on any track.)
I don't have tons of time for gaming anymore. I want to be able to sit down and play the game I just spent $60 buying and have fun *now*, not twenty gruelling hours from now.
Right, all you need is an movie playing application where the "Fair Use" number of screenshots allowed per movie has either been given a high limit, or the code to enforce it has been hobbled, or where there's a genuine bug. And that's just what would be trivially easy to sneak through.
The reason DRM is a fools game is because you can't plug the analog hole. Eventually you need to display the data and someone with fairly high-quality recording gear can copy it. The copy won't be protected, so they can distribute it.
The answer to this is supposedly watermarks, but they won't work.
If your watermark checker is available to people, as in, part of a system that decides if this analog movie you're trying to play is supposed to be played, it can be examined (even just as a series of yes/no answers to slight media changes) and the protection removed.
If you're talking about hidden watermarks that exist the track the user, people will just buy music with cash. Or with stolen credit cards. Nobody is going to fill out a detailed form full of personal information and present ID to buy music or a movie, so you're going to get quite a few essentially anonymous purchases. And then there's the issue of someone stealing a legal disc and player from the rightful owner.
Their DRM can't stand up to a world of motivated hackers and the internet and international mail-order will allow any cracks to be distributed around the world, quickly.
If you think XBox modchips are big business, wait until a tenth of the world has a computer with an identical "fritz" chip in it.
DRM is just going to piss of the legitimate customers and everyone else will ignore it.
I just assumed it wouldn't because the systems I've heard of have been a 35mm-sized snap-in that are supposed to be retrofitted into existing camera, not a whole new compatible back. But yeah, that was just an assumption.
There's so much more a digital camera has to offer than simply free film.
Instant feedback is useful, even for a professional, and means that a digital camera without an LCD is a toy or a specialty device, not an everyday tool.
I have to agree with this. If we're going to bother enforcing laws, shouldn't we enforce them fairly and consistently?
There's a lot more to be damaged than simple someone's wallet.
I think punative damages should be scaled to people's ability to pay. If a fine is supposed to be a deterrant, charge enough to make the person think twice. That means a large fine for me would maybe to $50 for a kid, and $2.5M for Bill Gates.
In that sense, these kids should be charged with theft and punished in such a way as to demonstrate that laws aren't optional. That you can't get away with murder as long as it's a fat funny-looking kid.
Sometimes. But other times supreme court justices are as deluded as drunks on a week-long bender.
For example, the recently sodomy issue. What possible legal reason is there to keep homosexual sex illegal? How is society served in any way? It costs more to police it, it annoys people who want to do it, etc.
The supreme court justices who were against this were voting their religion, nothing else. You could have replaced them with high-school dropout trailer-park residents for all the legal thought they had to put into their decision.
How can jury nullification not be a good thing? It's fine from an ivory tower view to say that laws are changed by legislators, but there's been strong public outcry against some laws (drug related asset seizure laws for instance) for years and there's hasn't been the slightest change, except maybe for the worse. Regular people have absolutely no power to change these laws, yet a jury refusing to uphold unjust charges against someone can make a real, immediate difference.
If you can't convince a jury of the people that a law is just, maybe it's a sign that it's not.
The *only* time I see a problem with jury nullification is if it's done when the crime is just, simply to free a charismatic criminal.
What I find to be quite insulting is the attitude judges have towards people who tell juries about this right. There's a guy, whose site I can't find right now, who goes around handing out pamphlets outside courthouses, informing potential jurors about this right and he's been persecuted for this. A right doesn't really exist if you can't tell people about it.
The GPL does not try to prevent anyone from profiting from software.
It prevents only people who have modified GPLed code from closing the source from that modified code, if they make the binaries public. Admittedly, you aren't going to sell many copies of an open source project, but that's only one of many ways to profit from writing code.
I make a comfortable living writing software. The companies that hire me don't care if the program is GPLed (they do know up front) because they get their custom programs much cheaper than they would if I had to code everything from scratch. So, I make a better living thanks to the GPL than I would if it didn't exist.
I've written many programs and most of them have used GPLed code, but if I choose to do without this third-party code I can write a program I own completely and I can sell it. The GPL doesn't try to control that.
The GPL could be written to ask you to sign over all future copyrights to the public domain. It would be a valid contract because you have to accept it to use the GPLed code. They could, but they don't. The GPL only states that you can't license GPL-derived code under any license except the GPL. That's all.
Why not have stores edit books? As long as they say the book is edited, it's not misrepresentation.
When you sell a work, be it a book, a painting, or a movie, you're giving up your rights to that copy. The purchaser can read it, burn it, or quote it in a critical essay. You can't tell that how they read it any more than you can tell them they can't sell it. If they choose to read every second page, or only the racy bits, it's their right.
I'll never purchase an edited copy of a movie or book, but that's only because dirty words don't offend me. I fully support the rights of other people to do so.
It's true though, isn't it? If the authorities say that Linux is good, PHBs will go with it. If the authorities are discredited, PHBs will hire consultants to pick an OS or webserver. The consultants don't have anything to lose by choosing Linux (and a bit to gain, there are less Linux techs than MCSEs out there) so Linux would win.
It's not a contradiction, it's that the market forces on Linux are different than the ones on Microsoft.
The only reason I really care is that Linux drivers for hardware I want to buy will get better if more people use it.
It's like offering you resume templates, but only with the up-front condition that if you do write a resume with one of them, that you contribute it back to the project as an example.
You really overrate your importance. If your example you say "$500", I think it's closer to $0.15. Nobody is dying to get their hands on it. People don't write GPLed software to trick you into releasing kick-ass code. People write GPLed code because they're tired of sharing with companies who aren't grateful and don't give anything back.
In some sense they do. Mutt isn't written by them, but it's the sysadmin's mail program, Tux is the web server kernel module.
Microsoft doesn't really write all that much, an OS, a browser, a media player, and an office suite. It's just the way they do it that ties them so closely together.
Of course, I think everyone, Linux and Windows, needs a much more fine-grained set of access controls, preferably application specific. There's no reason for an email program to write anything outside of a config directory and a download directory. There's no reason for an office suite to access any files that aren't of it's filetypes, especially in write mode. Browsers should be chrooted into a sandbox. I think we should start running everything chrooted actually. There's no reason for my browser to look at my office suite. If I really want it, I'll make a shared directory they can both access.
We need to recognize that the important thing to most everyone isn't the system, it's the data. If your data gets destroyed, it's over. If the system gets garbled, you reinstall. What we need to do is offer data integrity features so that you can barely lose data if you try, like backups that aren't owned by you, so a virus or trojan can't take them out.
Yeah, let's all buy stock in a company of someone we hate, so that the price goes up and he gets richer. Good idea.
How about you send that $60 you were willing to spend off to the EFF and help them get rid of some of the more ridiculous laws that put us in the situation.?
Now, a pool I would be interested in is finding out how much it'd take to hire some bikers to beat the execs until they're coughing blood. Maybe if we get the RAMBUS execs we can get a bulk discount. That would discourage this kind of crap in the future.
But really, Linux and MacOS X are both better, and while there have been bugs found in each, if the bug isn't one in a component you use, or in the kernel, can you count it? When I update my system, many of the updates are for third-party packages. As if MS provided patches for Eudora.
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anything other than a cynical mindset
Exactly. If you don't look into a field which is obviously (Uri Geller and a ton of other example...) full of fakes and frauds with a cynical eye, you're going to be duped and you results are worthless.
Experiments used to "prove" a theory to other scientists are expected to be rigorous. As the post below yours mentions, there are some very sensitive non-paranormal experiments. No matter how sure these scientists were about their results, they can't expect anyone else to be convinced until they ruled out all alternatives and got rid of the noise in the signal, to show the actual results.
There are a few semi-plausible reasons of why limited telepathy might exist. If our brains leak signals strong enough to sense with machinery, it's plausible to imagine that a very sensitive machine or perhaps trained human mind could pick up some of these signals. Being that you can move a light around on a screen by just thinking (even if the sensors are picking up commands to your eye muscles or whatever) it's possible that a sensitive person could tell the difference between you clutching an object in your hands, versus your hands being empty, through a partition.
If you write a paper talking about "energy" and using a bunch of quantum mechanical terms like "uncertainty principle" and "observer effect" and obviously don't understand them you're not going to get any scientific respect, even if you claim that water is wet. However, if you stay factual, don't wildly speculate, and perform reasonable tests you'll get attention.
So yes, your "cynical mindset" claim is true. But scientists should be cynical about new claims until they see proof.
Atheists make a counterclaim - "There is no form of divinity whatsoever."
This is the misunderstanding. Athiests don't make the claim because to make a claim requires something with which to prove the claim. Athiests, at least those like me, simply say that because of the total lack of evidence for the existance of a god, there's no reason to believe in one. Of course, they're going to phrase this in the same way as they would for a IPU (the unicorn), "there is no god", because belief in anything else is provisional on actual evidence which nobody in the history of mankind has yet provided, so it's pretty safe to assume it'll be a while in coming.
As someone else said: Have you ever taken an action based on the fact there might be "invisible pink unicorns" and it can't hurt just in case?
It's one thing to keep an open mind. If and when I see something I think is a miracle (not merely something I can't explain, but something that seems like it must be a miracle) then I may re-examine this. It's another thing to provisionally believe everything, just in case. That's like leaving cookies out for Santa every year, and feeling for the unicorn horn in front of you before you go anywhere, to avoid being stabbed as you walk.
In a strict logical sense, it doesn't matter who makes a claim. A scientologist's claim should be examined as critically as that of a person whose claims you have investigated and found to be valid before.
In the real world, the boy who cries wolf is quickly ignored. If you make claim after unjustifiable claim of alien abduction and anal probing, you're likely not going to be taken seriously when you claim that your detractors are kooks.
Being that anytime Randi has "debunked" a specific person he's provided evidence and a description of the test they failed, I think he's fairly reliable. Saying he ignores the scientific method doesn't ring true because it's exactly the opposite of what I've observed.
Is there a link to him on his own site, calling someone a fraud without offering any proof? ("Quotes" don't count, I don't trust your sources anymore than you trust mine.)
Athiests are on the sturdiest ground. They say there's no verifiable evidence for the existance of god. Without such evidence, they take the reasonable action of not believing in a god.
You think it's unreasonable to dismiss a view like this, but really it's the only thing to do. What if I tell you that the world doesn't actually exist anywhere you're not looking or sensing? Do you take my word for it? What if I offer poorly documented third-party claims, and first-person claims from people who "just know" it's true, but are unwilling to try to prove it?
The only reasonable action to take is to act as if a claim like this isn't true unless you can get proof. This is how athiests view the claim of the existance of god.
The fact that it's crooked doesn't excuse it. You may need to know how to effectively bribe to get anywhere, but it's still bribes.
I can complain about car thieves without having to be an expert car thief. Why can't I complain about dirty politicians without being a master at bribery?
Politics is a hard job, but nowhere near being a cop. We don't excuse dirty cops, so why the double-standard? If anything, politicians can do much more damage.
If you give a politician money, it *is* buying their favor and should be illegal. The fact that other people are doing it and trying to cancel out your donation/bribe is irrelevant. Just because your $1000 doesn't actually change anything doesn't mean it's not intended to, and intent is the deciding factor in bribery laws.
Substitute politician and police officer. Everyone knows it's bribery to give a cop money to influence his actions. Why is it different when it's a politician?
Without an understanding of the fundamentals of how a computer works, a person can't understand the true impact of the code they write. For a db front-end this may not matter, but unless they understand how sorts work, they may waste a ton of time, or they may reinvent (badly) the wheel.
For instance, a print"foo"; and a sort Array; command are the same length, yet one may take a day to execute. Why, and how do you prevent this, or at least limit the worst-case scenario?
The problem isn't multiple declarations on one line. The problem is that there are multiple types of declarations on one line.
.b;' or something.
int a, b, c;
saves time, and makes it clear at first glance that all three variables are the same. (Or it would, if people didn't try to break this.)
int a, *b;
I agree, is stupid. It's like putting a float and an int on one line, differing only in some piece of punctuation. Like 'num a,
So break out all different declarations (pointers, declarations with assignments, etc) onto different line, and keep all identical declarations on a single line.
Or, broken up by functionality...
int i, j, k;
int Cats, Dogs;
int *PetPointer;
int ErrorCode;
Declaring identical variables on a single line is imho, clearer than a line for each. It's not really any easier to read
int a;
int b;
int c;
than
int a, b, c;
and the second syntax lets you look at one type (int) and see that everything declared on the line is the same.
But, for this to be a valid style, you need to break out the different declarations.
int a, b = 0, *c, d, e, *f;
should really be
int a, d, e;
int *c, *f;
int b=0;
Moving d, e, and *f, onto their own lines just makes the program longer without making it clearer.
Even with large monitors and 80+ line screens, vertical space is still at a premium. It's a lot easier to write or debug a function if it fits onto the screen. There's no need to jump back and forth, losing your place, to see what the declarations were, or what exactly it returns.
Just like, while
if (foo == bar) {
code;
}
if (foo == baz) {
code2;
}
is a better style than what follows
if (foo == bar) { code; }
if (foo == baz) { code2; }
if you're writing twenty of those, ala a switch type statement, and 'code;' is short it makes sense to put them on one line. It's a deviation from "proper" style, but you make the program more readable to having all the conditions right in line with each other, and all the actions in line with each other, without anything in the way.
Rules are made to be broken, but you should learn the rules (and the reasoning behind them) before breaking them.
This is why copyright should be an either/or kind of thing. If you want copyright, you rely on the courts to police copying. If you go with DRM you release it into the public domain, if people can crack the protection.
Failing that, which would never happen, you should at least have to give an archivable, unprotected, copy to LoC in order to get copyright protection on a published work.
There are some fairly good rally racing games for the PC. Colin McRae Rally 2 was pretty sweet. I'm haven't seen the current crop, but I bet they're pretty sweet.
I don't like console games because of the design philosophy I see in them. They're all about making you jump through hoops to play the little bit of fun game at the end. They give you a dinky car, on a dinky course, and you have to win a championship to open up the next tier of cars, and then another championship to get slightly better tracks, etc. (CMR2 did this, but at least it let you cheat and didn't try to penalize you for it.)
I like playing PC games where most of them either present a fun game from the beginning, or have a way of jumping into the cool stuff at the end. (For example, you can't play a championship with the coolest car until you unlock it, but you can play a single race with any car on any track.)
I don't have tons of time for gaming anymore. I want to be able to sit down and play the game I just spent $60 buying and have fun *now*, not twenty gruelling hours from now.
Right, all you need is an movie playing application where the "Fair Use" number of screenshots allowed per movie has either been given a high limit, or the code to enforce it has been hobbled, or where there's a genuine bug. And that's just what would be trivially easy to sneak through.
The reason DRM is a fools game is because you can't plug the analog hole. Eventually you need to display the data and someone with fairly high-quality recording gear can copy it. The copy won't be protected, so they can distribute it.
The answer to this is supposedly watermarks, but they won't work.
If your watermark checker is available to people, as in, part of a system that decides if this analog movie you're trying to play is supposed to be played, it can be examined (even just as a series of yes/no answers to slight media changes) and the protection removed.
If you're talking about hidden watermarks that exist the track the user, people will just buy music with cash. Or with stolen credit cards. Nobody is going to fill out a detailed form full of personal information and present ID to buy music or a movie, so you're going to get quite a few essentially anonymous purchases. And then there's the issue of someone stealing a legal disc and player from the rightful owner.
Their DRM can't stand up to a world of motivated hackers and the internet and international mail-order will allow any cracks to be distributed around the world, quickly.
If you think XBox modchips are big business, wait until a tenth of the world has a computer with an identical "fritz" chip in it.
DRM is just going to piss of the legitimate customers and everyone else will ignore it.
I just assumed it wouldn't because the systems I've heard of have been a 35mm-sized snap-in that are supposed to be retrofitted into existing camera, not a whole new compatible back. But yeah, that was just an assumption.
There's so much more a digital camera has to offer than simply free film.
Instant feedback is useful, even for a professional, and means that a digital camera without an LCD is a toy or a specialty device, not an everyday tool.
I have to agree with this. If we're going to bother enforcing laws, shouldn't we enforce them fairly and consistently?
There's a lot more to be damaged than simple someone's wallet.
I think punative damages should be scaled to people's ability to pay. If a fine is supposed to be a deterrant, charge enough to make the person think twice. That means a large fine for me would maybe to $50 for a kid, and $2.5M for Bill Gates.
In that sense, these kids should be charged with theft and punished in such a way as to demonstrate that laws aren't optional. That you can't get away with murder as long as it's a fat funny-looking kid.
Sometimes. But other times supreme court justices are as deluded as drunks on a week-long bender.
For example, the recently sodomy issue. What possible legal reason is there to keep homosexual sex illegal? How is society served in any way? It costs more to police it, it annoys people who want to do it, etc.
The supreme court justices who were against this were voting their religion, nothing else. You could have replaced them with high-school dropout trailer-park residents for all the legal thought they had to put into their decision.
Sometimes experts are just highly paid imbeciles.
How can jury nullification not be a good thing? It's fine from an ivory tower view to say that laws are changed by legislators, but there's been strong public outcry against some laws (drug related asset seizure laws for instance) for years and there's hasn't been the slightest change, except maybe for the worse. Regular people have absolutely no power to change these laws, yet a jury refusing to uphold unjust charges against someone can make a real, immediate difference.
If you can't convince a jury of the people that a law is just, maybe it's a sign that it's not.
The *only* time I see a problem with jury nullification is if it's done when the crime is just, simply to free a charismatic criminal.
What I find to be quite insulting is the attitude judges have towards people who tell juries about this right. There's a guy, whose site I can't find right now, who goes around handing out pamphlets outside courthouses, informing potential jurors about this right and he's been persecuted for this. A right doesn't really exist if you can't tell people about it.
The GPL does not try to prevent anyone from profiting from software.
It prevents only people who have modified GPLed code from closing the source from that modified code, if they make the binaries public. Admittedly, you aren't going to sell many copies of an open source project, but that's only one of many ways to profit from writing code.
I make a comfortable living writing software. The companies that hire me don't care if the program is GPLed (they do know up front) because they get their custom programs much cheaper than they would if I had to code everything from scratch. So, I make a better living thanks to the GPL than I would if it didn't exist.
I've written many programs and most of them have used GPLed code, but if I choose to do without this third-party code I can write a program I own completely and I can sell it. The GPL doesn't try to control that.
The GPL could be written to ask you to sign over all future copyrights to the public domain. It would be a valid contract because you have to accept it to use the GPLed code. They could, but they don't. The GPL only states that you can't license GPL-derived code under any license except the GPL. That's all.
Why not have stores edit books? As long as they say the book is edited, it's not misrepresentation.
When you sell a work, be it a book, a painting, or a movie, you're giving up your rights to that copy. The purchaser can read it, burn it, or quote it in a critical essay. You can't tell that how they read it any more than you can tell them they can't sell it. If they choose to read every second page, or only the racy bits, it's their right.
I'll never purchase an edited copy of a movie or book, but that's only because dirty words don't offend me. I fully support the rights of other people to do so.
It's true though, isn't it? If the authorities say that Linux is good, PHBs will go with it. If the authorities are discredited, PHBs will hire consultants to pick an OS or webserver. The consultants don't have anything to lose by choosing Linux (and a bit to gain, there are less Linux techs than MCSEs out there) so Linux would win.
It's not a contradiction, it's that the market forces on Linux are different than the ones on Microsoft.
The only reason I really care is that Linux drivers for hardware I want to buy will get better if more people use it.
It's like offering you resume templates, but only with the up-front condition that if you do write a resume with one of them, that you contribute it back to the project as an example.
You really overrate your importance. If your example you say "$500", I think it's closer to $0.15. Nobody is dying to get their hands on it. People don't write GPLed software to trick you into releasing kick-ass code. People write GPLed code because they're tired of sharing with companies who aren't grateful and don't give anything back.
In some sense they do. Mutt isn't written by them, but it's the sysadmin's mail program, Tux is the web server kernel module.
Microsoft doesn't really write all that much, an OS, a browser, a media player, and an office suite. It's just the way they do it that ties them so closely together.
Of course, I think everyone, Linux and Windows, needs a much more fine-grained set of access controls, preferably application specific. There's no reason for an email program to write anything outside of a config directory and a download directory. There's no reason for an office suite to access any files that aren't of it's filetypes, especially in write mode. Browsers should be chrooted into a sandbox. I think we should start running everything chrooted actually. There's no reason for my browser to look at my office suite. If I really want it, I'll make a shared directory they can both access.
We need to recognize that the important thing to most everyone isn't the system, it's the data. If your data gets destroyed, it's over. If the system gets garbled, you reinstall. What we need to do is offer data integrity features so that you can barely lose data if you try, like backups that aren't owned by you, so a virus or trojan can't take them out.
Yeah, let's all buy stock in a company of someone we hate, so that the price goes up and he gets richer. Good idea.
How about you send that $60 you were willing to spend off to the EFF and help them get rid of some of the more ridiculous laws that put us in the situation.?
Now, a pool I would be interested in is finding out how much it'd take to hire some bikers to beat the execs until they're coughing blood. Maybe if we get the RAMBUS execs we can get a bulk discount. That would discourage this kind of crap in the future.
QNX.
But really, Linux and MacOS X are both better, and while there have been bugs found in each, if the bug isn't one in a component you use, or in the kernel, can you count it? When I update my system, many of the updates are for third-party packages. As if MS provided patches for Eudora.