Aha! Yep, there it is. Anyway, imagine that this is what you'd normally use to browse your files. Imagine that the search box isn't something you pull up in this way, it's always there. And imagine if the search starts the moment you start typing and the search is finished within a second or two of you finishing. That's what the new Tiger and Longhorn features amount to.
I don't think the first thing is a continuity error. He could have been intentionally deceptive in the film where he's older. He could have become senile, or forgotten. Those models of robot could be so common that he isn't sure if they're the same. He could be an anti-robot bigot and pretending like he doesn't know them in order to be a jerk and feel superior to the metal slaves
I guess that explains a lot. IIRC, the current series is going to end with the first appearance of Khan, where he fights this old guy at the top of a volcano and ends up falling in it (hence his conversion into an embittered old psychopath in the "original series"), it could be something happens during the fight that makes the guy hate robots or lose his memory or something.
IIRC the old guy is friendly with Kirk in the later series, and it might be the whole thing about the robots going back in time to kill Kirk's mother (and then Kirk) would explain how he's become an anti-robot bigot. Who can forget the terrifying scene where C3PO drives the mobile crane chasing the younger Kirk and R2D2 through the streets of Los Angeles?
I am an OS X user, and I spent some time yesterday actually trying to find the tool that searches inside files. It's presumably there, it's just not obvious.
Yes, OS X can find all your harddrive's ".doc" files pretty quickly. But that's not what we're talking about here. In fact, that's the opposite of what we're talking about. Nobody wants to find all their.doc files. They want to find the.doc file that was about whatever it was about and might be called something relevent, or might be called "Untitled1.doc".
Actually what makes all of this interesting is that Apple and Microsoft are improving the search features so they're usable. Right now, for example, you wouldn't browse your hard drive using the search features of your OS: it's quicker to to to Documents/Essays/CMP101 and open "Data Hierarchies.doc" than it is to open Find File from start, look over the various criteria settings, enter words you know appear in the document, and hit Find.
What Apple and Microsoft are doing is encouraging applications to create indexes that go with every file they create, so searching can just be a matter of going to a ubiquitous Search box and entering whatever it is you want to find. Within seconds, you'll have the files and objects that are relevent. You'll end up using it as your default way of finding documents, rather than navigating your file heirarchy.
Less Exploring, more Finding. Ironic, in some ways.
Irony. How sad it is that nobody at Adobe is going to actually spend any time in jail over this. (Which "this"? I mean, either hacking the camera, because they're not going to do it, or over accusing someone of DMCA violations for producing a perfectly legal application in their home country.)
Adobe: this is another fine mess you've gotten yourself into.
It's a pain for the consumer (to return bad RAM... I've had to do this often enough that I stopped buying RAM from Frys) but the problem will eventually be solved by "evolution" -- companies selling product that can't compete change or die.
I can see how it wouldn't. Companies testing RAM sell at higher prices. Consumers avoid higher prices for low cost crappy RAM. Companies that test go bust or are forced to change policy and stop testing. Majority of consumers still keep RAM that's faulty because they (a) can't be bothered (b) don't know it's the RAM or (c) assume that's what you have to put up with, like coverage blackspots and dropped calls on a cellphone, or anything sold by Wal*Mart.
I'm sure no solution is perfect, and it might even have factored into the decision to cancel the series that it was, if you'll pardon the pun, a "loose canon".
Ultimately though, I'd still go with the computer. A computer at least would be able to formulate millions of plot lines that are ultimately consistant, even finding ways to make the various versions of Star Trek internally consistant where there are problems now.
As a good example, in the original series (which, you may remember, takes place in the future compared to the version we're discussing), there's this scene where this old guy, whose name temporarily escapes me, comes across two robots and doesn't recognize them. Yet, in the current series, he's in it too he actually deals with the same robots throughout the show proving he must have recognized them in the original. There's a lot of problems like that that have to be resolved. And while a lot of the movies tie in, I'm still trying to work out how, if they were able to destroy the robot that was trying to kill Kirk's mother and prevent the future machine world in the second of the two films, how the machines still could have taken over the world in the future so they could come back for the third movie.
Ultimately, a fitting use, I think, for modern AI. At the very least, you could have the computer generate the plots, and then a good writer can make it enjoyable.
The OpenOffice.org license was essentially a nasty example of what's called an asymetric license, a license where one group is given explicit rights that others are not given. Now, the MPL and CDDL are, to some extent, technically asymetric because they recognize the original developer has having a particular status (which makes combining code from two projects with different "original developers" legally difficult), but not to the same extent, they don't give the original developer any additional rights so far as I can see.
The problem with the OOo license was that it went further and gave Sun certain rights, such as the ability to relicense the code under other licenses. This is the basis of StarOffice, for example: people who submit code to the OOo project automatically give Sun the right to include that code in StarOffice.
The same problem afflicts the APSL, the license Apple's Darwin is released under. Those who prefer not to contribute to non-Free projects are wary about submitting code under these licenses for that reason.
I suspect it's a ma[tt]er of keeping creative control, though I don't know the full details of the Paramount offer. While Enterprise might be a separate part of the entire series, what happened during it clearly has an impact on later shows. Outsourcing such a key series would constrain the keepers of Star Trek canon.
In some ways, it's sad because it shows Paramount do plan to continue extending the series further and further. It's kind of the equivalent of that Mercury Grand Marquis or Buick Park Avenue you see with the Canadian license plates in the left lane, blinker on, vehicle driving at 5, 10, 20 below the speed limit, annoying just about everyone. You can't fault the drivers, they're clearly too old to know better, but it'll continue doing the wrong thing at the wrong pace until different drivers come along, and, truth be told, at that point you're probably looking at the type of kid who'll do the car up with spinners and under-the-body neon lights.
So you end up feeling, really, that maybe the old people, with their poor eyesight and slow reactions, really are the best people to drive the car, and once they no longer have use for it, that the car should, really, be sent to the dump.
Of course, the other solution is we move to driverless cars. Then this whole business of people going at 75, or even 80, on a highway clearly marked as 70, will be a thing of the past. In the analogy, I guess, this would mean handing over control of the Star Trek series to a computer. With the right AI, this would be in many ways the most fitting solution and the best tribute to what Trek stood for. Technology being used to help mankind, exploring areas never explored before.
To boldly go, indeed, where no man has gone before.
Firefox is covered by the same licenses as the Mozilla suite. The MPL contains a clause allowing developers to designate an alternative license in Exhibit A, and that's where it's specified. You have to download the code to do this.
More of Firefox is actually dual licensed than the Mozilla suite, because a large proportion of Firefox is newer code that replaces the suite's, and was written after the license policy change.
RMS hasn't "ranted" about the CDDL or most other licenses, indeed, the Free Software movement has largely kept out of this argument. RMS and the FSF have expressed concerns in the past when licenses haven't been free but have been promoted as free, and with the original BSD license at a time it and the GPL were pretty much the only Free Software licenses, but the CDDL seems to have been largely uncontrovertial as far as the FSF is concerned.
The major concerns are being expressed by the Open Source Initiative, spearheaded by Russ Nelson who, on taking office for his short stint as OSI head honcho, immediately started an initiative to review the number of licenses the OSI approves because of the problems they cause.
Personally, I agree with him. You don't get a lot of freedom if you can't use software from one FOSS project with another. The CDDL is a problem because it's representative of the push for yet more "Open Source" licenses when we're in the middle of a major problem with code sharing. Combine it with the APSL, an even worse example, and the "big 3" copylefted Open Source kernels and operating systems - Solaris, Darwin, and GNU (with Linux or HURD) - cannot share a single line of code.
They did actually bitch about this. This is why Mozilla is now dual licensed under the GPL and MPL. End user-programmers can pick which one they want to use.
They don't bitch about it today because they don't have to.
It's a step in the right direction. However, it's still using a license fundamentally incompatable with all the others out there, with the pseudo-exception of the BSD licenses (why "pseudo-exception"? Because someone interested in BSD isn't going to touch a license like this with a long pole.)
The other big "open source" operating systems I'm aware of are GNU based operating systems such as GNU/Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, and Darwin, which is licensed under the APSL. In both cases (cue anti-GPL zealots who'll ignore the second part of the previous sentence - clue: the CDDL isn't compatable with anything, and neither is the APSL), you'll not be able to use code from one and use it with the other.
There is, right now, one, respected, neutral, copyleft license: the GPL. The FSF needs to get off its arse and update it to cover patents and create genuine defenses against patent wars. Once that happens, there'll be no reason to avoid making a simple choice between a BSD/X.org type license, the LGPL, or the GPL.
Non readable allows subdirectory access (as long as executable is set) but means no process can get a directory listing (and therefore recursive commands like the above do not work.) Doing it your way doesn't really give you any security.
If I were a retailer, I'd look towards getting something that works and doesn't embarass my customers. These things are only slightly better than some guy in a uniform pointing at random customers yelling out "Him! Him over there! He's a thief!"
Most amusing incident in my case involved a shoe store in the mall. The alarm went off, and needless to say I didn't have any merchandise on me.
Which is what you'd expect. You see, it went off when I was entering the store. (I didn't have anyone else's merchandise either, I had just driven up from home and this was the first store I entered.)
Shop assistants looked dumbfounded, needless to say, yet with an air of "there it goes again".
Actually, no it isn't. There is nowhere in the US where it is illegal to drive at the speed limit. That would be unconstitutional, needless to say, as it would mean there'd be no way of avoiding a ticket. Florida, at one point, tried to enact such a law, largely so they had an excuse to stop suspected drugs traffickers (who would get on the highway, speed up to 5 below, and then set the cruise control), and the law was struck down for obvious reasons.
It is often ticketable to be driving slower than the traffic to the right of you, but in this case the offense is that you're hogging the passing lane (or whatever the legal term is), not that you're "driving at the speed limit" - if you're not in a passing lane, you'll not get a ticket. There are also a number of areas that have a minimum speed limit (for example, a minimum 40mph on interstates, with the maximum set at 70. Not a minimum of 70 with a maximum of 55...)
As for the last sentence, US speed limits predate the 1970s "gasoline saving" limits, which was 55mph in any case. Very few, if any, states have a 55mph limit on interstates today.
However, speed limits are set mainly for the benefit of the insurance industry
Uh-huh. Yeah. Because... erm, why?
Because people who speed are more likely to have accidents and therefore insurance companies want to use their traffic violation history as a factor in how much to charge? Well, yeah. But, in that case, the correct sentence would be:
"Speed limits are set mainly for the benefit of drivers who do not speed, for they receive lower insurance premiums rather than having to subsidize those who generally drive less safely."
Because, sure as anything, you can bet that the insurance industry doesn't make up reasons to increase premiums for specific groups as opposed to other groups. That would be financial suicide. The moment you start getting one group to unfairly subsidize another in insurance, those who are unfairly paying more will find another insurance company, because other insurance companies have no financial incentive to abuse the same group as much as the first. It's in their best interests not to.
Put it this way - if you sincerely believe that speeders drive just as safely as non-speeders (or even more safely), and you run an insurance company, and you see your competitors abusing speeders, then isn't the most logical thing for you to do to offer speeders lower premiums so they switch to your company?
The statistics show that speeders, generally, cause more accidents than those who drive close to the speed limit. Yes, some Slashdiot is going to reply here "Well, actually, accidents are often caused by people driving too slowly", usually hoping nobody will spot the fact that they're not talking about your average sensible driver doing 55 in, erm, a 55 zone, but the person doing 30 on the interstate.
This is why insurance companies take into account speed related traffic violations. It's not some evil conspiracy. It's good business practice. You use the information available to determine if a driver is safe or not safe, and you bill them accordingly. You'll need more money to cover unsafe drivers, and you don't care as much about losing them as you do safe drivers, so you ask for more money.
So, no, the reason for speeding tickets isn't to please the insurance companies. It's not some big conspiracy. It all comes down, in the vast majority of cases, to local governments trying to reduce accidents by setting speed limits that serve to protect motorists by (a) recommending a common speed that drivers will generally stay within range of and (b) ensuring that speed is rational given the driving conditions (lane widths, turns, visibility, numbers of pedestrians, etc.) And if you're going to set a speed limit, there's no point in not enforcing it.
Yeah, just downloaded it. The bad news is the OS X client is still X11 based. But it's fairly well integrated and, yup, it has a host of improvements upon the original.
Freeciv looks to be exactly the same game as Civ 2.
The website's/.'d, so I can't see the release notes, but I know Freeciv 1.0 improved upon Civ 1 in a number of ways, including being multiplayer.
I seriously doubt that Freeciv 2 is "identical" to Civ 2.
And that's, incidentally, ignoring the utilitarian advantages of the project, for example that you can run this on platforms Civ never supported.
I think the Freeciv people have done a great job so far, and while you may dislike it, I think it's great they've done it, because for a Civilization fan like me, it's very valuable.
Let's hope this version will have a proper OS X client too (you could run the older one under OS X, but you needed to do so under X11)
And the question returns to: Then why did the Developer use that license in the first place? Is the Developer in violation of the law since he used an - according to him - illegal license? Or did you want to use the word "invalid" instead of the far stronger "illegal"?
Who knows. You're now assuming I know under what hypothetical circumstance the GPL would be invalid or illegal and I have no idea, because I sincerely believe it is legal and is valid.
The point was that people were saying that the only set of circumstances where someone would protest the GPL is invalid was where they were distributing code in violation of it. I'm saying that this isn't the real test of its legality: it's real test is of a copyright holder suing someone for doing something that the GPL, in theory, allows, claiming that the GPL is not a valid or legal license.
SCO came close to that, btw, but I think even if their case had been upheld, the circumstances wouldn't have invalidated the GPL. SCO distributed GNU/Linux under the GPL under their previous guise of Caldera. They, of course, claim they did so unwittingly (ie they didn't know the "real Unix IP" they allege was/is in Linux was in it) and so wouldn't have had to claim the GPL itself was at fault. But they did, at one point, start going down a train of argument (one of Boise's collegues, IIRC, expressed this absurd point of view) that the GPL itself was illegal because it gave rights to people that weren't enshrined in copyright law.
They didn't take this argument to court (because, presumably, they'd have been laughed at), so we never got to see this happen.
Also not possible, since the GPL is simply a license to copy and redistribute copyrighted software, if the GPL is revoked, I still have been granted rights to the version I was given, via the U.S. Copyright system
We're not talking about the license being revoked, so for the second time, your response is irrelevent.
We're talking about a situation in which the Developer proves the license wasn't valid to begin with, that the GPL itself is illegal.
IANAL, but I'd assume there are two reasons why it wouldn't be.
The first is I don't know what happens if the User is notified that the license is invalid before they attempt to exercise their rights under it.
The other would be if some external legal issue is what's causing the problem. For example, it might be found (hypothetically) that the license in some way violates some anti-trust law, and therefore the Developer actually has a legal duty to exercise their rights under copyright law to prevent people from exercising what would otherwise be their rights.
I don't think you understand the scenario I'm proposing. Indeed, in your comment, the developer is actually accepting the GPL is a valid license.
The topic here is the GPL being a valid or invalid license. The situation I propose is that the original developer announces that anyone using the software now needs to pay a licensing fee, claiming that the GPL is not a valid license to begin with (ie, for anything. ie the GPL does not give people the right to redistribute with source for free.) It's not a matter of them revoking it, it's a matter of them claiming that the GPL was never a valid, legal, license to begin with, and as such, can impose any conditions on users they want.
There's one case where it might be a good thing to get it tested in court.
Suppose a developer suddenly announces that they do not want their software to be GPL'd any more. They own the copyright on the entire thing, so unilaterally announce that anyone using the software now needs to pay a licensing fee.
Someone who obtained the software under the GPL assumes the conditions still apply to their copy of the software and redistributes it. Developer immediately files suit, saying that the GPL is actually not a real license, that it's invalid, and that the person who's distributing it is violating copyright law.
To recap:
In June, Developer distributes Software 1.0 under GPL
In July: User receives copy of Software 1.0
In August: Developer announces Software 1.0 users must pay a fee for using Software 1.0 and is not be allowed to redistribute it.
In September, User takes Software 1.0 and gives copies to millions of anonymous strangers, including full source code.
In October, Developer sues User for Copyright Infringment, claiming GPL is illegal
In this case, it actually is important that the legality of the GPL be confirmed. In the unlikely event it wouldn't stand up, this would really send shockwaves through the entire computer industry as it would immediately open the question of whether any licenses are legal (FOSS or otherwise), and it would mean, for instance, Linus-with-a-moustache (evil Linus) would be in a position to sue Red Hat, IBM, et al, for copyright infringment. An enormous burden would subsequently be put on trust, which isn't something the average PHB is going to be likely to want.
Before anyone accuses me of spreading FUD, I have no doubt the GPL is legal and would be upheld in court, if for no other reason than there are legal principles against suing people for things you promised not to sue them over. But it is the one legal case I can think of where the whole "you must agree it's legal otherwise you never had a license to begin with!" thing doesn't support the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, huh?
IIRC the old guy is friendly with Kirk in the later series, and it might be the whole thing about the robots going back in time to kill Kirk's mother (and then Kirk) would explain how he's become an anti-robot bigot. Who can forget the terrifying scene where C3PO drives the mobile crane chasing the younger Kirk and R2D2 through the streets of Los Angeles?
Yes, OS X can find all your harddrive's ".doc" files pretty quickly. But that's not what we're talking about here. In fact, that's the opposite of what we're talking about. Nobody wants to find all their .doc files. They want to find the .doc file that was about whatever it was about and might be called something relevent, or might be called "Untitled1.doc".
Actually what makes all of this interesting is that Apple and Microsoft are improving the search features so they're usable. Right now, for example, you wouldn't browse your hard drive using the search features of your OS: it's quicker to to to Documents/Essays/CMP101 and open "Data Hierarchies.doc" than it is to open Find File from start, look over the various criteria settings, enter words you know appear in the document, and hit Find.
What Apple and Microsoft are doing is encouraging applications to create indexes that go with every file they create, so searching can just be a matter of going to a ubiquitous Search box and entering whatever it is you want to find. Within seconds, you'll have the files and objects that are relevent. You'll end up using it as your default way of finding documents, rather than navigating your file heirarchy.
Less Exploring, more Finding. Ironic, in some ways.
I'm not sure how you feel the above disagrees with the content of my comment. Perhaps the bit in parenthesies needed wording a different way.
Adobe: this is another fine mess you've gotten yourself into.
Ultimately though, I'd still go with the computer. A computer at least would be able to formulate millions of plot lines that are ultimately consistant, even finding ways to make the various versions of Star Trek internally consistant where there are problems now.
As a good example, in the original series (which, you may remember, takes place in the future compared to the version we're discussing), there's this scene where this old guy, whose name temporarily escapes me, comes across two robots and doesn't recognize them. Yet, in the current series, he's in it too he actually deals with the same robots throughout the show proving he must have recognized them in the original. There's a lot of problems like that that have to be resolved. And while a lot of the movies tie in, I'm still trying to work out how, if they were able to destroy the robot that was trying to kill Kirk's mother and prevent the future machine world in the second of the two films, how the machines still could have taken over the world in the future so they could come back for the third movie.
Ultimately, a fitting use, I think, for modern AI. At the very least, you could have the computer generate the plots, and then a good writer can make it enjoyable.
The problem with the OOo license was that it went further and gave Sun certain rights, such as the ability to relicense the code under other licenses. This is the basis of StarOffice, for example: people who submit code to the OOo project automatically give Sun the right to include that code in StarOffice.
The same problem afflicts the APSL, the license Apple's Darwin is released under. Those who prefer not to contribute to non-Free projects are wary about submitting code under these licenses for that reason.
In some ways, it's sad because it shows Paramount do plan to continue extending the series further and further. It's kind of the equivalent of that Mercury Grand Marquis or Buick Park Avenue you see with the Canadian license plates in the left lane, blinker on, vehicle driving at 5, 10, 20 below the speed limit, annoying just about everyone. You can't fault the drivers, they're clearly too old to know better, but it'll continue doing the wrong thing at the wrong pace until different drivers come along, and, truth be told, at that point you're probably looking at the type of kid who'll do the car up with spinners and under-the-body neon lights.
So you end up feeling, really, that maybe the old people, with their poor eyesight and slow reactions, really are the best people to drive the car, and once they no longer have use for it, that the car should, really, be sent to the dump.
Of course, the other solution is we move to driverless cars. Then this whole business of people going at 75, or even 80, on a highway clearly marked as 70, will be a thing of the past. In the analogy, I guess, this would mean handing over control of the Star Trek series to a computer. With the right AI, this would be in many ways the most fitting solution and the best tribute to what Trek stood for. Technology being used to help mankind, exploring areas never explored before.
To boldly go, indeed, where no man has gone before.
More of Firefox is actually dual licensed than the Mozilla suite, because a large proportion of Firefox is newer code that replaces the suite's, and was written after the license policy change.
The major concerns are being expressed by the Open Source Initiative, spearheaded by Russ Nelson who, on taking office for his short stint as OSI head honcho, immediately started an initiative to review the number of licenses the OSI approves because of the problems they cause.
Personally, I agree with him. You don't get a lot of freedom if you can't use software from one FOSS project with another. The CDDL is a problem because it's representative of the push for yet more "Open Source" licenses when we're in the middle of a major problem with code sharing. Combine it with the APSL, an even worse example, and the "big 3" copylefted Open Source kernels and operating systems - Solaris, Darwin, and GNU (with Linux or HURD) - cannot share a single line of code.
Not a particularly great state of affairs, is it?
They don't bitch about it today because they don't have to.
The other big "open source" operating systems I'm aware of are GNU based operating systems such as GNU/Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, and Darwin, which is licensed under the APSL. In both cases (cue anti-GPL zealots who'll ignore the second part of the previous sentence - clue: the CDDL isn't compatable with anything, and neither is the APSL), you'll not be able to use code from one and use it with the other.
There is, right now, one, respected, neutral, copyleft license: the GPL. The FSF needs to get off its arse and update it to cover patents and create genuine defenses against patent wars. Once that happens, there'll be no reason to avoid making a simple choice between a BSD/X.org type license, the LGPL, or the GPL.
Non readable allows subdirectory access (as long as executable is set) but means no process can get a directory listing (and therefore recursive commands like the above do not work.) Doing it your way doesn't really give you any security.
Most amusing incident in my case involved a shoe store in the mall. The alarm went off, and needless to say I didn't have any merchandise on me.
Which is what you'd expect. You see, it went off when I was entering the store. (I didn't have anyone else's merchandise either, I had just driven up from home and this was the first store I entered.)
Shop assistants looked dumbfounded, needless to say, yet with an air of "there it goes again".
It is often ticketable to be driving slower than the traffic to the right of you, but in this case the offense is that you're hogging the passing lane (or whatever the legal term is), not that you're "driving at the speed limit" - if you're not in a passing lane, you'll not get a ticket. There are also a number of areas that have a minimum speed limit (for example, a minimum 40mph on interstates, with the maximum set at 70. Not a minimum of 70 with a maximum of 55...)
As for the last sentence, US speed limits predate the 1970s "gasoline saving" limits, which was 55mph in any case. Very few, if any, states have a 55mph limit on interstates today.
Because people who speed are more likely to have accidents and therefore insurance companies want to use their traffic violation history as a factor in how much to charge? Well, yeah. But, in that case, the correct sentence would be:
"Speed limits are set mainly for the benefit of drivers who do not speed, for they receive lower insurance premiums rather than having to subsidize those who generally drive less safely."
Because, sure as anything, you can bet that the insurance industry doesn't make up reasons to increase premiums for specific groups as opposed to other groups. That would be financial suicide. The moment you start getting one group to unfairly subsidize another in insurance, those who are unfairly paying more will find another insurance company, because other insurance companies have no financial incentive to abuse the same group as much as the first. It's in their best interests not to.
Put it this way - if you sincerely believe that speeders drive just as safely as non-speeders (or even more safely), and you run an insurance company, and you see your competitors abusing speeders, then isn't the most logical thing for you to do to offer speeders lower premiums so they switch to your company?
The statistics show that speeders, generally, cause more accidents than those who drive close to the speed limit. Yes, some Slashdiot is going to reply here "Well, actually, accidents are often caused by people driving too slowly", usually hoping nobody will spot the fact that they're not talking about your average sensible driver doing 55 in, erm, a 55 zone, but the person doing 30 on the interstate.
This is why insurance companies take into account speed related traffic violations. It's not some evil conspiracy. It's good business practice. You use the information available to determine if a driver is safe or not safe, and you bill them accordingly. You'll need more money to cover unsafe drivers, and you don't care as much about losing them as you do safe drivers, so you ask for more money.
So, no, the reason for speeding tickets isn't to please the insurance companies. It's not some big conspiracy. It all comes down, in the vast majority of cases, to local governments trying to reduce accidents by setting speed limits that serve to protect motorists by (a) recommending a common speed that drivers will generally stay within range of and (b) ensuring that speed is rational given the driving conditions (lane widths, turns, visibility, numbers of pedestrians, etc.) And if you're going to set a speed limit, there's no point in not enforcing it.
Yeah, just downloaded it. The bad news is the OS X client is still X11 based. But it's fairly well integrated and, yup, it has a host of improvements upon the original.
And that's, incidentally, ignoring the utilitarian advantages of the project, for example that you can run this on platforms Civ never supported.
I think the Freeciv people have done a great job so far, and while you may dislike it, I think it's great they've done it, because for a Civilization fan like me, it's very valuable.
Let's hope this version will have a proper OS X client too (you could run the older one under OS X, but you needed to do so under X11)
The point was that people were saying that the only set of circumstances where someone would protest the GPL is invalid was where they were distributing code in violation of it. I'm saying that this isn't the real test of its legality: it's real test is of a copyright holder suing someone for doing something that the GPL, in theory, allows, claiming that the GPL is not a valid or legal license.
SCO came close to that, btw, but I think even if their case had been upheld, the circumstances wouldn't have invalidated the GPL. SCO distributed GNU/Linux under the GPL under their previous guise of Caldera. They, of course, claim they did so unwittingly (ie they didn't know the "real Unix IP" they allege was/is in Linux was in it) and so wouldn't have had to claim the GPL itself was at fault. But they did, at one point, start going down a train of argument (one of Boise's collegues, IIRC, expressed this absurd point of view) that the GPL itself was illegal because it gave rights to people that weren't enshrined in copyright law.
They didn't take this argument to court (because, presumably, they'd have been laughed at), so we never got to see this happen.
We're talking about a situation in which the Developer proves the license wasn't valid to begin with, that the GPL itself is illegal.
The first is I don't know what happens if the User is notified that the license is invalid before they attempt to exercise their rights under it.
The other would be if some external legal issue is what's causing the problem. For example, it might be found (hypothetically) that the license in some way violates some anti-trust law, and therefore the Developer actually has a legal duty to exercise their rights under copyright law to prevent people from exercising what would otherwise be their rights.
The topic here is the GPL being a valid or invalid license. The situation I propose is that the original developer announces that anyone using the software now needs to pay a licensing fee, claiming that the GPL is not a valid license to begin with (ie, for anything. ie the GPL does not give people the right to redistribute with source for free.) It's not a matter of them revoking it, it's a matter of them claiming that the GPL was never a valid, legal, license to begin with, and as such, can impose any conditions on users they want.
So, no, there's no inaccuracy in my comment.
Suppose a developer suddenly announces that they do not want their software to be GPL'd any more. They own the copyright on the entire thing, so unilaterally announce that anyone using the software now needs to pay a licensing fee.
Someone who obtained the software under the GPL assumes the conditions still apply to their copy of the software and redistributes it. Developer immediately files suit, saying that the GPL is actually not a real license, that it's invalid, and that the person who's distributing it is violating copyright law.
To recap:
In June, Developer distributes Software 1.0 under GPL
In July: User receives copy of Software 1.0
In August: Developer announces Software 1.0 users must pay a fee for using Software 1.0 and is not be allowed to redistribute it.
In September, User takes Software 1.0 and gives copies to millions of anonymous strangers, including full source code.
In October, Developer sues User for Copyright Infringment, claiming GPL is illegal
In this case, it actually is important that the legality of the GPL be confirmed. In the unlikely event it wouldn't stand up, this would really send shockwaves through the entire computer industry as it would immediately open the question of whether any licenses are legal (FOSS or otherwise), and it would mean, for instance, Linus-with-a-moustache (evil Linus) would be in a position to sue Red Hat, IBM, et al, for copyright infringment. An enormous burden would subsequently be put on trust, which isn't something the average PHB is going to be likely to want.
Before anyone accuses me of spreading FUD, I have no doubt the GPL is legal and would be upheld in court, if for no other reason than there are legal principles against suing people for things you promised not to sue them over. But it is the one legal case I can think of where the whole "you must agree it's legal otherwise you never had a license to begin with!" thing doesn't support the GPL.