You can normally find many, many, areas where the line has little or no interference. For most of us, that's most of the areas we're in most of the day.
This is the direct opposite of a landline, which will give you a clear, interference-free, connection in one location only.
As an example, my BellSouth landline, with a cordless phone, gives me a clear signal throughout my home (as long as the microwave isn't on), but it's pretty much impossible to get a signal at the office, and I can't really get a signal when I'm in my car except when I'm a few feet from my home. By comparison, my Cingular (formerly AT&T Wireless) line gives me occasional interference in some areas of my house, but works flawlessly in most of it, as well as most of the street outside (and the streets from it to and from US1), most of US1 from my neighbourhood to my office, and throughout almost all of my office.
If you're reading this going "Huh?", that's kind of the point. It's one of those things people do not think about when they make these kinds of comparisons. There's a good reason why supposedly unreliable cellphones are displacing landlines so dramatically - for normal use, they have massively superior availability to a regular landline. For normal use. Why? Because for normal use, you're out of range of your landline for a massive proportion of the day.
The usual reason for thinking the opposite is that people rationalise the limitations of both technologies, and do not compare like applications with like applications.
No, there wasn't a vote. The "95-0" vote oft-mentioned refers to a vote the Senate made about Kyoto procedure that occured several months before the treaty was even written.
It's essentially irrelevent. But the wingnuts will continue to argue otherwise.
Can we make this a consistant rule? I mean, I currently pay taxes and I'm not a citizen (and it's not exactly a rubber-stamp process to get citizenship either.) Can you persuade the IRS to let me off paying taxes (plus get the State of Florida and the Feds to refund usage taxes I pay), or could you, conversely, ask them to treat me as a citizen?
If the carriers had any sense, they'd embrace the concept (though not the Skype implementation.)
Imagine this: each cellphone can connect to a regular 802.11* network. On doing so, it reads from a standardized entry in the SIM card (or in the phone itself for obsolete cellphone-is-your-identity standards) that gives the phone enough information to set up a SIP connection with the carrier.
Result: phone customers can deal with many coverage issues that the carriers themselves can't - dead spots inside buildings, that kind of thing. Additionally, strain is taken off the network's licensed bands giving the carriers more bandwidth for people who are outside their homes.
Additionally, the customers themselves can also deal with carrier availability issues, varying from one group of operators being clustered around a user's home, and a different set around their employer, to someone going to a totally different country that doesn't even have the same set of cellphone standards as the carrier's country. All said customer needs to do is find an 802.11* wireless hotspot and they have access.
I think it'd be a good thing myself. I've never had a cellphone (CDMA, TDMA, GSM) that's operated with full coverage and no breaks simply because of a slight move of the phone perfectly in either of the two locations (work, home) where I spend most of my time. I'd prefer the tariffs to encourage such usage (add on free local calls or free evenings or whatever to anyone calling using VoIP), but to be brutally honest, I'd still use it even if the tariffs remained identical. I seriously would reconsider keeping a seperate landline telephone if they offered this.
It's really no different to one political party accusing its biggest opponent of "playing politics" when they do something it doesn't like. It's part of the game and is usually played by out-of-touch been-in-it-too-long hacks who do not realise how silly their remarks look to people on the outside.
Well, Wales is part of Great Britain, which is that big island to the East of you, and if that wasn't enough GB is part of the British Isles, which includes Ireland. In this case it's a continental thing, not a related-to-ancient-Britons thing (who almost certainly didn't call themselves Britons in any case) or a political thing, though on a political level the Welsh are clearly British too.
Kind of amusing though your point about the Welsh/foreigner thing. I didn't know that!
I think an open standard (SIP, or whatever it's called) would be more likely to take off than Skype, as you have a lot of people being able to push the standard and wanting to be interoperable. End users can get equipment varying from stuff they've built themselves to off-the-shelf equipment and, inevitably, the combination leads to a lot more flexibility. I'm surprised to be honest that Skype has been as successful as it has been. I'd be curious to hear Slashdotters views (no, seriously! I read the specs, and don't understand it, and it's something I accept I'm not "getting") on why Skype has been so successful.
Makes you wonder how much better off many content producers would be if they skipped the whole idea of "broadcasting", and sold their content on regionless DVD instead? People like yourself, who are downloading because you want to watch something that you cannot get any other way, would presumably be happy if you could just pop into a shop and spend 20GBP on 20 hours of decent programming, rather than trying to get someone's variable-quality rip down a DSL or cable link.
Many do sell complete serieses on DVD, usually around the $30-50 mark for a complete "season", but it's usually region locked and usually a series that was broadcast several years prior.
A lot of fuss was made in the US recently about the (incorrect - the decision was widely misunderstood to mean this) assumption that the FCC was about to allow cable users to pick and choose which channels they want and just pay for those channels. I think an environment in which we fund directly the programmes we like, getting copies to watch when we want to watch them, would be infinitely better. Proctor and Gamble has more say over what I watch than I do. That's not how it should be.
Since I came to America (1998), TV here has improved quite a bit. At the same time, my understanding is that TV in Britain has massively declined - I'd say "people over there tell me so", but to be honest, moaning is a British disease. My evidence is more the types of programmes I'm being told are being shown at the moment compared to the types of programs that were produced in the mid-nineties and before.
Certainly you only have to look at what's happened in comedy and animation in the US to see how the US has improved. The Simpsons and, arguably, Beavis and Butthead (whether you liked it or not, it was remarkably innovative) proved animation could be aimed at adults and has spawned an entire industry. At the same time Comedy Central has pretty much had to make itself useful and that's also where a lot of the innovation has come from.
So I suspect Cleese is right. Hopefully we'll see, long term, an artistic resurgance in Britain without seeing any reduction in the quality of material coming out of the US. That'd be, in a literal and figurative sense, the best of both worlds.
Yeah, but you had to pay for Windows 3.1. So it was a simple anti-competition move.
In this case, Microsoft is denying giving Wine users the stuff Windows users have paid for (unless they download it via Windows.) I think that's different. It's a simple case of "You don't get a free gift unless you're our customer."
Clause 2b. You can't combine GPL code with non GPL code (except by getting a separate agreement from all contributors of course)
And?
That is not about keeping the GPL'd code free, but about bringing other code under GPL. Stallman is very open about the politics behind it. It's a lever to try and get his prefered model of open source more widely adopted.
Ensuring the code is licensed under the GPL is about keeping it free, yes. At the time the GPL was produced (and realistically, still today), there was no reason to copyleft something and not license it under the GPL. It's still a strong copyleft, the vast majority of incompatable licenses exist to weaken it, for example the Apple and Sun licenses mentioned earlier.
No other licence can be GPL compatable
The FSF disagrees with you and maintains a list of licenses which includes a division by GPL compatability. The reason I suspect you're saying this is because someone who licenses their project under, say, the X11 license would find a modified version that includes code from Linux upgraded to the GPL. However, the point remains that there was a way to combine this code, a licensing formula that made it possible with the end result being free software.
The examples I gave are of the opposite. In particular, you can't combine Solaris and Darwin code without direct negotiated permission from Apple and Sun. There's no licensing formula available. Until the OpenOffice.org and Mozilla people decided on dual licensing, there was no legal way for someone to produce a project containing both OO.o and Mozilla code.
This is the issue we're dealing with, not "Goodness me! If I incorporate this code into that, it suddenly becomes GPL'd!" GPL'd is fine. GPL'd is Free Software. The issue isn't one of keeping the license you chose, it's of being able to use software from different sources and still end up with free software at the end of it.
Richard Stallman didn't write either Sun or Apple's licenses.
The GPL was one of the original Free Software licenses and contains very little "baggage" other than an attempt to keep anything licensed under it free.
I don't think a reasonable person can blame RMS for this. The truth is that most free software licenses are incompatable with one another. The only solution so far for people not keen on working for other people's proprietary projects, ironically considering the frothing-at-the-mouth-acts by its opponents claiming the opposite, has been the move towards either explicitly making a license GPL compatable, or dual licensing a project under the prefered license and under the GPL.
None of the examples I gave included the GPL. The GPL is a neutral copyleft. The major problem is not the neutral licenses, but the licenses from groups like Apple and Sun who want to treat modifications to code they've produced as "owned" by them. The result is that different projects cannot share code.
The GPL is NOT an EULA. You do not have to agree to it. If you don't agree to it, you have to abide by copyright law.
If you don't copy something, you are not breaching copyright. If you dynamically link to a library, you're not producing a derived work in any legal sense. The end user may be, but you're not.
If what you were saying were true, it'd be illegal to produce a movie review.
When the LGPL was written, it was usual to statically link a library with the application that uses it. Hence the power a license would have over someone using a product, and the legitimacy of the LGPL.
Today dynamic library linking is more common. Note carefully: you cannot commit copyright infringment simply by refering to copyrighted material. You have to actually copy the copyrighted material.
This means, essentially, that if you don't distribute a GPL'd library, but dynamically link to one, you're essentially in the clear.
There's also nothing stopping a future redistributor of a library they'd have otherwise GPL'd from adding an additional license (as Torvalds did with the Linux kernel) saying that there's no requirement for applications that link to the said library to be licensed under the GPL and be subject to its terms.) The OSI reducing the number of Open Source licenses to three doesn't prevent dual licensing with a neutral, optional, open source or free software license, and an optional project specific license the end user can choose if they feel it's appropriate to their needs.
Most commercial software development is "in house" and/ore bespoke. These groups really aren't threatened by the GPL (actually, the GPL helps as it creates a massive base of software they can immediately pick up and use, and develop with others including competitors.)
I think it'd be hard to craft a license that creates "Freedom" in the way you describe without the results being indistinguishable from shared source - ultimately a system that's damaging because any programmer that looks at it theoretically can be non-trivially accused of copyright infringment.
GNU/Linux works as well as it does because developers can freely share code amongst one another. Incompatable licenses impede this. This is why we've seen a growth in the number of "dual licensed" projects, from Mozilla to QT, often (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc) where the original project-specific license was open source, free software, compatable but not GPL compatable.
Yes, different developers have different needs. But much of the cruft that passes for alternative licenses these days ultimately is unnecessary and incompatable with other licenses for the sake of being so. A Solaris user will not, when the OS is opened, be able to include code from Darwin and redistribute the results. An X.org user cannot include parts of XFree86 and redistribute the results. There's little reason for this: Sun and Apple want to distribute closed code and aren't willing to work with each other. Some of XFree86's developers unilaterally decided that the usual copyright attributions weren't credit enough for their work. None of these really have much to do with the type of code being written.
It sucks. It's hard to figure something's "free software" if you're not allowed to include code from other "free software" and still treat it as free software. Incompatable licenses undermine software freedom.
For the sake of this discussion though, yes, they are guilty. The thing the government would do with them if it wasn't for this GPS thing is throw them in jail.
Yes, I agree that (a) law enforcement is imperfect and sometimes innocent people get convicted and (b) there are many laws that shouldn't be on the books to begin with, but that's an entirely seperate discussion.
I suspect the point is though that "Antiquated" is rarely actually used that way. It's usually used as a put-down for older technologies.
I have a collegue who refuses to do a particular job (pass on authentication from a cookie to an IIS server) the "right" way - which requires programming a small stub in C++ - because C++ is "antiquated".
Competition is only good for the market if it results in choices.
My feeling is that there's a lot of good that could come out of a FOSS project to create an advanced program-management framework. There's a little less good, but some good nonetheless, if such a thing is built to allow programs that work an existing VM to work under it but is, nonetheless, a totally different design (see GCJ.) There's little or no good if the framework is just a clone of something that already exists, albiet one that's slightly nicer in one area, and slightly worse in another.
You really need to compare Java to.NET, not Mono. Mono's direct comparison would be with products like GCJ/GNU CLASSPATH and/or Kaffe.
These projects would probably be a little further along than they are now had the development focus not been on.NET (Mono,.GNU), I think developers got bored with Java or something. That said, I like the whole GCJ thing, that's Free Software people implementing a (relatively) original idea using existing protocols, rather than just a blind copy of something someone else has done. Hopefully it'll succeed.
Oh, get off your high horse. It's so good to see that you are so willing to ignore two important facts:
Oh, now come on, as analogies and the rewriting of history goes, that takes the cake.
Iraq did have WMDs and used them on its own people... in the 1980s. This it did without any comeuppance. It wasn't until Iraq invaded Kuwait that the entire issue became one of concern to the rest of the world. The invasion was reversed, Iraq surrendered, agreed to destroy its WMDs, and promptly - under the guidance of the UN weapons inspections - promptly did. Meanwhile Saddam continued to terrorise his own people, just without using WMDs. The only silver lining was that the group terrorised became smaller and smaller until, by the end of the 90s, Saddam ran around a third of Iraq.
Your analogy is entirely wrong. If this really were a DEA/drug dealer thing, it'd happen a bit like this: The DEA goes in at the start, with an agreement to let the drug dealer avoid stiffer penalties if he destroys his drugs. The DEA watches him do this, but then the two reach a stalemate where the DEA hangs around on the off chance there's something it missed and the dealer is upset about the invasion of privacy this ensues. Eventually he kicks the DEA out, holes himself up in his house for a few months surrounded by armed police, finally lets the DEA back in, the DEA confirm that they believe there are no drugs in the house but would appreciate a little more cooperation from the sulking dealer, and finally the cops raid the house anyway.
Note the analogy is stupid, but that's because you came up with it.
Hans Blix was right. The right wing morons who insisted he and his team were stupid, incompetent, or whatever, really owe him a massive apology, and, FWIW, a debt of thanks. Yes, thanks. Because if he and his predecessors hadn't done their job, Iraq would have had WMDs, and there'd be a hell of a lot of dead Americans, British, Italians, and other allies outside Baghdad.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the direct opposite of a landline, which will give you a clear, interference-free, connection in one location only.
As an example, my BellSouth landline, with a cordless phone, gives me a clear signal throughout my home (as long as the microwave isn't on), but it's pretty much impossible to get a signal at the office, and I can't really get a signal when I'm in my car except when I'm a few feet from my home. By comparison, my Cingular (formerly AT&T Wireless) line gives me occasional interference in some areas of my house, but works flawlessly in most of it, as well as most of the street outside (and the streets from it to and from US1), most of US1 from my neighbourhood to my office, and throughout almost all of my office.
If you're reading this going "Huh?", that's kind of the point. It's one of those things people do not think about when they make these kinds of comparisons. There's a good reason why supposedly unreliable cellphones are displacing landlines so dramatically - for normal use, they have massively superior availability to a regular landline. For normal use. Why? Because for normal use, you're out of range of your landline for a massive proportion of the day.
The usual reason for thinking the opposite is that people rationalise the limitations of both technologies, and do not compare like applications with like applications.
Bet you never thought of it like that :)
It's essentially irrelevent. But the wingnuts will continue to argue otherwise.
Thanks in advance,
Imagine this: each cellphone can connect to a regular 802.11* network. On doing so, it reads from a standardized entry in the SIM card (or in the phone itself for obsolete cellphone-is-your-identity standards) that gives the phone enough information to set up a SIP connection with the carrier.
Result: phone customers can deal with many coverage issues that the carriers themselves can't - dead spots inside buildings, that kind of thing. Additionally, strain is taken off the network's licensed bands giving the carriers more bandwidth for people who are outside their homes.
Additionally, the customers themselves can also deal with carrier availability issues, varying from one group of operators being clustered around a user's home, and a different set around their employer, to someone going to a totally different country that doesn't even have the same set of cellphone standards as the carrier's country. All said customer needs to do is find an 802.11* wireless hotspot and they have access.
I think it'd be a good thing myself. I've never had a cellphone (CDMA, TDMA, GSM) that's operated with full coverage and no breaks simply because of a slight move of the phone perfectly in either of the two locations (work, home) where I spend most of my time. I'd prefer the tariffs to encourage such usage (add on free local calls or free evenings or whatever to anyone calling using VoIP), but to be brutally honest, I'd still use it even if the tariffs remained identical. I seriously would reconsider keeping a seperate landline telephone if they offered this.
It's really no different to one political party accusing its biggest opponent of "playing politics" when they do something it doesn't like. It's part of the game and is usually played by out-of-touch been-in-it-too-long hacks who do not realise how silly their remarks look to people on the outside.
Kind of amusing though your point about the Welsh/foreigner thing. I didn't know that!
I think an open standard (SIP, or whatever it's called) would be more likely to take off than Skype, as you have a lot of people being able to push the standard and wanting to be interoperable. End users can get equipment varying from stuff they've built themselves to off-the-shelf equipment and, inevitably, the combination leads to a lot more flexibility. I'm surprised to be honest that Skype has been as successful as it has been. I'd be curious to hear Slashdotters views (no, seriously! I read the specs, and don't understand it, and it's something I accept I'm not "getting") on why Skype has been so successful.
Many do sell complete serieses on DVD, usually around the $30-50 mark for a complete "season", but it's usually region locked and usually a series that was broadcast several years prior.
A lot of fuss was made in the US recently about the (incorrect - the decision was widely misunderstood to mean this) assumption that the FCC was about to allow cable users to pick and choose which channels they want and just pay for those channels. I think an environment in which we fund directly the programmes we like, getting copies to watch when we want to watch them, would be infinitely better. Proctor and Gamble has more say over what I watch than I do. That's not how it should be.
Certainly you only have to look at what's happened in comedy and animation in the US to see how the US has improved. The Simpsons and, arguably, Beavis and Butthead (whether you liked it or not, it was remarkably innovative) proved animation could be aimed at adults and has spawned an entire industry. At the same time Comedy Central has pretty much had to make itself useful and that's also where a lot of the innovation has come from.
So I suspect Cleese is right. Hopefully we'll see, long term, an artistic resurgance in Britain without seeing any reduction in the quality of material coming out of the US. That'd be, in a literal and figurative sense, the best of both worlds.
You upset a lot of Welsh people when you say they're not British almost as much as you upset them if you say they're English.
In this case, Microsoft is denying giving Wine users the stuff Windows users have paid for (unless they download it via Windows.) I think that's different. It's a simple case of "You don't get a free gift unless you're our customer."
The examples I gave are of the opposite. In particular, you can't combine Solaris and Darwin code without direct negotiated permission from Apple and Sun. There's no licensing formula available. Until the OpenOffice.org and Mozilla people decided on dual licensing, there was no legal way for someone to produce a project containing both OO.o and Mozilla code.
This is the issue we're dealing with, not "Goodness me! If I incorporate this code into that, it suddenly becomes GPL'd!" GPL'd is fine. GPL'd is Free Software. The issue isn't one of keeping the license you chose, it's of being able to use software from different sources and still end up with free software at the end of it.
The GPL was one of the original Free Software licenses and contains very little "baggage" other than an attempt to keep anything licensed under it free.
I don't think a reasonable person can blame RMS for this. The truth is that most free software licenses are incompatable with one another. The only solution so far for people not keen on working for other people's proprietary projects, ironically considering the frothing-at-the-mouth-acts by its opponents claiming the opposite, has been the move towards either explicitly making a license GPL compatable, or dual licensing a project under the prefered license and under the GPL.
None of the examples I gave included the GPL. The GPL is a neutral copyleft. The major problem is not the neutral licenses, but the licenses from groups like Apple and Sun who want to treat modifications to code they've produced as "owned" by them. The result is that different projects cannot share code.
The GPL is NOT an EULA. You do not have to agree to it. If you don't agree to it, you have to abide by copyright law.
If you don't copy something, you are not breaching copyright. If you dynamically link to a library, you're not producing a derived work in any legal sense. The end user may be, but you're not.
If what you were saying were true, it'd be illegal to produce a movie review.
Today dynamic library linking is more common. Note carefully: you cannot commit copyright infringment simply by refering to copyrighted material. You have to actually copy the copyrighted material.
This means, essentially, that if you don't distribute a GPL'd library, but dynamically link to one, you're essentially in the clear.
There's also nothing stopping a future redistributor of a library they'd have otherwise GPL'd from adding an additional license (as Torvalds did with the Linux kernel) saying that there's no requirement for applications that link to the said library to be licensed under the GPL and be subject to its terms.) The OSI reducing the number of Open Source licenses to three doesn't prevent dual licensing with a neutral, optional, open source or free software license, and an optional project specific license the end user can choose if they feel it's appropriate to their needs.
I think it'd be hard to craft a license that creates "Freedom" in the way you describe without the results being indistinguishable from shared source - ultimately a system that's damaging because any programmer that looks at it theoretically can be non-trivially accused of copyright infringment.
Yes, different developers have different needs. But much of the cruft that passes for alternative licenses these days ultimately is unnecessary and incompatable with other licenses for the sake of being so. A Solaris user will not, when the OS is opened, be able to include code from Darwin and redistribute the results. An X.org user cannot include parts of XFree86 and redistribute the results. There's little reason for this: Sun and Apple want to distribute closed code and aren't willing to work with each other. Some of XFree86's developers unilaterally decided that the usual copyright attributions weren't credit enough for their work. None of these really have much to do with the type of code being written.
It sucks. It's hard to figure something's "free software" if you're not allowed to include code from other "free software" and still treat it as free software. Incompatable licenses undermine software freedom.
Yes, I agree that (a) law enforcement is imperfect and sometimes innocent people get convicted and (b) there are many laws that shouldn't be on the books to begin with, but that's an entirely seperate discussion.
I have a collegue who refuses to do a particular job (pass on authentication from a cookie to an IIS server) the "right" way - which requires programming a small stub in C++ - because C++ is "antiquated".
True story.
My feeling is that there's a lot of good that could come out of a FOSS project to create an advanced program-management framework. There's a little less good, but some good nonetheless, if such a thing is built to allow programs that work an existing VM to work under it but is, nonetheless, a totally different design (see GCJ.) There's little or no good if the framework is just a clone of something that already exists, albiet one that's slightly nicer in one area, and slightly worse in another.
I don't see Mono as creating choices.
These projects would probably be a little further along than they are now had the development focus not been on .NET (Mono, .GNU), I think developers got bored with Java or something. That said, I like the whole GCJ thing, that's Free Software people implementing a (relatively) original idea using existing protocols, rather than just a blind copy of something someone else has done. Hopefully it'll succeed.
Iraq did have WMDs and used them on its own people... in the 1980s. This it did without any comeuppance. It wasn't until Iraq invaded Kuwait that the entire issue became one of concern to the rest of the world. The invasion was reversed, Iraq surrendered, agreed to destroy its WMDs, and promptly - under the guidance of the UN weapons inspections - promptly did. Meanwhile Saddam continued to terrorise his own people, just without using WMDs. The only silver lining was that the group terrorised became smaller and smaller until, by the end of the 90s, Saddam ran around a third of Iraq.
Your analogy is entirely wrong. If this really were a DEA/drug dealer thing, it'd happen a bit like this: The DEA goes in at the start, with an agreement to let the drug dealer avoid stiffer penalties if he destroys his drugs. The DEA watches him do this, but then the two reach a stalemate where the DEA hangs around on the off chance there's something it missed and the dealer is upset about the invasion of privacy this ensues. Eventually he kicks the DEA out, holes himself up in his house for a few months surrounded by armed police, finally lets the DEA back in, the DEA confirm that they believe there are no drugs in the house but would appreciate a little more cooperation from the sulking dealer, and finally the cops raid the house anyway.
Note the analogy is stupid, but that's because you came up with it.
Hans Blix was right. The right wing morons who insisted he and his team were stupid, incompetent, or whatever, really owe him a massive apology, and, FWIW, a debt of thanks. Yes, thanks. Because if he and his predecessors hadn't done their job, Iraq would have had WMDs, and there'd be a hell of a lot of dead Americans, British, Italians, and other allies outside Baghdad.
I suspect the problem was that the spell checker didn't "just work"... ;-)