You forgot to also mention the brain damagingly bad documentation that passes for help in the Linux community.
How about some examples?
So far, on the bad documentation side, the proprietary software vendors seem to be winning. Most of their 'documentation' these days is in the vein of:
Frobulator
Select this item to frobulate your network.
Granted, there are lots of screenshots, and lots of introductory text congratulating you on your purchase of the latest FOO, now with the new Frobulator feature, but helpful? I have to deal daily with 'Enterprise' class products that think this is a good way to write documentation. The days that I find no usable documentation in the manpages or/usr/share/doc/ are vanishingly rare. The Gnome desktop help files are still a work in progress, but they are improving with every release as well. Whereas the proprietary world is getting less documentation with every release. Look at Microsoft: from thick, actual dead-tree manuals, to scant unhelpful help files. Try pressing F1 every now and again: read 'em and weep.
Run out of arguments, eh? So you start throwing strawmen around? I do not assume. I go by your words, and common knowledge of traffic regulations.
Then again, seeing as you can't frame a decent argument anyhow, I suppose I must just consider you stupid. Especially since you seem to think I'm American.
Do the world a favour: next time you think you can just make it, just hit a tree, OK?
Yes, you're a typical example of someone who considers themselves an above average driver. Yet with every word you say, you just prove that you are a complacent driver. Your ice and snow example? If it is risky to brake from thirty because of ice and snow, you're driving too fast for conditions.
If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, stop digging.
You say got ticket for a running a red light that had just a few tenths of a second gone red. The only way to do that is to not anticipate the light changing. With the lead time of a previous green and orange, that means you were in the wrong. Period.
As for your driving record, big deal. Everybody thinks they're an above average driver. If you can't anticipate a red with 2 seconds lead time while you're already preparing to corner, you can't drive.
He in fact picked a very good example. For one, Shakespeare was succesful without needing copyright. He made his fortune on his income from the performances given by his company, and some shrewd investing. In how far an exclusive performance right was necessary to ensure the uniqueness and success of these performances is debatable, but since the Globe was a massive success despite rampant piracy of Shakespeare's works, I humbly suggest that this right was not the crucial ingredient.
Secondly, with modern-style copyright, Shakespeare would have been sued into oblivion for his pilfering of contemporary works.
The last time you brought this up I and others brought up counter-arguments as to why your argument might not work. You didn't deign to answer then, yet you bring up the same bullshit in another thread. How about growing a spine and adressing the arguments for a change?
As a quick summary: Shakespeare was of humble origins, he rose to greatness despite no copyright existing, he was famous before he started attracting patronage, and he lived quite comfortably on the takings of his theatres (and some shrewd investing) alone.
Yes, it was your own damn fault for trying to continue at full speed until the last possible moment. Even a 2 second yellow does not appear out of nowhere, and it is ample warning to come to a complete stop in time. You got dinged because you ignored the warning and continued on. And yes, that is dangerous behaviour. Not only does it lead to running lights, it is also dangerous to people who do want to do the right thing on yellow, who run a real risk of being rear-ended. Given that I am particularly vulnerable on the road, I tend to care about this thing, and I notice how many idiots like you don't care, and blame the camera for their own bad driving.
After getting nailed by a redlight camera when turning right.2 seconds after the light turned red.
So you ran a yellow light, instead of stopping, as you presumably have been taught as a condition for getting your license. I am afraid I can feel very little sympathy for your self-inflicted suffering. Next time you see a yellow light, remember you have at least one more pedal beside your accelerator.
Mart (motorcyclist who regularly gets almost rear-ended by cagers who think a yellow means speed up).
I take a regular bicycle for all trips under 5km, and most trips under 10km. And yes, in dense city traffic, especially in pre-twentieth century city areas that are densely built up and have many small streets, a bicycle beats all other forms of transportation.
Too bad my commute is 50 km. A motorbike is the best alternative in that case.
How about this one: when building a new suburb, execute all planners that don't factor in access roads, and instead expect all inhabitants to use the existing infrastructure.
Here in the Netherlands they just built some new suburbs as part of a national program. Around Leiden, situated near one of our busiest motorways, they expect people to use the only road leading to the motorway. A road that is already being used by about half the population of the town anyway. This was acknowledged as a problem in the planning stage, and waved away with "another access road will be built once development of the housing is done". Result: jams leading up to the motorway, jam-packed merge lanes, and worse jams on the motorway itself.
Amsterdam has a new development that depends for its motorway acccess on one of the main access roads leading into the city center. Do I have to spell out how bad the congestion gets these days? I cross that bit daily, and the onramps are packed. See Google Maps. The development is the bit on the right.
My Moto Guzzi 1000 SP III is useless below 30 km/h in second gear. First gear works, but just barely, to trundle along at constant throttle, unfortunately the power/weight ratio is such that the least throttle movement translates into huge jerks. And my experience is that this is typical for Guzzi motorbikes, they have very tall first gears, and a correspondingly higher speed in second, and even though they're V-twins (usually thought of as sedate low-rev trundlers), they're useless below 2000 revs.
And this is not even a very powerful bike, only 72hp (240 kg dry weight). Japanese bikes tend to have shorter firsts, but even they suffer from jerkiness, made worse because they are usually higher-powered.
I have to ride the clutch if I want to keep moving in a jam. Thankfully this is usually unnecessary, as filtering is legal here in the Netherlands. Guess why I ride a big-arse touring bike for my daily commute? It's rather fun to comfortably filter through two lanes of almost-stopped traffic at a sedate 2200 revs in 2, which is about the aforementioned 30 km/h. Only concessions I have to make is taking 5 minutes at both ends of my commute to get in and out of my suit, and a reduced carrying capacity (even my hardbags and luggage rack can't compete with a car backseat or a boot).
Why don't you stick to the example I gave you? Ah right, because that would destroy your nice little theory, primarily because I was not talking about prior restraint.
In other words, you're probably a spammer. Fuck off and die. Slowly and painfully preferably.
Here's a hint: all rights have limits, and these limits are when infringing on the rights of others. Your First Amendment rights do not give you the right to stand on my lawn in the middle of the night with a megaphone to advertise your goods; you are infringing on my property rights. I can have the police haul you off for that. How is that different from you pushing shit into my inbox which I have to pay for, directly in connection charges, or indirectly through higher ISP prices?
Spam is about consent, not content. Spamming is not free speech. Anyone who says otherwise is most likely a spammer.
As long as such sharing over bittorrent is non-commercial in nature, clause 3c of the GPL is in force, allowing the distributor to discharge their obligation by merely giving a link to the source.
A commercial distributor must either distribute the source along with the binary (clause 3a) or give a written offer (3b). Clause 3a can conceivably be met by distributing a torrent for the source from the same location as the binary. That is an edge case though, but given the history of GPL enforcement not something that will land you in hot water.
Of course files that are not part of any package can and will be overwritten by the package manager. I don't see that as a particular problem. If one thinks oneself smart enough to install software outside the system (usually by compiling from source), one obviously is expected to know that the package manager knows nothing about these files. Moreover, system files are usually installed by a package, and thus covered by the protections of the package management system.
Reality is a bit different though, plenty of people think they're cool because they can type./configure ; make ; make install, and are suddenly startled to find that they don't know as much about *nix as they thought when things break. The smart ones learn from these mistakes, the dumb ones fill forums with whines.
And as for dpkg outright stopping when a conflict occurs, that was what I meant by 'whining mightily'.
dpkg on Debian and derived distros whines mightily if it finds a file already in use while installing a new package. RPM has file-level dependencies, and can also catch these kinds of errors. So the two major packaging systems on GNU/Linux already have mechanisms to avoid exactly this problem.
Debian goes even a step further: beyond the capabilities of the basic package manager, it declares certain files (usually those living in/etc) conffiles, for which policy declares that they shall never be overwritten without a positive confirmation, and never deleted unless the administrator specifically invokes the package manager with the --purge option.
About those Germans in American uniforms, you do realise that:
These fellows were subject to summary execution under the laws of war anyway?
That the accusation of fighting in US uniform is not commonly levelled at Gitmo detainees? In fact, most of the unlawfal combatant definition seems to rest on them not wearing any uniform at all, convenient because the US did not ratify the 'spontaneous militia' clause of the Geneva Conventions.
That in fact, the commander of Operation Greif was tried for ordering his men into US uniforms?
Now, the day the US actually sets up a tribunal to make clear the status of those detainees in Gitmo is the day we can talk legality. Until then, Gitmo is a breach of the laws of war, and in contravention of both the US Constition and precedent set in international law by the US itself.
Is it so hard to understand that the 5th ammendment was written in a time when we were not dealing with a group of individuals who think it's a good idea to kill Americans?
Like, oh, the English government and their sympathisers in the colonies?
Sheesh, if you need a Dutchman to point out that you don't know your own history, you're really not doing your best to dispel the stereotype of the Stupid American, now are you?
For once and for all: the artwork and brandnames in documentation are trademarks. The GPL does not cover trademarks. This would be why you don't find references to them in the GPL text.
You can whine all you want, but Red Hat's demands on redistributors have NOTHING to do with their obligations under the GPL.
The source can be distributed verbatim. You actually have never seen a Red Hat distribution up close, now have you?
The artwork and documentation referring to the distribution by brand name cannot be distributed. Last I checked, those things were not covered by the GPL.
I've not read any car magazines recently. How do they score on the editorial bias front?
Given that here (Europe), the press consistently keeps awarding 'Car of the Year' awards to European cars, with the Japanese only occasionally breaking that hegemony, leads me to suspect that they're not entirely bias-free.
The motorcycle press is worse. Minor marques get flak for things like too-soft rear suspension, while a major advertiser like BMW gets a throwaway line that the suspension is tuned for comfort, not sports riding. Not to mention Harley-Davidson getting away with having their marketing slogans reprinted, because (aside from their Revolution-based bikes) otherwise there would not be anything positive to say about H-D. About the only exception is the German Motorrad magazine, and even they give the local giant a little too much credit IMO.
Patents, trademarks, and copyright are different things. The GPL covers two of those. And the logos and what name is used documentation are not necessary to the functioning of the program, which is why the FSF is totally OK with Red Hat's practices.
Red Hat is using trademark law in exact the way it was designed to do: to make sure that that which is called Red Hat is Red Hat. And if you were to have read the slightest bit on the Gnu Philosophy page, or known the slightest bit about how Stallman thinks of trademark, you would have known the FSF stance on this. Again I say: stop being a stupid twit in public.
Slashdot Mirror
How about some examples?
So far, on the bad documentation side, the proprietary software vendors seem to be winning. Most of their 'documentation' these days is in the vein of:
Frobulator
Granted, there are lots of screenshots, and lots of introductory text congratulating you on your purchase of the latest FOO, now with the new Frobulator feature, but helpful? I have to deal daily with 'Enterprise' class products that think this is a good way to write documentation. The days that I find no usable documentation in the manpages or /usr/share/doc/ are vanishingly rare. The Gnome desktop help files are still a work in progress, but they are improving with every release as well. Whereas the proprietary world is getting less documentation with every release. Look at Microsoft: from thick, actual dead-tree manuals, to scant unhelpful help files. Try pressing F1 every now and again: read 'em and weep.
MartYes, yes, it's always someone else's fault. Really. You're a perfect driver.
Sad really.
MartRun out of arguments, eh? So you start throwing strawmen around? I do not assume. I go by your words, and common knowledge of traffic regulations.
Then again, seeing as you can't frame a decent argument anyhow, I suppose I must just consider you stupid. Especially since you seem to think I'm American.
Do the world a favour: next time you think you can just make it, just hit a tree, OK?
MartYes, you're a typical example of someone who considers themselves an above average driver. Yet with every word you say, you just prove that you are a complacent driver. Your ice and snow example? If it is risky to brake from thirty because of ice and snow, you're driving too fast for conditions.
If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, stop digging.
MartYou say got ticket for a running a red light that had just a few tenths of a second gone red. The only way to do that is to not anticipate the light changing. With the lead time of a previous green and orange, that means you were in the wrong. Period.
As for your driving record, big deal. Everybody thinks they're an above average driver. If you can't anticipate a red with 2 seconds lead time while you're already preparing to corner, you can't drive.
MartHe in fact picked a very good example. For one, Shakespeare was succesful without needing copyright. He made his fortune on his income from the performances given by his company, and some shrewd investing. In how far an exclusive performance right was necessary to ensure the uniqueness and success of these performances is debatable, but since the Globe was a massive success despite rampant piracy of Shakespeare's works, I humbly suggest that this right was not the crucial ingredient.
Secondly, with modern-style copyright, Shakespeare would have been sued into oblivion for his pilfering of contemporary works.
MartThe last time you brought this up I and others brought up counter-arguments as to why your argument might not work. You didn't deign to answer then, yet you bring up the same bullshit in another thread. How about growing a spine and adressing the arguments for a change?
As a quick summary: Shakespeare was of humble origins, he rose to greatness despite no copyright existing, he was famous before he started attracting patronage, and he lived quite comfortably on the takings of his theatres (and some shrewd investing) alone.
MartYes, it was your own damn fault for trying to continue at full speed until the last possible moment. Even a 2 second yellow does not appear out of nowhere, and it is ample warning to come to a complete stop in time. You got dinged because you ignored the warning and continued on. And yes, that is dangerous behaviour. Not only does it lead to running lights, it is also dangerous to people who do want to do the right thing on yellow, who run a real risk of being rear-ended. Given that I am particularly vulnerable on the road, I tend to care about this thing, and I notice how many idiots like you don't care, and blame the camera for their own bad driving.
Sorry, but I have no sympathy at all.
MartAfter getting nailed by a redlight camera when turning right .2 seconds after the light turned red.
So you ran a yellow light, instead of stopping, as you presumably have been taught as a condition for getting your license. I am afraid I can feel very little sympathy for your self-inflicted suffering. Next time you see a yellow light, remember you have at least one more pedal beside your accelerator.
Mart (motorcyclist who regularly gets almost rear-ended by cagers who think a yellow means speed up).I take a regular bicycle for all trips under 5km, and most trips under 10km. And yes, in dense city traffic, especially in pre-twentieth century city areas that are densely built up and have many small streets, a bicycle beats all other forms of transportation.
Too bad my commute is 50 km. A motorbike is the best alternative in that case.
MartHow about this one: when building a new suburb, execute all planners that don't factor in access roads, and instead expect all inhabitants to use the existing infrastructure.
Here in the Netherlands they just built some new suburbs as part of a national program. Around Leiden, situated near one of our busiest motorways, they expect people to use the only road leading to the motorway. A road that is already being used by about half the population of the town anyway. This was acknowledged as a problem in the planning stage, and waved away with "another access road will be built once development of the housing is done". Result: jams leading up to the motorway, jam-packed merge lanes, and worse jams on the motorway itself.
Amsterdam has a new development that depends for its motorway acccess on one of the main access roads leading into the city center. Do I have to spell out how bad the congestion gets these days? I cross that bit daily, and the onramps are packed. See Google Maps. The development is the bit on the right.
MartTry a motorbike.
My Moto Guzzi 1000 SP III is useless below 30 km/h in second gear. First gear works, but just barely, to trundle along at constant throttle, unfortunately the power/weight ratio is such that the least throttle movement translates into huge jerks. And my experience is that this is typical for Guzzi motorbikes, they have very tall first gears, and a correspondingly higher speed in second, and even though they're V-twins (usually thought of as sedate low-rev trundlers), they're useless below 2000 revs.
And this is not even a very powerful bike, only 72hp (240 kg dry weight). Japanese bikes tend to have shorter firsts, but even they suffer from jerkiness, made worse because they are usually higher-powered.
I have to ride the clutch if I want to keep moving in a jam. Thankfully this is usually unnecessary, as filtering is legal here in the Netherlands. Guess why I ride a big-arse touring bike for my daily commute? It's rather fun to comfortably filter through two lanes of almost-stopped traffic at a sedate 2200 revs in 2, which is about the aforementioned 30 km/h. Only concessions I have to make is taking 5 minutes at both ends of my commute to get in and out of my suit, and a reduced carrying capacity (even my hardbags and luggage rack can't compete with a car backseat or a boot).
MartThese ignoramuses have been around a long time. Where did you think I got the idea for my .sig?
MartDo POSIX and the IETF count?
MartWhy don't you stick to the example I gave you? Ah right, because that would destroy your nice little theory, primarily because I was not talking about prior restraint.
In other words, you're probably a spammer. Fuck off and die. Slowly and painfully preferably.
MartAh yes, the Frea Speach defense.
Here's a hint: all rights have limits, and these limits are when infringing on the rights of others. Your First Amendment rights do not give you the right to stand on my lawn in the middle of the night with a megaphone to advertise your goods; you are infringing on my property rights. I can have the police haul you off for that. How is that different from you pushing shit into my inbox which I have to pay for, directly in connection charges, or indirectly through higher ISP prices?
Spam is about consent, not content. Spamming is not free speech. Anyone who says otherwise is most likely a spammer.
MartAs long as such sharing over bittorrent is non-commercial in nature, clause 3c of the GPL is in force, allowing the distributor to discharge their obligation by merely giving a link to the source.
A commercial distributor must either distribute the source along with the binary (clause 3a) or give a written offer (3b). Clause 3a can conceivably be met by distributing a torrent for the source from the same location as the binary. That is an edge case though, but given the history of GPL enforcement not something that will land you in hot water.
MartOf course files that are not part of any package can and will be overwritten by the package manager. I don't see that as a particular problem. If one thinks oneself smart enough to install software outside the system (usually by compiling from source), one obviously is expected to know that the package manager knows nothing about these files. Moreover, system files are usually installed by a package, and thus covered by the protections of the package management system.
Reality is a bit different though, plenty of people think they're cool because they can type ./configure ; make ; make install, and are suddenly startled to find that they don't know as much about *nix as they thought when things break. The smart ones learn from these mistakes, the dumb ones fill forums with whines.
And as for dpkg outright stopping when a conflict occurs, that was what I meant by 'whining mightily'.
Martdpkg on Debian and derived distros whines mightily if it finds a file already in use while installing a new package. RPM has file-level dependencies, and can also catch these kinds of errors. So the two major packaging systems on GNU/Linux already have mechanisms to avoid exactly this problem.
Debian goes even a step further: beyond the capabilities of the basic package manager, it declares certain files (usually those living in /etc) conffiles, for which policy declares that they shall never be overwritten without a positive confirmation, and never deleted unless the administrator specifically invokes the package manager with the --purge option.
Works very well indeed.
MartAbout those Germans in American uniforms, you do realise that:
Now, the day the US actually sets up a tribunal to make clear the status of those detainees in Gitmo is the day we can talk legality. Until then, Gitmo is a breach of the laws of war, and in contravention of both the US Constition and precedent set in international law by the US itself.
MartLike, oh, the English government and their sympathisers in the colonies?
Sheesh, if you need a Dutchman to point out that you don't know your own history, you're really not doing your best to dispel the stereotype of the Stupid American, now are you?
MartFor once and for all: the artwork and brandnames in documentation are trademarks. The GPL does not cover trademarks. This would be why you don't find references to them in the GPL text.
You can whine all you want, but Red Hat's demands on redistributors have NOTHING to do with their obligations under the GPL.
MartThe source can be distributed verbatim. You actually have never seen a Red Hat distribution up close, now have you?
The artwork and documentation referring to the distribution by brand name cannot be distributed. Last I checked, those things were not covered by the GPL.
Idiot.
MartGiven that here (Europe), the press consistently keeps awarding 'Car of the Year' awards to European cars, with the Japanese only occasionally breaking that hegemony, leads me to suspect that they're not entirely bias-free.
The motorcycle press is worse. Minor marques get flak for things like too-soft rear suspension, while a major advertiser like BMW gets a throwaway line that the suspension is tuned for comfort, not sports riding. Not to mention Harley-Davidson getting away with having their marketing slogans reprinted, because (aside from their Revolution-based bikes) otherwise there would not be anything positive to say about H-D. About the only exception is the German Motorrad magazine, and even they give the local giant a little too much credit IMO.
MartPatents, trademarks, and copyright are different things. The GPL covers two of those. And the logos and what name is used documentation are not necessary to the functioning of the program, which is why the FSF is totally OK with Red Hat's practices.
Red Hat is using trademark law in exact the way it was designed to do: to make sure that that which is called Red Hat is Red Hat. And if you were to have read the slightest bit on the Gnu Philosophy page, or known the slightest bit about how Stallman thinks of trademark, you would have known the FSF stance on this. Again I say: stop being a stupid twit in public.
Mart