What license is it published under? I can't seem to find any mention of licensing on their website.
According to this page, Vim is public domain charity-ware. Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, asks users who appreciate the software to contribute money to an orphange/hospital in Uganda.
I believe that the FSF objects to the public domain feature of the license, as it's not copyleft.
I agree with you: Vim is a great editor! It's a pity that my CS Department is an Emacs zone...
I agree with you that that is true, but at the same time, it could be useful to have a "standard" default wm/desktop across Unix/Linux. KDE is probably the most newbie friendly, but licensing issues would probably mean that GNOME became the default. This would not preclude people from writing a new wm/desktop, but it would tend to mean that only advanced users are using sawfish (standalone), or Enlightenment, Ice, etc.)
That's a manifestation of the main reason that people invest in gold.
Let's say you buy some bonds (of any type). Interest rates rise. This implies two things:
Your bonds decrease in value. Because they pay less interest than the bonds being issued, someone looking to buy a bond would be better off paying for a new bond than an old one, unless you discount your bond. There is a correlation of -10 to 1 in this relationship (a 1% increase in the interest rate leads to a 10% decrease in value)
Because interest rates more or less track inflation, it is reasonable to assume that inflation has increased.
This implies that: when inflation goes up, bond values go down, and will go down by a 10:1 ratio. Thus, by finding an investment that's value tracks inflation, and placing at most 10% of your bond investments in that investment, you have a nice hedge position. One investment that, over long periods, tends to track inflation is gold, as this from the Cleveland Fed says.
You have to go back to 15th century Italy to find the first instances of something resembling modern banking. Interest was generated by finagling exchange rates... ie: I pay you 10 Genoan units and in 3 months, you pay me 20 Venetian units.
It could also be argued that the Knights Templar ran a predecessor to the savings/checking account in the 12th-14th centuries. In their system, you would give gold to a Templar Preceptory, and they would give you a sheet of paper with a code on it saying that you had deposited xxx amount of gold. You could then go to any Templar preceptory and receive that amount of gold in exchange for the sheet of paper.
The reason that charge cards are not as universally accepted as credit cards is simple: the charge cards don't pay up as quickly as the credit cards. Generally, AmEx/Diner's Club will pay out on a quarterly basis. Visa/Mastercard pay out much more quickly, and debit cards are even faster. This is the main source of income for the charge card people: float. They collect from you an average of 6 weeks before they pay the merchant. With a few million in assorted safe bonds, you can make a lot of money in 6 weeks.
Also, charge card fees to merchants (the charge card company in effect gets a discount) tend to be larger than credit card fees.
And finally, due to the small number of Diner's Club and (to a lesser extent) AmEx members, the benefits do not necessarily justify the costs.
More blatantly obvious is this article, about a major case where Fox was sued by its reporters when they were fired for refusing to distort a story. The reporters were awarded $425,000. Sound familiar? Probably not, because few people reported on it. But it sure was a big story to me. But perhaps this quote from Fox's defense team will shed some light on the subject: "There is no law, rule or regulation against slanting the news."
As well there shouldn't be. Any piece of writing by humans has a bias/slant. Even source code has a bias, which manifests itself in the way a data structure or algorithim is used or in the type of algorithim used.
Explain to me why, say, http://www.indymedia.org is any less biased than Fox. The NYTimes and NYPost are equally biased. Slashdot and ZDNet are equally biased. Sun and Microsoft are equally biased. In all these cases the best course of action is to identify the bias used by one source, find a source that has an opposite bias, and the truth sould lie somewhere in between those.
I was only saying that in cases where you're applying for a security clearance that a profile is a good thing. If the gov't can turn up something on you, the odds are that anybody else will be able to, as well.
Would it be possible to hack the firmware so that ecc-ignorance can be switched on and off?
If it can't be done with current drives, I'm sure there would be quite a market for drives that allow you to pass parameters to the firmware (without building support for ecc-ignorance in). Then, the company drops some hints as to how to hack it to ignore ecc. Somebody posts it on the web, the company declines to sue under the dmca, and sales soar as people buy the drive.
Kinda like how dvd drives that are easy to hack still sell very well.
I guess in a related note, would it be possible to design a system where all the data on a page is compressed (say, into a bzipped tarbal) and decompressed by the client? How much power would be required to do multiple extremely quick bzips?
The reasoning behind the lifestyle profiles for security clearances is very simple. If you, say, have a large collection of kiddie porn on your system at home, that's a huge security risk, because somebody else could discover it and blackmail you into handing over secrets.
This was the reason that the CIA still has a prohibition on employing closeted homosexuals.
Of course, if you're fully out in the open about having the kiddie porn, then there's no reason to deny the clearance.
The NFL has a rule that, unless a game sells 60,000 tickets, that game cannot be shown live in that home market. The purpose of the rule is to prevent TV from cutting into the ticket revenue. In cases where tems are particularly crappy (such as Arizona), many games are blacked out because of poor attendance.
I even believe that a few playoff games over the years have been blacked out.
I mean, how long has the Palm been in existence? And NCR only just discovers it? IANAL, but waiting for an ungodly long amount of time before suing for patent infringement should count against the plaintiff...
That said, the NCR patent sounds to me like a completely different animal from the Amazon patent. This would've been non-obvious in 1987. I assume that NCR has a few of their proto-pilots floating around in their labs...
I think an interesting point on sweatshop labor is this: 30-40 years ago, India, Taiwan, and South Korea were all at roughly the same economic status (e.g. very low per capita income, low per capita GDP, etc.). India rejected sweatshops as a means of economic development. Taiwan and South Korea accepted them as a necessary evil. India is still a developing nation. Taiwan and South Korea are rivalling Japan to be the richest country in East Asia. There are few sweatshops in Taiwan and South Korea.
The problem isn't sweatshops; it's poverty. Sweatshops are a mere manifestation of that poverty. Think about it for a moment: if the people in say, Bangladesh weren't in poverty, would they work in sweatshops?
What is the most certain cure for poverty? wealth creation (wealth being liquid assets). The biggest asset of a developing country is the manual labor of its citizens. The country does not have huge amounts of wealth (otherwise, it's not a developing nation), and it doesn't tend to have a high education level, because education is expensive.
What a sweatshop does is, for a very low initial cost, convert that labor into cash. Thus, a middle class gradually starts to appear and grow, eventually reaching a size where education and non-manual jobs become a possibility. As this happens, labor costs go up, forcing sweatshops elsewhere.
"Asian workers would be aghast at the idea of American consumers boycotting certain toys or clothing in protest. The simplest way to help the poorest Asians would be to buy more from sweatshops, not less." -- Kristof, Nicholas and Sheryl Wudnunn, Thunder from the East: A Portrait of a Rising Asia.
And in most states, fatalities have decreased since 65 was put in (at least in Massachusetts, and a few others). This despite Boston drivers.
I ascribe it to this fact: the danger is not speed, by itself, it's speed differences. You would think that NASCAR drivers, seeing as they're driving in packs at 200+ mph, would be being killed a lot (and they do get killed from time to time... ignoring the past 9 months though, NASCAR had gone several years without a fatality). The reason for that is that the NASCAR drivers are all going at approximately the same speed.
There's a certain segment of the population that will always drive a limited access highway at 75 or 80, even. There's another segment that drives those same roads at the speed limit. And there's a segment that drives 5-10 above, and a small segment that drives 5-10 below. On a 55 mph speed limit, that means that some people are doing eighty, and sharing the road with people who are doing 45, a range of 35 mph.
With 65, the 75-80 folk are still there, some of the +5-+10'ers are doing 70-75, others are doing 65-70 (they didn't change their habits significantly), those who religiously drive the speedlimit are doing 65, and almost nobody does less than 55. So the range is now 25 mph, which tends to result in lower fatality rates.
Also, in some states, the cops weren't enforcing 55 anyway, but strictly keep 65. The Adirondack Northway is a prime example. When the speed limit was 55, traffic flow was around 70-80 (the few times I was on it). With 65 in place, the flow has actually slowed a little, to around 75 tops, because the 65 is more heavily enforced.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this page, Vim is public domain charity-ware. Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, asks users who appreciate the software to contribute money to an orphange/hospital in Uganda.
I believe that the FSF objects to the public domain feature of the license, as it's not copyleft.
I agree with you: Vim is a great editor! It's a pity that my CS Department is an Emacs zone...
By your logic, computer code is not speech? Based on the DeCSS discussions, I think a lot of /.ers will disagree with you.
I agree with you that that is true, but at the same time, it could be useful to have a "standard" default wm/desktop across Unix/Linux. KDE is probably the most newbie friendly, but licensing issues would probably mean that GNOME became the default. This would not preclude people from writing a new wm/desktop, but it would tend to mean that only advanced users are using sawfish (standalone), or Enlightenment, Ice, etc.)
That's a manifestation of the main reason that people invest in gold.
Let's say you buy some bonds (of any type). Interest rates rise. This implies two things:
- Your bonds decrease in value. Because they pay less interest than the bonds being issued, someone looking to buy a bond would be better off paying for a new bond than an old one, unless you discount your bond. There is a correlation of -10 to 1 in this relationship (a 1% increase in the interest rate leads to a 10% decrease in value)
- Because interest rates more or less track inflation, it is reasonable to assume that inflation has increased.
This implies that: when inflation goes up, bond values go down, and will go down by a 10:1 ratio. Thus, by finding an investment that's value tracks inflation, and placing at most 10% of your bond investments in that investment, you have a nice hedge position. One investment that, over long periods, tends to track inflation is gold, as this from the Cleveland Fed says.Exactly.
There is no such thing as intrinsic value. A thing has value if two people agree a) that it has value, and b) they agree on a specific value.
You have to go back to 15th century Italy to find the first instances of something resembling modern banking. Interest was generated by finagling exchange rates... ie: I pay you 10 Genoan units and in 3 months, you pay me 20 Venetian units.
It could also be argued that the Knights Templar ran a predecessor to the savings/checking account in the 12th-14th centuries. In their system, you would give gold to a Templar Preceptory, and they would give you a sheet of paper with a code on it saying that you had deposited xxx amount of gold. You could then go to any Templar preceptory and receive that amount of gold in exchange for the sheet of paper.
The reason that charge cards are not as universally accepted as credit cards is simple: the charge cards don't pay up as quickly as the credit cards. Generally, AmEx/Diner's Club will pay out on a quarterly basis. Visa/Mastercard pay out much more quickly, and debit cards are even faster. This is the main source of income for the charge card people: float. They collect from you an average of 6 weeks before they pay the merchant. With a few million in assorted safe bonds, you can make a lot of money in 6 weeks.
Also, charge card fees to merchants (the charge card company in effect gets a discount) tend to be larger than credit card fees.
And finally, due to the small number of Diner's Club and (to a lesser extent) AmEx members, the benefits do not necessarily justify the costs.
There's always Opera...
What about Huckster?...
About three feet lower in my case...
But there's No Such Agency...
As well there shouldn't be. Any piece of writing by humans has a bias/slant. Even source code has a bias, which manifests itself in the way a data structure or algorithim is used or in the type of algorithim used.
Explain to me why, say, http://www.indymedia.org is any less biased than Fox. The NYTimes and NYPost are equally biased. Slashdot and ZDNet are equally biased. Sun and Microsoft are equally biased. In all these cases the best course of action is to identify the bias used by one source, find a source that has an opposite bias, and the truth sould lie somewhere in between those.
To outlaw bias is to outlaw all expression.
I was only saying that in cases where you're applying for a security clearance that a profile is a good thing. If the gov't can turn up something on you, the odds are that anybody else will be able to, as well.
Did you read the Onion a few too many times...
[Collective groans]
Am I the only one on this planet that prefers Win 3.x to Win 9x any day!
[Still chuckling about the day I installed DOS 6.22 and WFW 3.11 on a 1.1 GHz TBird...]
Would it be possible to hack the firmware so that ecc-ignorance can be switched on and off?
If it can't be done with current drives, I'm sure there would be quite a market for drives that allow you to pass parameters to the firmware (without building support for ecc-ignorance in). Then, the company drops some hints as to how to hack it to ignore ecc. Somebody posts it on the web, the company declines to sue under the dmca, and sales soar as people buy the drive.
Kinda like how dvd drives that are easy to hack still sell very well.
I guess in a related note, would it be possible to design a system where all the data on a page is compressed (say, into a bzipped tarbal) and decompressed by the client? How much power would be required to do multiple extremely quick bzips?
The reasoning behind the lifestyle profiles for security clearances is very simple. If you, say, have a large collection of kiddie porn on your system at home, that's a huge security risk, because somebody else could discover it and blackmail you into handing over secrets.
This was the reason that the CIA still has a prohibition on employing closeted homosexuals.
Of course, if you're fully out in the open about having the kiddie porn, then there's no reason to deny the clearance.
Vim is available for Win32.
The NFL has a rule that, unless a game sells 60,000 tickets, that game cannot be shown live in that home market. The purpose of the rule is to prevent TV from cutting into the ticket revenue. In cases where tems are particularly crappy (such as Arizona), many games are blacked out because of poor attendance.
I even believe that a few playoff games over the years have been blacked out.
And with the power of a Quantum Computer, VB programs might actually be able to run with reasonable speed...
I mean, how long has the Palm been in existence? And NCR only just discovers it? IANAL, but waiting for an ungodly long amount of time before suing for patent infringement should count against the plaintiff...
That said, the NCR patent sounds to me like a completely different animal from the Amazon patent. This would've been non-obvious in 1987. I assume that NCR has a few of their proto-pilots floating around in their labs...
Not if Microsoft's Jim Allchin has anything to do with it...
I think an interesting point on sweatshop labor is this: 30-40 years ago, India, Taiwan, and South Korea were all at roughly the same economic status (e.g. very low per capita income, low per capita GDP, etc.). India rejected sweatshops as a means of economic development. Taiwan and South Korea accepted them as a necessary evil. India is still a developing nation. Taiwan and South Korea are rivalling Japan to be the richest country in East Asia. There are few sweatshops in Taiwan and South Korea.
The problem isn't sweatshops; it's poverty. Sweatshops are a mere manifestation of that poverty. Think about it for a moment: if the people in say, Bangladesh weren't in poverty, would they work in sweatshops?
What is the most certain cure for poverty? wealth creation (wealth being liquid assets). The biggest asset of a developing country is the manual labor of its citizens. The country does not have huge amounts of wealth (otherwise, it's not a developing nation), and it doesn't tend to have a high education level, because education is expensive.
What a sweatshop does is, for a very low initial cost, convert that labor into cash. Thus, a middle class gradually starts to appear and grow, eventually reaching a size where education and non-manual jobs become a possibility. As this happens, labor costs go up, forcing sweatshops elsewhere.
And in most states, fatalities have decreased since 65 was put in (at least in Massachusetts, and a few others). This despite Boston drivers.
I ascribe it to this fact: the danger is not speed, by itself, it's speed differences. You would think that NASCAR drivers, seeing as they're driving in packs at 200+ mph, would be being killed a lot (and they do get killed from time to time... ignoring the past 9 months though, NASCAR had gone several years without a fatality). The reason for that is that the NASCAR drivers are all going at approximately the same speed.
There's a certain segment of the population that will always drive a limited access highway at 75 or 80, even. There's another segment that drives those same roads at the speed limit. And there's a segment that drives 5-10 above, and a small segment that drives 5-10 below. On a 55 mph speed limit, that means that some people are doing eighty, and sharing the road with people who are doing 45, a range of 35 mph.
With 65, the 75-80 folk are still there, some of the +5-+10'ers are doing 70-75, others are doing 65-70 (they didn't change their habits significantly), those who religiously drive the speedlimit are doing 65, and almost nobody does less than 55. So the range is now 25 mph, which tends to result in lower fatality rates.
Also, in some states, the cops weren't enforcing 55 anyway, but strictly keep 65. The Adirondack Northway is a prime example. When the speed limit was 55, traffic flow was around 70-80 (the few times I was on it). With 65 in place, the flow has actually slowed a little, to around 75 tops, because the 65 is more heavily enforced.