83. And Taco Bell was never a taco company. In an interview with the New York Times conducted in the wake of Yahoo’s decision to outsource its search features to Microsoft, Yahoo boss Carol Bartz says that Yahoo has “never been a search company.”
Carol Bartz is correct--Yahoo started out as a link collection, then a hierarchical directory (basically like http://www.dmoz.org/ then added a lot of portal services (including email, stock quotes, etc).
The thing that they never had, until 2004, was a search engine; Yahoo put other company's searches on their site (including Inktomi for a while, and then Google up until 2004). Doing that with Bing is just returning to what they've done historically.
BTW if your debit card is a visa one then afaict you can use it anywhere that asks for a visa credit card
Probably the case with most smallish online purchases, but in the general case this is untrue. Hertz car rentals, for instance, won't accept debit cards (including Visa-branded) even when there's enough money in the account that they can apply their standard hold. Enterprise car rentals will accept such cards.
Train operators were called Engineers originally because you had to be an engineer to operate one (it required the skills and knowledge of engineering).
No, train operators were called engineers for the same reason that ship's engineers are so called--because they work with engines, and traditionally those who did so were given the moniker "engineer". (as Webster says, "engineer(n). 4 : a person who runs or supervises an engine or an apparatus").
Fire engineers are likewise named, and radio engineers and station engineers come from the same history. There were technical skills required, but they bear no resemblance to modern PE requirements or recent attempts to redefine engineer restrictively.
In Asia, you can get a PE in: Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Marine Engineering, Nautical Studies, Polymer Engineering, Textile & Clothing Engineering, Information Technology and Agriculture Engineering
In the US: Mechanical (also covers Aerospace), Electrical, Civil, Chemical
First, PE is a technical designation that in the US varies by state jurisdiction; some states (e.g. Texas) offer PEs for software engineering, others do not.
Second, arguing based on PE definitions is like saying that because an M.D. has to graduate from an accredited medical school, calling a PhD in philosophy "Doctor Smith" or a Hollywood ghost editor/rewriter a "script doctor" is wrong.
It's completely irrelevant to the discussion of the word "engineer", which is a much broader word than a narrow PE designation. In the US, a PE is only required for those working on projects deemed to have significant public health and safety implications. The vast majority of engineers (even in traditional branches) do not have PEs in the US, although many engineers opt to get a PE even if they're not legally required to; the majority in the US, though, are graduate engineers.
Engineer is an English word with a long and broad history, and recent attempts to restrict its use to P.E.s and by engineering societies are just as repugnant as if the AMA tried to lobby for the plain word "doctor" to be illegal for use by those without an M.D.
The term may be hazy in the US, but it actually means something in other countries, and has for quite a few decades.
This is backwards: the term has an actual meaning in the English language, going back hundreds of years. In Canada (and much of continental US), professional societies have succeeded in legislating that meaning away in favor of meanings that they control. To date, the US (and the UK) have successfully defended the meaning from those professional society's attempts to corrupt it.
The historical meaning of the word in English is inline with its usage in the US, not the recent proscriptivist fad.
The difference is doctor, engineer, and lawyer all refer to people with a minimum of a college degree and even higher level education.
In the US, there's no minimum college degree to be an engineer. In much of continental Europe, "engineer" has been co-opted by professional societies. Thankfully, the US hasn't legislated away the traditional meaning of the word, so it can still be used properly in all senses.
Here you can be a high school dropout who is really good at mixing volume levels in the recording studio and be an engineer. You can dig ditches for the military and be an engineer. You can drive a fire truck and be an engineer. You can replace broken boards in the radio tower and be an engineer.
What'd *really* annoy the Texans is the fact that, outside the US, "yanks" or "yankees" generally refers to all Americans, them included.:-)
Of course they'd have no problem turning around and calling someone from New York a yankee, which would be equally "incorrect"--but also has a 230+ year history.
That's where the engineers are - you know, the people who design hardware of different types
Please don't give credence to professional engineering societies who try to fetishize the word "engineer".
Engineers are also people who adjust the mix levels of audio recordings. Or dig ditches for the military. Or drive trains or fire trucks. Or keeps the radio equipment running.
Or engage in the (IEEE-recognized, for what little that's worth) field of software engineering.
The main reason you saw the switch to Google early on was that the site was spartan.
The main reason you saw the switch to Google was because the thing you were searching for often came back as the first result and very often came back on the first page, and because it didn't allow paid placement of sites. WebCrawler, Lycos, Altavista, Inktomi, and the other legions of earlier engines often required a lot of search refinement and hunting through several pages of results to find things, and starting with Inktomi many of them returned sponsored sites as the top hits regardless of their specific relevancy to your search.
Of the core demands of Versailles was the disbanding of the General Staff, because it had, since Frederick the Great had basically remodeled its Prussian antecedent, been one of the most skilled in the world. What the Weimar Republic did was to essentially violate that directive and secretly keep the General Staff employed. During the 1920s these guys were fighting mock battles with fictitious armies.
Churchill noted this himself, that if the General Staff had actually been disbanded in reality, then it would have taken decades to rebuild it, to recreate a core group of skilled officers with the training. The Allies, by basically turning a blind eye to the Weimar's ghost army, allowed Germany to maintain the skeleton of its army to which Hitler rapidly could apply the flesh to. Without the General Staff, Hitler probably would have been in his grave before Germany had a central military command capable the kinds of campaigns that began in 1939.
I disagree, vehemently.
The post-WWI General Staff _did_ secretly meet (under the name Truppenamt). They hardly formed a basis for the Wehrmacht's leadership, though. Of the most prominent Truppenamt fieldmarshals:
The founder, Hans von Seeckt, was somewhat supportive of Hitler early on, but by the time of the beer hall putsch in 1923 he opposed him. He was out of the German military by the mid-1920s, spent some time supporting Chiang Kai-shek in China in the mid-1930s, and was opposed to Hitler's regime upon his return, though too old to be active in opposition.
Werner von Blomberg was forced out in 1938, nominally because his wife was a former prostitute but realistically because he'd alienated Goering and Himmler. Hitler then trumped up homosexuality charges against his supposed successor--Werner von Blomberg--in order to force him out.
Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord was a vocal opponent of Hitler's from the early 1930s on, who led several attempts to oust him
Wilhelm Adam retired prior to the war, though he actually did get recalled and serve intermittently throughout the war (never in a significant strategic planning position).
Ludwig Beck served as a military strategist under Hitler, but his decisions were almost uniformly ignored--in particular, he opposed Panzer Blitzkreig techniques and believed that the earliest that Germany would be ready to go to war would be in 1944. He later led a failed plot to assassinate Hitler.
So of the 5 fieldmarshals of note, 1 actively opposed Hitler, 1 passively opposed him, 1 was dismissed peremptorily, and 1 served intermittently but not in a strategic capacity. Only 1 served as a real strategist, but his ideas were essentially ignored and he wound up leading a plot to kill the Fuhrer.
The major German strategist to come out of the Truppenamt was Heinz Guderian. He was extremely important, but Goering and many other key military strategists had no real lineage back to the General Staff--and Guderian's influence was sporadic, as he was relieved of command after arguing with Hitler about how to fight the war on the eastern front, the later reinstated only to be relieved of command again by Hitler before the end of the war. Still, he was a key strategist especially leading up to the war.
It's debatable, though, how much of Guderian's military acumen is owed to the ancestry of the General Staff; he himself claimed that the majority of his Achtung-Panzer! work was derivative of British strategist JFC Fuller and (ironically) French military theoretician Charles de Gaulle, not of earlier General Staff guides.
The German General Staff was one of the very best military commands the world has ever known (inherited from Prussia and originally built into a magnificent war machine by Frederick the Great).
That's like saying that the modern USA military is a magnificent war machine inherited from Abraham Lincoln.
Frederick the Great died in 1786. His military success had very little relationship to Germany's WW2 military.
The law has been there for a while. It just isn't retroactive--it's illegal to build new houses with non-GFCI circuits in kitchens/bathrooms/etc, and it's illegal to sell existing ones, but if you're living in such a house you're not required to update it until it changes hands.
If Project Beta is not a derivative work, then you don't need to bother to read GPL2 and worry about it's wording, so there's no problem here (for the Project Beta people -- let's get back to this in a little while).
If Project Beta is a derived work of GPL2-licensed Project Alpha, and you don't want to infringe copyright, then you need to follow the terms of GPL2. Now this is where it gets interesting: under the GPL2's definition of derived works -- not the same as copyright's -- Project Beta still might go either way. It might be a derived work under copyright law, but not a derived work under GPL2's defintions, which means that GPL2's terms that talk about derivative works, might not apply. So you might have something that is legally a derivative work, but GPL2 might not give you any distribution rights. Or it might give you distribution (GPL2 defininition) rights, but then legally you might find that you still don't have distribution (copyright definition) rights.
This is exactly backwards.
The GPL2 does not offer a separate definition of "derivative work". It instead defers to copyright law itself, saying:
The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law
The objection of the article is that by defering to the legal definition of "derivative work", you are creating a different set of responsibilities based on what that term means in various jurisdictions.
That's true, but as you point out the local legal meaning of copyright law is _always_ going to affect whether copyright applies to a particular work or not.
What GPL V3 does is avoid using the term "derivative work", using distinct terms from copyright law.
While that does offer more clarity as to what those terms mean within the license, it falls into the trap that you outlined above: with GPLV3-style licenses, you have 2 different sets of standards to determine (first, is this a "derivative work", needed for GPLV3 to apply at all; second, if it is, is it whatever the GPLV3-specific terminology intends to cover).
The ultimate impact is that you _still_ have to know what a derivative work is locally, and on top of that you also have to figure out the license-specific language.
What has gone wrong, is that GPL2 is using copyright-related terms
I'd say that what was right was that the GPLv2 used legal terms rather than trying to create yet another parallel structure. That way, with GPLv2 there's only one set of definitions to pin down, and those definitions are ones that have been pretty well adjudicated in the past so you have a fair amount of history to look at to figure out how they apply.
This is, incidentally, one of the reasons that I don't put language in my code allowing distribution under GPLv2 "or any later version".
It's not that I think that the FSF is going to go crazy and put out a GPLv3 saying "the FSF has sole rights to this code" or anything so sinister--it's that they have different motivations from me, and I don't want to put others in control of the license for my code (a decision I'm happy with, considering that the first "later version" since I made that decision seems to be a significant step in the wrong direction to me).
I've been watching a lot of "Outer Limits" on Hulu of late (some of the best episodes aren't available there or on Netflix - only on DVD. What gives?!?). The best stories are about how people interact with aliens, their technology or both or with humans technology and progress. One episode has a plot based on transportation and duplicating folks and how people might deal with it. Or another plot that finds an alien and assumes their hostile only to find out they're friendly and we humans over reacted.
That's all well and good, but it sort of seems to be tilting at windmills to complain that popular sci-fi isn't hard sci-fi. The most popular sci-fi movies and TV shows have almost all been stories about humans dealing with human subjects, with the sci-fi as window dressing and action/effects fodder--Star Trek and Star Wars come to mind most readily.
There's certainly a place for hard sci-fi/speculative fiction/whatever you want to call it, but just yelling at the fact that most popular shows aren't _that_ is just cranky and obvious.
Bonaroo draws much more "famous" groups than Lilith Fair did. Last year they had (among dozens of others) Pearl Jam, Metallica, Jack Johnson, Kanye West, Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, Willie Nelson, BB King, etc. This year they had the Beastie Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Phish, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costello, Ani Difranco, Merle Haggard, and tons more.
Yes, that's exactly what the petty crime vs. (traditional) criminal offense is getting at. Petty crimes have short sentences and don't greatly malign the reputation of the criminal.
It is somewhat more complicated than simply looking at the length of the penalty--e.g. even if the jail penalty is minimal, if the nature of the charge is heinous enough to really impugn your reputation, you may still have a right to a jury trial.
If it's a criminal case, Amendment VI provides a right to a jury.
If it isn't, and the amount at stake is over $20, Amendment VII provides it.
The bolded portion is wrong. Amendment VII only provides the right to a jury in civil suits, not in all non-criminal trials.
The distinction is important because at the time the Constitution was written there was a difference between petty crimes and so-called criminal offenses--the former were not afforded a jury trial under common law, while the latter were.
While petty crimes are, today, lumped in with criminal offenses in many ways, the distinction still remains when it comes to determining whether a jury trial is required or not.
The impression I've gotten from reading various past "Con threads", is that while he tries in the beginning, Con doesn't deal well with this process; he can't keep his ego submerged, gets frustrated, and everything (perhaps including Con himself last time I read one of these threads) ends up unravelling.
Agreed; Con seems not to be able to work well in the process.
e.g. Ingo ran a bunch of benchmarks on BFS and made a long post to LKML explaining his results, that, while critical of its performance on a series of benchmarks, bent over backwards to be very polite in tone, with things like:
First and foremost, let me say that i'm happy that you are hacking the Linux scheduler again. It's perhaps proof that hacking the scheduler is one of the most addictive things on the planet;-)...
General interactivity of BFS seemed good to me - except for the pipe test when there was significant lag over a minute. I think it's some starvation bug, not an inherent design property of BFS, so i'm looking forward to re-test it with the fix.... I hope to be able to work with you on this, please dont hesitate sending patches if you wish - and we'll also be following BFS for good ideas and code to adopt to mainline.
And Con responded with a very defensive and confrontational tone: I'm not interested in a long protracted discussion about this since I'm too busy to live linux the way full time developers do, so I'll keep it short, and perhaps you'll understand my intent better if the FAQ wasn't clear enough.
Do you know what a normal desktop PC looks like? No, a more realistic question based on what you chose to benchmark to prove your point would be: Do you know what normal people actually do on them?
Re:Interesting Background Material
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Robotic Mold
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· Score: 2, Informative
In reference to slime moulds, plasmodium is just the macroscopic form of any slime mould.
Not _any_ slime mold. Plasmodial slime molds are one small grouping of slime molds.
Dictyostelids, for instance, are unicellular slime molds. Plasmodiums have many (often millions) nuclei in one cell membrane. Dictyostelids maintain cellular structure--their macroscopic form is not a plasmodium, though they do form a "pseudoplasmodium" that kind of looks like a plasmodium.
And that's just the plasmodials and the dictyostelids, two kinds of slime molds in the Amoebozoa kingdom--there are 3 other kingdoms that contain other kinds of slime molds, many with macroscopic forms that are not plasmodiums.
Re:Umm...
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Robotic Mold
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No, this sounds like it's a normal mold.
Nope, normal molds are fungi. Slime molds aren't molds at all. They used to be considered in the now-defunct Protist kingdom, but that's not a monophyletic grouping, so it's been split up into several different kingdoms (although the exact classification is still the subject of some debate).
The most popular current taxonomy puts slime molds into several kingdoms, with plasmodial slime molds (the case at hand) in the kingdom Amoebozoa alongside amoebas (among others) and decidedly not in the kingdoms of plants, animals, or fungi.
Given the vast numbers of CVS repositories that exist and the ease with which you can transition to Subversion, I don't think it's popularity is going to wane any time soon.
git to CVS transformation and a server that servers git repos to CVS clients exist, too.
SVN is in a weird place: it's not exactly legacy. There are certainly new projects choosing it. But almost all of those know that it's an intermediate step that'll be out the door in a few years.
There's 1 major reason to choose SVN over git: better GUI clients. That could be pretty compelling in some shops (even as a long-term decision--there will be fine SVN to git transition tools available if and when you decide to make another switch), but you have to realize that you're getting yourself into a worse VC system and some long-term pain in exchange for some (non-trivial, to be sure) short term benefit.
Certainly it was a nice stepping stone, and even today there are some good reasons to pick it (especially for shops that have a lot of Windows development), but SVN has absolutely already waned a lot in popularity over the past few years. In 2005, it was the clear choice for most new projects; now, most places I work at are deciding between short-term client flexibility and short-term distributed VC, but they pretty much all know that in 4-5 years they'll be using a distributed VC system.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
Carol Bartz is correct--Yahoo started out as a link collection, then a hierarchical directory (basically like http://www.dmoz.org/ then added a lot of portal services (including email, stock quotes, etc).
The thing that they never had, until 2004, was a search engine; Yahoo put other company's searches on their site (including Inktomi for a while, and then Google up until 2004). Doing that with Bing is just returning to what they've done historically.
BTW if your debit card is a visa one then afaict you can use it anywhere that asks for a visa credit card
Probably the case with most smallish online purchases, but in the general case this is untrue. Hertz car rentals, for instance, won't accept debit cards (including Visa-branded) even when there's enough money in the account that they can apply their standard hold. Enterprise car rentals will accept such cards.
Train operators were called Engineers originally because you had to be an engineer to operate one (it required the skills and knowledge of engineering).
No, train operators were called engineers for the same reason that ship's engineers are so called--because they work with engines, and traditionally those who did so were given the moniker "engineer". (as Webster says, "engineer(n). 4 : a person who runs or supervises an engine or an apparatus").
Fire engineers are likewise named, and radio engineers and station engineers come from the same history. There were technical skills required, but they bear no resemblance to modern PE requirements or recent attempts to redefine engineer restrictively.
In Asia, you can get a PE in:
Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Marine Engineering, Nautical Studies, Polymer Engineering, Textile & Clothing Engineering, Information Technology and Agriculture Engineering
In the US:
Mechanical (also covers Aerospace), Electrical, Civil, Chemical
First, PE is a technical designation that in the US varies by state jurisdiction; some states (e.g. Texas) offer PEs for software engineering, others do not.
Second, arguing based on PE definitions is like saying that because an M.D. has to graduate from an accredited medical school, calling a PhD in philosophy "Doctor Smith" or a Hollywood ghost editor/rewriter a "script doctor" is wrong.
It's completely irrelevant to the discussion of the word "engineer", which is a much broader word than a narrow PE designation. In the US, a PE is only required for those working on projects deemed to have significant public health and safety implications. The vast majority of engineers (even in traditional branches) do not have PEs in the US, although many engineers opt to get a PE even if they're not legally required to; the majority in the US, though, are graduate engineers.
Engineer is an English word with a long and broad history, and recent attempts to restrict its use to P.E.s and by engineering societies are just as repugnant as if the AMA tried to lobby for the plain word "doctor" to be illegal for use by those without an M.D.
Err, "continental US" is meant to be "continental Europe".
The term may be hazy in the US, but it actually means something in other countries, and has for quite a few decades.
This is backwards: the term has an actual meaning in the English language, going back hundreds of years. In Canada (and much of continental US), professional societies have succeeded in legislating that meaning away in favor of meanings that they control. To date, the US (and the UK) have successfully defended the meaning from those professional society's attempts to corrupt it.
The historical meaning of the word in English is inline with its usage in the US, not the recent proscriptivist fad.
The difference is doctor, engineer, and lawyer all refer to people with a minimum of a college degree and even higher level education.
In the US, there's no minimum college degree to be an engineer. In much of continental Europe, "engineer" has been co-opted by professional societies. Thankfully, the US hasn't legislated away the traditional meaning of the word, so it can still be used properly in all senses.
Here you can be a high school dropout who is really good at mixing volume levels in the recording studio and be an engineer. You can dig ditches for the military and be an engineer. You can drive a fire truck and be an engineer. You can replace broken boards in the radio tower and be an engineer.
What'd *really* annoy the Texans is the fact that, outside the US, "yanks" or "yankees" generally refers to all Americans, them included. :-)
Of course they'd have no problem turning around and calling someone from New York a yankee, which would be equally "incorrect"--but also has a 230+ year history.
That's where the engineers are - you know, the people who design hardware of different types
Please don't give credence to professional engineering societies who try to fetishize the word "engineer".
Engineers are also people who adjust the mix levels of audio recordings. Or dig ditches for the military. Or drive trains or fire trucks. Or keeps the radio equipment running.
Or engage in the (IEEE-recognized, for what little that's worth) field of software engineering.
The main reason you saw the switch to Google early on was that the site was spartan.
The main reason you saw the switch to Google was because the thing you were searching for often came back as the first result and very often came back on the first page, and because it didn't allow paid placement of sites. WebCrawler, Lycos, Altavista, Inktomi, and the other legions of earlier engines often required a lot of search refinement and hunting through several pages of results to find things, and starting with Inktomi many of them returned sponsored sites as the top hits regardless of their specific relevancy to your search.
Of the core demands of Versailles was the disbanding of the General Staff, because it had, since Frederick the Great had basically remodeled its Prussian antecedent, been one of the most skilled in the world. What the Weimar Republic did was to essentially violate that directive and secretly keep the General Staff employed. During the 1920s these guys were fighting mock battles with fictitious armies.
Churchill noted this himself, that if the General Staff had actually been disbanded in reality, then it would have taken decades to rebuild it, to recreate a core group of skilled officers with the training. The Allies, by basically turning a blind eye to the Weimar's ghost army, allowed Germany to maintain the skeleton of its army to which Hitler rapidly could apply the flesh to. Without the General Staff, Hitler probably would have been in his grave before Germany had a central military command capable the kinds of campaigns that began in 1939.
I disagree, vehemently.
The post-WWI General Staff _did_ secretly meet (under the name Truppenamt). They hardly formed a basis for the Wehrmacht's leadership, though. Of the most prominent Truppenamt fieldmarshals:
The founder, Hans von Seeckt, was somewhat supportive of Hitler early on, but by the time of the beer hall putsch in 1923 he opposed him. He was out of the German military by the mid-1920s, spent some time supporting Chiang Kai-shek in China in the mid-1930s, and was opposed to Hitler's regime upon his return, though too old to be active in opposition.
Werner von Blomberg was forced out in 1938, nominally because his wife was a former prostitute but realistically because he'd alienated Goering and Himmler. Hitler then trumped up homosexuality charges against his supposed successor--Werner von Blomberg--in order to force him out.
Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord was a vocal opponent of Hitler's from the early 1930s on, who led several attempts to oust him
Wilhelm Adam retired prior to the war, though he actually did get recalled and serve intermittently throughout the war (never in a significant strategic planning position).
Ludwig Beck served as a military strategist under Hitler, but his decisions were almost uniformly ignored--in particular, he opposed Panzer Blitzkreig techniques and believed that the earliest that Germany would be ready to go to war would be in 1944. He later led a failed plot to assassinate Hitler.
So of the 5 fieldmarshals of note, 1 actively opposed Hitler, 1 passively opposed him, 1 was dismissed peremptorily, and 1 served intermittently but not in a strategic capacity. Only 1 served as a real strategist, but his ideas were essentially ignored and he wound up leading a plot to kill the Fuhrer.
The major German strategist to come out of the Truppenamt was Heinz Guderian. He was extremely important, but Goering and many other key military strategists had no real lineage back to the General Staff--and Guderian's influence was sporadic, as he was relieved of command after arguing with Hitler about how to fight the war on the eastern front, the later reinstated only to be relieved of command again by Hitler before the end of the war. Still, he was a key strategist especially leading up to the war.
It's debatable, though, how much of Guderian's military acumen is owed to the ancestry of the General Staff; he himself claimed that the majority of his Achtung-Panzer! work was derivative of British strategist JFC Fuller and (ironically) French military theoretician Charles de Gaulle, not of earlier General Staff guides.
The German General Staff was one of the very best military commands the world has ever known (inherited from Prussia and originally built into a magnificent war machine by Frederick the Great).
That's like saying that the modern USA military is a magnificent war machine inherited from Abraham Lincoln.
Frederick the Great died in 1786. His military success had very little relationship to Germany's WW2 military.
you can bet your butts that this single episode will first be sold for the price of a full movie.
According to TFA, the episode will be included as part of the bonus material for the season 3 release on blu-ray:
"The restored pilot will be included in the "Star Trek: Original Series - Season 3" Blu-ray release.."
The American lawyer dealing with this is named Godwin. Surely you get the irony in that, if nothing else.
The American lawyer dealing with this is, in fact, the same Mike Godwin who created Godwin's law.
It is the same Mike Godwin who created Godwin's law. He moved from the EFF to Wikimedia counsel in 2007, IIRC.
The law has been there for a while. It just isn't retroactive--it's illegal to build new houses with non-GFCI circuits in kitchens/bathrooms/etc, and it's illegal to sell existing ones, but if you're living in such a house you're not required to update it until it changes hands.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Let's say Project Alpha is GPL2 licensed.
If Project Beta is not a derivative work, then you don't need to bother to read GPL2 and worry about it's wording, so there's no problem here (for the Project Beta people -- let's get back to this in a little while).
If Project Beta is a derived work of GPL2-licensed Project Alpha, and you don't want to infringe copyright, then you need to follow the terms of GPL2. Now this is where it gets interesting: under the GPL2's definition of derived works -- not the same as copyright's -- Project Beta still might go either way. It might be a derived work under copyright law, but not a derived work under GPL2's defintions, which means that GPL2's terms that talk about derivative works, might not apply. So you might have something that is legally a derivative work, but GPL2 might not give you any distribution rights. Or it might give you distribution (GPL2 defininition) rights, but then legally you might find that you still don't have distribution (copyright definition) rights.
This is exactly backwards.
The GPL2 does not offer a separate definition of "derivative work". It instead defers to copyright law itself, saying :
The objection of the article is that by defering to the legal definition of "derivative work", you are creating a different set of responsibilities based on what that term means in various jurisdictions.
That's true, but as you point out the local legal meaning of copyright law is _always_ going to affect whether copyright applies to a particular work or not.
What GPL V3 does is avoid using the term "derivative work", using distinct terms from copyright law.
While that does offer more clarity as to what those terms mean within the license, it falls into the trap that you outlined above: with GPLV3-style licenses, you have 2 different sets of standards to determine (first, is this a "derivative work", needed for GPLV3 to apply at all; second, if it is, is it whatever the GPLV3-specific terminology intends to cover).
The ultimate impact is that you _still_ have to know what a derivative work is locally, and on top of that you also have to figure out the license-specific language.
What has gone wrong, is that GPL2 is using copyright-related terms
I'd say that what was right was that the GPLv2 used legal terms rather than trying to create yet another parallel structure. That way, with GPLv2 there's only one set of definitions to pin down, and those definitions are ones that have been pretty well adjudicated in the past so you have a fair amount of history to look at to figure out how they apply.
This is, incidentally, one of the reasons that I don't put language in my code allowing distribution under GPLv2 "or any later version".
It's not that I think that the FSF is going to go crazy and put out a GPLv3 saying "the FSF has sole rights to this code" or anything so sinister--it's that they have different motivations from me, and I don't want to put others in control of the license for my code (a decision I'm happy with, considering that the first "later version" since I made that decision seems to be a significant step in the wrong direction to me).
I've been watching a lot of "Outer Limits" on Hulu of late (some of the best episodes aren't available there or on Netflix - only on DVD. What gives?!?). The best stories are about how people interact with aliens, their technology or both or with humans technology and progress. One episode has a plot based on transportation and duplicating folks and how people might deal with it. Or another plot that finds an alien and assumes their hostile only to find out they're friendly and we humans over reacted.
That's all well and good, but it sort of seems to be tilting at windmills to complain that popular sci-fi isn't hard sci-fi. The most popular sci-fi movies and TV shows have almost all been stories about humans dealing with human subjects, with the sci-fi as window dressing and action/effects fodder--Star Trek and Star Wars come to mind most readily.
There's certainly a place for hard sci-fi/speculative fiction/whatever you want to call it, but just yelling at the fact that most popular shows aren't _that_ is just cranky and obvious.
Bonaroo draws much more "famous" groups than Lilith Fair did. Last year they had (among dozens of others) Pearl Jam, Metallica, Jack Johnson, Kanye West, Robert Plant and Alison Kraus, Willie Nelson, BB King, etc. This year they had the Beastie Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Phish, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costello, Ani Difranco, Merle Haggard, and tons more.
Yes, that's exactly what the petty crime vs. (traditional) criminal offense is getting at. Petty crimes have short sentences and don't greatly malign the reputation of the criminal.
It is somewhat more complicated than simply looking at the length of the penalty--e.g. even if the jail penalty is minimal, if the nature of the charge is heinous enough to really impugn your reputation, you may still have a right to a jury trial.
If it's a criminal case, Amendment VI provides a right to a jury.
If it isn't, and the amount at stake is over $20, Amendment VII provides it.
The bolded portion is wrong. Amendment VII only provides the right to a jury in civil suits, not in all non-criminal trials.
The distinction is important because at the time the Constitution was written there was a difference between petty crimes and so-called criminal offenses--the former were not afforded a jury trial under common law, while the latter were.
While petty crimes are, today, lumped in with criminal offenses in many ways, the distinction still remains when it comes to determining whether a jury trial is required or not.
See Petty Federal Offenses and the Constitutional Guaranty of Trial by Jury, 39 Harv.L.Rev. 917, 922-965, 983-1019, or the summary of the law visible in Google books here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=pkb9HLOzeTcC&lpg=PT396&ots=chYy4WR8ii&dq=Petty%20Federal%20Offenses%20and%20the%20Constitutional%20Guarantee%20of%20Trial%20by%20Jury&pg=PT395#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Bats are still mammals, and there are certainly species of bats in NZ that predate humans.
Agreed; Con seems not to be able to work well in the process.
e.g. Ingo ran a bunch of benchmarks on BFS and made a long post to LKML explaining his results, that, while critical of its performance on a series of benchmarks, bent over backwards to be very polite in tone, with things like:
First and foremost, let me say that i'm happy that you are hacking the Linux scheduler again. It's perhaps proof that hacking the scheduler is one of the most addictive things on the planet ;-) ...
General interactivity of BFS seemed good to me - except for the pipe test when there was significant lag over a minute. I think it's some starvation bug, not an inherent design property of BFS, so i'm looking forward to re-test it with the fix. ...
I hope to be able to work with you on this, please dont hesitate sending patches if you wish - and we'll also be following BFS for good ideas and code to adopt to mainline.
And Con responded with a very defensive and confrontational tone:
I'm not interested in a long protracted discussion about this since I'm too busy to live linux the way full time developers do, so I'll keep it short, and perhaps you'll understand my intent better if the FAQ wasn't clear enough.
Do you know what a normal desktop PC looks like? No, a more realistic question based on what you chose to benchmark to prove your point would be: Do you know what normal people actually do on them?
Feel free to treat the question as rhetorical.
Full exchange here:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/886319
In reference to slime moulds, plasmodium is just the macroscopic form of any slime mould.
Not _any_ slime mold. Plasmodial slime molds are one small grouping of slime molds.
Dictyostelids, for instance, are unicellular slime molds. Plasmodiums have many (often millions) nuclei in one cell membrane. Dictyostelids maintain cellular structure--their macroscopic form is not a plasmodium, though they do form a "pseudoplasmodium" that kind of looks like a plasmodium.
And that's just the plasmodials and the dictyostelids, two kinds of slime molds in the Amoebozoa kingdom--there are 3 other kingdoms that contain other kinds of slime molds, many with macroscopic forms that are not plasmodiums.
No, this sounds like it's a normal mold.
Nope, normal molds are fungi. Slime molds aren't molds at all. They used to be considered in the now-defunct Protist kingdom, but that's not a monophyletic grouping, so it's been split up into several different kingdoms (although the exact classification is still the subject of some debate).
The most popular current taxonomy puts slime molds into several kingdoms, with plasmodial slime molds (the case at hand) in the kingdom Amoebozoa alongside amoebas (among others) and decidedly not in the kingdoms of plants, animals, or fungi.
Given the vast numbers of CVS repositories that exist and the ease with which you can transition to Subversion, I don't think it's popularity is going to wane any time soon.
git to CVS transformation and a server that servers git repos to CVS clients exist, too.
SVN is in a weird place: it's not exactly legacy. There are certainly new projects choosing it. But almost all of those know that it's an intermediate step that'll be out the door in a few years.
There's 1 major reason to choose SVN over git: better GUI clients. That could be pretty compelling in some shops (even as a long-term decision--there will be fine SVN to git transition tools available if and when you decide to make another switch), but you have to realize that you're getting yourself into a worse VC system and some long-term pain in exchange for some (non-trivial, to be sure) short term benefit.
Certainly it was a nice stepping stone, and even today there are some good reasons to pick it (especially for shops that have a lot of Windows development), but SVN has absolutely already waned a lot in popularity over the past few years. In 2005, it was the clear choice for most new projects; now, most places I work at are deciding between short-term client flexibility and short-term distributed VC, but they pretty much all know that in 4-5 years they'll be using a distributed VC system.