TkRat can send and save mime attachments. What more do you want, an integrated office suite?
As for URLs, every time I click on them in tkrat, it fires up netscape.
Don't even get me started on html mail... if your job requires html mail, I feel sorry for you.
I guess the difference between you and me is that I want a mail client that can read mail, and you want something that looks pretty and can handle attachments, html, and other things not generally meant to be done with email. Maybe actually reading mail is a secondary priority for you, considering how badly Netscape Messenger crashes on you all the time.
You are completely missing the point. Of course when your graphics subsystem crashes it might leave the keyboard locked up. This holds true whether you're on Linux or NT.
The difference is that in Linux, when the graphics subsystem crashes, you at least have the option of killing the X server over the network. With NT, if the graphics subsystem crashes (and don't tell me it never crashes), you're looking at a blue screen.
The ability to recover via network when the graphics subsystem crashes is a feature that is useful and absent in Windows NT. It's ironic that you slam X crashes as leaving a Linux system unusable, when in reality the situation is exactly opposite of what you describe. Between Linux and Windows, the only OS that is left unusable by a graphics system crash is Windows, not Linux.
TkRat is my IMAP client of choice under X. It has the advantage of being usable (unlike Netscape, which from the looks of your post is definitely unusable).
You might also want to try Postilion, a client derived from TkRat (although I've always had better luck with TkRat myself).
What follows is the microeconomics perspective of the Microsoft situation. You may not agree on the appropriate interpretations of the definitions and theorems, but you can't argue against the definitions or theorems themselves: they are stated (and, in the case of theorems, proved) in every textbook.
A company has monopoly power in a market if it is able to sell goods at more than the marginal cost of production. Microsoft in recent quarters has achieved about 50% profit margin. They take in 1.5 dollars of revenue for every dollar of expenses. This margin is way above what any company in the software market or any other market can make. Therefore, according to the economists' definition, Microsoft has monopoly power in the OS market.
There is a theorem in microeconomics that states that in a competitive market, long term economic profit is zero. Note that economic profit is different from the accounting profit that companies put on their quarterly reports. I am not saying that in a competitive market companies have no profits! Economic profit is defined as accounting profit minus opportunity cost (the cost you incur by not using your resources to exploit other opportunities). The theorem simply says that, in the long term, competitive companies do not make any additional profit above and beyond what they could make doing anything else.
It seems obvious to me that a company like MS, expecting 50% profit margins for as many years ahead as the eye can see, is making serious economic profit, that is above and beyond what they could make in any other line of work. MS's enormous long term economic profit indicates that their market cannot be competitive.
Monopolies are not outlawed in the US just because they're immoral. A major motivation for the Sherman act was that monopoly power can seriously drain the nation of beneficial, and vital, economic activity. Whenever you have a company like MS with monopoly power, you have deadweight loss--the company's product (e.g. a copy of Windows) costs far less to produce than it is priced, so consequently a lot of people who would pay more than cost of production for a copy of Windows are unable to get one. This loss of mutually beneficial trade hurts both the consumer (who would rather have his Windows) and MS (who would gladly sell something for more than cost of production, if only it didn't have to lower prices to everyone else!). In extreme cases (e.g. the industrial trusts of the late 1800s), the deadweight loss from monopoly power can drain away a significant chunk of the national economy. Restoring a competitive market can add a whole lot of beneficial trades that bolster the national economy, as well as the aggregate well-being of both the consumers and the producers who participate in said trades.
So that, my friends, is the academic economist's perspective. Make of it what you will.
I hate it when people confuse symmetric key cryptography with public key cryptography.
You state that each extra bit in the key doubles the cracking time. That statement is true only if:
the key is a symmetric key,
brute force is used as the cracking method.
When cracking public key cryptosystems, the first assumption is just completely wrong, and the second assumption is often not the case. In this particular case you are completely wrong -- the best known factoring algorithm is the number field sieve, with calculation time O(exp(c (log n)^(1/3) (log log n)^(2/3)). This running time is considerably below the 2^n time that you state.
If you leave out the section stating that complexity doubles with each bit, then the rest of your post actually makes good sense.
Are you saying NT can do these things? Not!
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You lay out a long list of (valid) deficiencies in Linux, and then claim "This is what NT has over Linux." I applaud you for listing the deficiencies, but Windows NT is not by any means ahead of Linux in this regard.
Why can't the linux installer automatically find your hardware? Answer: it does. The RedHat 6 installation autodetects most hardware as long as it isn't newer than the CD.
Does the Windows NT installer autodetect your hardware? Nope. For examplem, good luck getting Windows NT 4.0 to autodetect any sort of SCSI card, video card, or sound card.
Can you install redhat without X? Not easily. Valid point. But can you install NT without the graphical interface? Not at all! How, then, is NT ahead of linux in this regard?
Can you install Redhat with ftp/http and no X? Probably not easily. Can you install NT that way? Not. (You can't even install ftp/http servers with NT workstation.)
In Redhat at least you can select packages individually, and the installer keeps track of dependencies. I'd like to see you do that in the NT installation!
Want to add a user in Redhat 6 that can do foo? Yes, you're right, it takes some documentation hunting. But how in the world do you add a user that can do foo in Windows NT? I bet you need some doc hunting.
If you want to knock the Redhat installation for valid limitations, fine. But don't go saying that NT is all over Linux in this category. The Windows NT 4.0 installation is not anywhere near as easy, smooth, or customizable as the Redhat Linux 6.0 installation.
find out what other software and libraries your program requires to run?
find out what other software and libraries require your program to run?
uninstall, accounting for the dependency information above?
reinstall, accounting for the dependencies?
upgrade, accounting for the dependencies?
I'm sorry, but under Windows, software installations are crap. They break the moment you have dependencies and uninstall something. They break if you perform an incompatible upgrade in a dependency chain. And Windows gives you no way to tell what program(s) use a particular file or what files a particular program uses, so you can't handle those dependencies at all. Stories of "DLL hell", where one installation clobbers the DLLs that another program needs, abound.
Windows software installation seems easy, but is actually painful to administer. If you actually like to install/uninstall/administer Windows software, fine. It's your loss.
You are correct to point out that derived works of GPL-licensed products must be distributed under GPL, if they are to be distributed at all.
The reason Intel is in the clear regarding their Merced port is that they are not distributing their code at all. In fact, the Intel NDA prohibits the Merced people from distributing their code at all. The GPL does not require distribution; it only says that if distribution occurs, it must be under the GPL.
The Intel NDA also does not cover any code other than code written by the authors under that NDA. The authors own the copyrights on that code, and that code is not required to be GPL licensed unless it is distributed to someone else.
Corel, on the other hand, is distributing derived works of GPL programs to parties other than the original author, and the GPL mandates that the distribution of those programs be under the GPL.
There is an extraordinary difference between what Corel is doing with their distribution and what Intel is doing with their Merced port.
The Intel Merced NDAs only cover changes to the Linux kernel that are specific to the Merced port. That code is owned by the developers working on the port, and Intel is free to make the developers sign NDAs on that code.
The Intel NDAs do not in any way restrict the signatories from distributing outside GPL'd code that they did not themselves author. The Corel license, on the other hand, restricts the beta testers from distributing code within their distribution that is owned by other parties like the Free Software Foundation. That practice violates the terms under which the FSF licensed their software to Corel.
Section 6 of the GPL states very clearly that you may not under any circumstance distribute the code to anyone else except under the terms and conditions of the GPL. There is no distinction between "internal-only" and public distribution.
Certainly in the case of "internal-only" distribution it is legitimate for the recipients to voluntarily decline to distribute the code, but Corel cannot forcibly impose this requirement without breaking the law.
Section 6 of the GPL states very clearly that you may not under any circumstance distribute the code to anyone else except under the terms and conditions of the GPL. There is no distinction between "internal-only" and public distribution.
Certainly in the case of "internal-only" distribution it is legitimate for the recipients to voluntarily decline to distribute the code, but Corel cannot forcibly impose this requirement without breaking the law.
There is an extraordinary difference between what Corel is doing with their distribution and what Intel is doing with their Merced port.
The Intel Merced NDAs only cover changes to the Linux kernel that are specific to the Merced port. That code is owned by the developers working on the port, and Intel is free to make the developers sign NDAs on that code.
The Intel NDAs do not in any way restrict the signatories from distributing outside GPL'd code that they did not themselves author. The Corel license, on the other hand, restricts the beta testers from distributing code within their distribution that is owned by other parties like the Free Software Foundation. That practice violates the terms under which the FSF licensed their software to Corel.
Section 6 of the GPL states very clearly that you may not under any circumstance distribute the code to anyone else except under the terms and conditiosn of the GPL. There is no distinction between "internal-only" and public distribution.
Certainly in the case of "internal-only" distribution it is legitimate for the recipients to voluntarily decline to distribute the code, but Corel cannot forcibly impose this requirement without breaking the law.
Do you actually have any evidence that space is necessarily infinitely subdividable? If not, don't be so sure that it is.
There was actually a Discover magazine article a few years back that talked about the possibility of space being quantized. While I haven't heard anything about the subject since, I assume that's because the question is still open, not because it's been settled one way or the other.
Energy and matter are quantized, so it is certainly conceivable that space and time are also quantized. Again, unless you have clear evidence to the contrary, I don't think the possibility can be dismissed.
In any case, there is an additional difficulty with applying the Banach-Tarski paradox in real life: you do have to make an uncountable number of very exacting, precise choices at once. Considering that there are only countably many seconds (and possibly even finitely many) in the lifespan of the universe, it seems like it would be difficult to pull that off.
Just because something is out there mathematically doesn't mean we'll ever see it in the real world. For instance, the decimal expansion of pi is infinite nonrepeating. We will never see all the digits of pi laid out in sequence, since there are only finitely many atoms in the known universe, and hence only finitely many sheets of paper to write it on. The B-T paradox is the same kind of thing. I'm quite confident that you will never be able to achieve it in real life.
Read my post again. Please. Then you'd see how stupid your reply is.
I totally agree with you that communism applied to material goods is an utter failure. The USSR proved as much.
The first point of my post is that since software, unlike material goods, can be infinitely redistributed, one cannot conclude point blank, as you did, that the communist philosophy will also fail on software.
I am not interested in hearing about how miserably communism fails on material goods. We all know it fails. I am only interested in hearing about how well communism works with software. Please do not introduce material goods into the discussion. It is totally irrelevant to our topic.
There are two points to make that completely shoot down your analysis that "because communism is bad, GNU is bad."
A big part of why communism fails for material goods is that one cannot distribute material goods to one person without taking them away from another person. Software does not have this problem: it is infinitely copiable. Therefore, although the communist philosophy fails miserably for material goods, it may well be ideal for software.
Communism with a Capital C advocates the use of government force to compel sharing of material goods. Tellingly, that is not what happens in the free software movement: authors use the GPL or BSD licenses out of their own free will, and any author is free to choose any license they wish for their code, without government interference.
You might argue that authors who use the GPL are using government force (via copyright) to enforce their philosophy. This is true. However, it cuts both ways. Authors of proprietary software are using the same government force for their own ends. If you really are a laissez-faire capitalist, you would chafe at the thought of any government regulation of the software market, and let's face it: Software copyrights are a form of government regulation of the software market.
It is for these and other reasons that I maintain that the failure of communism has nothing to do with the free software movement, and that the current system of software copyright is not one that anyone with a capitalist philosophy can support.
An effort to replace GNU code with freely re-distributable implementations is also underway.
Quotes like these make me wonder about the mindset of those who favor the BSD license. James Howard is saying that GNU code is not freely re-distributable, and BSD code is. I disagree vehemently. Maybe in theory the BSD license gives users more permissions than the GNU license, but in practice BSD code is often made proprietary, and thus is not freely re-distributable.
From the software author's point of view, BSD code is easier to distribute, because its licensing is so liberal. However, from the software user's point of view, GPL code is more distributable, because unlike BSD code it is never proprietarized. As a software user myself, I think that James Howard (and all BSD license advocates) do software users like us a great disservice by focusing on the freedom of authors at the expense of freedom of users.
In conclusion, if you really do want to dispel the notion that "FreeBSD is an Old Boy's Network and Too Closed", please start paying more attention to the needs of software users instead of your own selfish interests as software authors. And please don't give me the "authors need money to eat" drivel. The success of Linux proves quite convincingly that authors can eat and serve their users at the same time.
I was playing fast and loose with words in my post because I am trying to explain highly mathematical concepts to readers in a way they can understand. A friend of mine once said that sometimes the incorrect explanation is just clearer.
You're right of course. Strictly speaking the problem is that real life doesn't let you apply the axiom of choice. And uncountability is not the feature of the axiom of choice that leads to the BT paradox.
But if I sit here and try to explain all the finer mathematical details, my post becomes 3 times as long and 1/100 as clear.
A bunch of lameoids in here are claiming that tracking via distributed.net is just as low and dirty as tracking via the Microsoft document ID. Get a grip, people!
The distributed.net client takes active effort to set up. The Microsoft tracker is enabled by default, and takes active effort to disable. That distinction makes all the difference in the world.
This kind of thing is very hard for non-mathematicians to understand, but... it actually is possible to cut up one sphere into pieces and rearrange the pieces into two spheres, each the same size as the original sphere. This particular result is famous enough to have its own name: the Banach-Tarski paradox.
The catch (of course there is one!) is that you need to accept the axiom of choice, which basically allows you to make arbitrary choices even if those choices are too many to count. The cuts you have to make along the sphere involve choosing an uncountable number of unknown real numbers in each of the three spatial coordinates all at once.
In real life you could not make such choices, since you are constrained to splitting a gold bar along gold atoms, which are discrete units. This lack of applicability of the axiom of choice to real life has led many in the field to reject the axiom of choice as invalid... but that's a whole other story.
PSYCHOLOGISTS say office workers hooked on sitting in chairs are mentally ill and need medical help.
That means those who spend more than four hours a day in the office could soon be treated on the NHS like alcholics and gamblers.
Top Brussels health advisers say new evidence shows constant sitting creates high body levels of fat, a lipid-like chemical linked to heart attacks.
Now the EU psychologists are warning Scots GPs to brace themselves for a wave of new patients suffering from addiction to office chairs.
Stars like Harvard president Neal Rudenstein and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates have already admitted to working binges. Gates gets up at 5am every day so he can cram in four hours in the office.
But it is the growing number of ordinary workers with access to office cubicles who are causing most concern.
The spread of cheaper and easier ways to get office jobs means that an increasing number of housewives and older people are getting hooked.
The psychologists base their fears on alarming real-life case studies. One Florida mum recently lost her children in a court custody battle because she couldn't keep out of the office.
Experts say up to 400,000 Brits may develop cubicle addiction in the new Millennium. A recent study of young people in the UK revealed that the problem often starts at college, where one in 10 students work for up to 16 hours a day.
Dr Kimberely Young, a lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh who is advising Brussels scientists, said: "Until recently, it was regarded by some psychologists as a joking matter. But the increasing number of divorces in which it is cited as a cause of family break-up has changed this attitude."
You claim that believing evolution or the big bang is more of a leap of faith than believing in God. I beg to differ. We have observational evidence of evolution and the big bang. We have no observational evidence of God, and indeed even Christians will admit that belief in God requires religious faith which can never be direcly substantiated in our lifetimes.
The observational evidence supporting the big bang is overwhelming. The microwave background radiation, the abundance of helium in our universe, and the observed Doppler redshift in distant galaxies all provide compelling evidence that the universe expanded from a hot, small, dense universe to what we observe today.
Evidence of evolution is equally strong. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, displacement of white moths by black moths in industrial London, and the fossil record are all tangible evidence that biological evolution happened in the past and is happening as we speak today.
The evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction are very well understood. Recombination hides deleterious recessive genes, while at the same time increasing the genetic variation of the population in a reasonably safe way. You can experimentally observe the utility of sexual reproduction firsthand yourself: simply take two different pure breed dogs or cats, mate them, and observe how dramatically more vigorous the hybrid offspring is than either parent.
I have provided nearly a dozen pieces of concrete, repeatable, observational evidence in support of the various scientific theories that you so disparage. Unless and until you provide similar repeatedly observable and tangible evidence of God, I shall have to remain agnostic.
Your savings disapper when you upgrade the OS
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What if you need to upgrade from Windows 95 to Windows 98, or to Windows NT, or to Windows 2000, or to Windows 2000 consumer, or even to whatever OS Microsoft has planned after that?
While sometimes the WinModem manufacturer will provide "drivers" for your new OS, more likely than not they will leave you in the lurch. After all, without software to run your WinModem, you'll just have to go out and buy another one, and that is exactly what they want.
If you only use your box for two years, then this isn't so much an issue, but some of us like to have computers that at least have a shot of working two years from now.
The problem is volume, not content
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I read this exact complaint on Slashdot two months ago, and I'm posting the exact same response (more or less).
Censorship, by definition, operates on the content of the message. Spam, on the other hand, is defined by its volume, not by its content. If you send unsolicited bulk email, your email is spam, no matter what its content. Contrariwise, if your email is solicited, or not bulk, then it's not spam, no matter what its content.
The fact that spam is characterised by volume, and not content, is the single most important difference between spam filters and content-based censorship.
If someone were forcing you to subscribe to the RBL, then you might have a case. But no one is so forcing you. Participation in RBL requires active subscription (i.e., you have to add nontrivial configuration to your MTA to pull it off).
In short, no one who loves receiving spam will ever have anything blocked by RBL, simply because they would not be subscribed to RBL.
As for mails we send to your personal address, I doubt that such a mail would be a bulk mail. As such, it would not fall under the definition of spam, "Unsolicited Bulk Email."
You're a fool if you can't control use of RBL
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You indicate in your post that NSI spam is not a hardship for you. That's absolutely fine! No one forces you to participate in RBL.
Before accusing others of being too stupid to operate mail filters, you should consider how ridiculous you look as you accuse voluntary RBL participants of being "unsuspecting." Yes, in case you didn't realize it, participation in the RBL requires active effort and is necessarily voluntary.
Slashdot Mirror
As for URLs, every time I click on them in tkrat, it fires up netscape.
Don't even get me started on html mail ... if your job requires html mail, I feel sorry for you.
I guess the difference between you and me is that I want a mail client that can read mail, and you want something that looks pretty and can handle attachments, html, and other things not generally meant to be done with email. Maybe actually reading mail is a secondary priority for you, considering how badly Netscape Messenger crashes on you all the time.
The difference is that in Linux, when the graphics subsystem crashes, you at least have the option of killing the X server over the network. With NT, if the graphics subsystem crashes (and don't tell me it never crashes), you're looking at a blue screen.
The ability to recover via network when the graphics subsystem crashes is a feature that is useful and absent in Windows NT. It's ironic that you slam X crashes as leaving a Linux system unusable, when in reality the situation is exactly opposite of what you describe. Between Linux and Windows, the only OS that is left unusable by a graphics system crash is Windows, not Linux.
You might also want to try Postilion, a client derived from TkRat (although I've always had better luck with TkRat myself).
A company has monopoly power in a market if it is able to sell goods at more than the marginal cost of production. Microsoft in recent quarters has achieved about 50% profit margin. They take in 1.5 dollars of revenue for every dollar of expenses. This margin is way above what any company in the software market or any other market can make. Therefore, according to the economists' definition, Microsoft has monopoly power in the OS market.
There is a theorem in microeconomics that states that in a competitive market, long term economic profit is zero. Note that economic profit is different from the accounting profit that companies put on their quarterly reports. I am not saying that in a competitive market companies have no profits! Economic profit is defined as accounting profit minus opportunity cost (the cost you incur by not using your resources to exploit other opportunities). The theorem simply says that, in the long term, competitive companies do not make any additional profit above and beyond what they could make doing anything else.
It seems obvious to me that a company like MS, expecting 50% profit margins for as many years ahead as the eye can see, is making serious economic profit, that is above and beyond what they could make in any other line of work. MS's enormous long term economic profit indicates that their market cannot be competitive.
Monopolies are not outlawed in the US just because they're immoral. A major motivation for the Sherman act was that monopoly power can seriously drain the nation of beneficial, and vital, economic activity. Whenever you have a company like MS with monopoly power, you have deadweight loss--the company's product (e.g. a copy of Windows) costs far less to produce than it is priced, so consequently a lot of people who would pay more than cost of production for a copy of Windows are unable to get one. This loss of mutually beneficial trade hurts both the consumer (who would rather have his Windows) and MS (who would gladly sell something for more than cost of production, if only it didn't have to lower prices to everyone else!). In extreme cases (e.g. the industrial trusts of the late 1800s), the deadweight loss from monopoly power can drain away a significant chunk of the national economy. Restoring a competitive market can add a whole lot of beneficial trades that bolster the national economy, as well as the aggregate well-being of both the consumers and the producers who participate in said trades.
So that, my friends, is the academic economist's perspective. Make of it what you will.
You state that each extra bit in the key doubles the cracking time. That statement is true only if:
- the key is a symmetric key,
- brute force is used as the cracking method.
When cracking public key cryptosystems, the first assumption is just completely wrong, and the second assumption is often not the case. In this particular case you are completely wrong -- the best known factoring algorithm is the number field sieve, with calculation time O(exp(c (log n)^(1/3) (log log n)^(2/3)). This running time is considerably below the 2^n time that you state.If you leave out the section stating that complexity doubles with each bit, then the rest of your post actually makes good sense.
Why can't the linux installer automatically find your hardware? Answer: it does. The RedHat 6 installation autodetects most hardware as long as it isn't newer than the CD.
Does the Windows NT installer autodetect your hardware? Nope. For examplem, good luck getting Windows NT 4.0 to autodetect any sort of SCSI card, video card, or sound card.
Can you install redhat without X? Not easily. Valid point. But can you install NT without the graphical interface? Not at all! How, then, is NT ahead of linux in this regard?
Can you install Redhat with ftp/http and no X? Probably not easily. Can you install NT that way? Not. (You can't even install ftp/http servers with NT workstation.)
In Redhat at least you can select packages individually, and the installer keeps track of dependencies. I'd like to see you do that in the NT installation!
Want to add a user in Redhat 6 that can do foo? Yes, you're right, it takes some documentation hunting. But how in the world do you add a user that can do foo in Windows NT? I bet you need some doc hunting.
If you want to knock the Redhat installation for valid limitations, fine. But don't go saying that NT is all over Linux in this category. The Windows NT 4.0 installation is not anywhere near as easy, smooth, or customizable as the Redhat Linux 6.0 installation.
- find out what files you installed?
- find out what other software and libraries your program requires to run?
- find out what other software and libraries require your program to run?
- uninstall, accounting for the dependency information above?
- reinstall, accounting for the dependencies?
- upgrade, accounting for the dependencies?
I'm sorry, but under Windows, software installations are crap. They break the moment you have dependencies and uninstall something. They break if you perform an incompatible upgrade in a dependency chain. And Windows gives you no way to tell what program(s) use a particular file or what files a particular program uses, so you can't handle those dependencies at all. Stories of "DLL hell", where one installation clobbers the DLLs that another program needs, abound.Windows software installation seems easy, but is actually painful to administer. If you actually like to install/uninstall/administer Windows software, fine. It's your loss.
Give me rpm/dpkg any day.
I see no reason why kids who are willing to kill (even though it's illegal) would have any trouble getting a gun (even if it is illegal).
How exactly do you propose to legally control guns in a way that will effectively hinder lawbreakers?
The reason Intel is in the clear regarding their Merced port is that they are not distributing their code at all. In fact, the Intel NDA prohibits the Merced people from distributing their code at all. The GPL does not require distribution; it only says that if distribution occurs, it must be under the GPL.
The Intel NDA also does not cover any code other than code written by the authors under that NDA. The authors own the copyrights on that code, and that code is not required to be GPL licensed unless it is distributed to someone else.
Corel, on the other hand, is distributing derived works of GPL programs to parties other than the original author, and the GPL mandates that the distribution of those programs be under the GPL.
The Intel Merced NDAs only cover changes to the Linux kernel that are specific to the Merced port. That code is owned by the developers working on the port, and Intel is free to make the developers sign NDAs on that code.
The Intel NDAs do not in any way restrict the signatories from distributing outside GPL'd code that they did not themselves author. The Corel license, on the other hand, restricts the beta testers from distributing code within their distribution that is owned by other parties like the Free Software Foundation. That practice violates the terms under which the FSF licensed their software to Corel.
Section 6 of the GPL states very clearly that you may not under any circumstance distribute the code to anyone else except under the terms and conditions of the GPL. There is no distinction between "internal-only" and public distribution.
Certainly in the case of "internal-only" distribution it is legitimate for the recipients to voluntarily decline to distribute the code, but Corel cannot forcibly impose this requirement without breaking the law.
Certainly in the case of "internal-only" distribution it is legitimate for the recipients to voluntarily decline to distribute the code, but Corel cannot forcibly impose this requirement without breaking the law.
The Intel Merced NDAs only cover changes to the Linux kernel that are specific to the Merced port. That code is owned by the developers working on the port, and Intel is free to make the developers sign NDAs on that code.
The Intel NDAs do not in any way restrict the signatories from distributing outside GPL'd code that they did not themselves author. The Corel license, on the other hand, restricts the beta testers from distributing code within their distribution that is owned by other parties like the Free Software Foundation. That practice violates the terms under which the FSF licensed their software to Corel.
Section 6 of the GPL states very clearly that you may not under any circumstance distribute the code to anyone else except under the terms and conditiosn of the GPL. There is no distinction between "internal-only" and public distribution.
Certainly in the case of "internal-only" distribution it is legitimate for the recipients to voluntarily decline to distribute the code, but Corel cannot forcibly impose this requirement without breaking the law.
There was actually a Discover magazine article a few years back that talked about the possibility of space being quantized. While I haven't heard anything about the subject since, I assume that's because the question is still open, not because it's been settled one way or the other.
Energy and matter are quantized, so it is certainly conceivable that space and time are also quantized. Again, unless you have clear evidence to the contrary, I don't think the possibility can be dismissed.
In any case, there is an additional difficulty with applying the Banach-Tarski paradox in real life: you do have to make an uncountable number of very exacting, precise choices at once. Considering that there are only countably many seconds (and possibly even finitely many) in the lifespan of the universe, it seems like it would be difficult to pull that off.
Just because something is out there mathematically doesn't mean we'll ever see it in the real world. For instance, the decimal expansion of pi is infinite nonrepeating. We will never see all the digits of pi laid out in sequence, since there are only finitely many atoms in the known universe, and hence only finitely many sheets of paper to write it on. The B-T paradox is the same kind of thing. I'm quite confident that you will never be able to achieve it in real life.
I totally agree with you that communism applied to material goods is an utter failure. The USSR proved as much.
The first point of my post is that since software, unlike material goods, can be infinitely redistributed, one cannot conclude point blank, as you did, that the communist philosophy will also fail on software.
I am not interested in hearing about how miserably communism fails on material goods. We all know it fails. I am only interested in hearing about how well communism works with software. Please do not introduce material goods into the discussion. It is totally irrelevant to our topic.
- A big part of why communism fails for material goods is that one cannot distribute material goods to one person without taking them away from another person. Software does not have this problem: it is infinitely copiable. Therefore, although the communist philosophy fails miserably for material goods, it may well be ideal for software.
- Communism with a Capital C advocates the use of government force to compel sharing of material goods. Tellingly, that is not what happens in the free software movement: authors use the GPL or BSD licenses out of their own free will, and any author is free to choose any license they wish for their code, without government interference.
You might argue that authors who use the GPL are using government force (via copyright) to enforce their philosophy. This is true. However, it cuts both ways. Authors of proprietary software are using the same government force for their own ends. If you really are a laissez-faire capitalist, you would chafe at the thought of any government regulation of the software market, and let's face it: Software copyrights are a form of government regulation of the software market.It is for these and other reasons that I maintain that the failure of communism has nothing to do with the free software movement, and that the current system of software copyright is not one that anyone with a capitalist philosophy can support.
Quotes like these make me wonder about the mindset of those who favor the BSD license. James Howard is saying that GNU code is not freely re-distributable, and BSD code is. I disagree vehemently. Maybe in theory the BSD license gives users more permissions than the GNU license, but in practice BSD code is often made proprietary, and thus is not freely re-distributable.
From the software author's point of view, BSD code is easier to distribute, because its licensing is so liberal. However, from the software user's point of view, GPL code is more distributable, because unlike BSD code it is never proprietarized. As a software user myself, I think that James Howard (and all BSD license advocates) do software users like us a great disservice by focusing on the freedom of authors at the expense of freedom of users.
In conclusion, if you really do want to dispel the notion that "FreeBSD is an Old Boy's Network and Too Closed", please start paying more attention to the needs of software users instead of your own selfish interests as software authors. And please don't give me the "authors need money to eat" drivel. The success of Linux proves quite convincingly that authors can eat and serve their users at the same time.
I was playing fast and loose with words in my post because I am trying to explain highly mathematical concepts to readers in a way they can understand. A friend of mine once said that sometimes the incorrect explanation is just clearer.
You're right of course. Strictly speaking the problem is that real life doesn't let you apply the axiom of choice. And uncountability is not the feature of the axiom of choice that leads to the BT paradox.
But if I sit here and try to explain all the finer mathematical details, my post becomes 3 times as long and 1/100 as clear.
The distributed.net client takes active effort to set up. The Microsoft tracker is enabled by default, and takes active effort to disable. That distinction makes all the difference in the world.
The catch (of course there is one!) is that you need to accept the axiom of choice, which basically allows you to make arbitrary choices even if those choices are too many to count. The cuts you have to make along the sphere involve choosing an uncountable number of unknown real numbers in each of the three spatial coordinates all at once.
In real life you could not make such choices, since you are constrained to splitting a gold bar along gold atoms, which are discrete units. This lack of applicability of the axiom of choice to real life has led many in the field to reject the axiom of choice as invalid ... but that's a whole other story.
That means those who spend more than four hours a day in the office could soon be treated on the NHS like alcholics and gamblers.
Top Brussels health advisers say new evidence shows constant sitting creates high body levels of fat, a lipid-like chemical linked to heart attacks.
Now the EU psychologists are warning Scots GPs to brace themselves for a wave of new patients suffering from addiction to office chairs.
Stars like Harvard president Neal Rudenstein and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates have already admitted to working binges. Gates gets up at 5am every day so he can cram in four hours in the office.
But it is the growing number of ordinary workers with access to office cubicles who are causing most concern.
The spread of cheaper and easier ways to get office jobs means that an increasing number of housewives and older people are getting hooked.
The psychologists base their fears on alarming real-life case studies. One Florida mum recently lost her children in a court custody battle because she couldn't keep out of the office.
Experts say up to 400,000 Brits may develop cubicle addiction in the new Millennium. A recent study of young people in the UK revealed that the problem often starts at college, where one in 10 students work for up to 16 hours a day.
Dr Kimberely Young, a lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh who is advising Brussels scientists, said: "Until recently, it was regarded by some psychologists as a joking matter. But the increasing number of divorces in which it is cited as a cause of family break-up has changed this attitude."
The observational evidence supporting the big bang is overwhelming. The microwave background radiation, the abundance of helium in our universe, and the observed Doppler redshift in distant galaxies all provide compelling evidence that the universe expanded from a hot, small, dense universe to what we observe today.
Evidence of evolution is equally strong. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, displacement of white moths by black moths in industrial London, and the fossil record are all tangible evidence that biological evolution happened in the past and is happening as we speak today.
The evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction are very well understood. Recombination hides deleterious recessive genes, while at the same time increasing the genetic variation of the population in a reasonably safe way. You can experimentally observe the utility of sexual reproduction firsthand yourself: simply take two different pure breed dogs or cats, mate them, and observe how dramatically more vigorous the hybrid offspring is than either parent.
I have provided nearly a dozen pieces of concrete, repeatable, observational evidence in support of the various scientific theories that you so disparage. Unless and until you provide similar repeatedly observable and tangible evidence of God, I shall have to remain agnostic.
While sometimes the WinModem manufacturer will provide "drivers" for your new OS, more likely than not they will leave you in the lurch. After all, without software to run your WinModem, you'll just have to go out and buy another one, and that is exactly what they want.
If you only use your box for two years, then this isn't so much an issue, but some of us like to have computers that at least have a shot of working two years from now.
Censorship, by definition, operates on the content of the message. Spam, on the other hand, is defined by its volume, not by its content. If you send unsolicited bulk email, your email is spam, no matter what its content. Contrariwise, if your email is solicited, or not bulk, then it's not spam, no matter what its content.
The fact that spam is characterised by volume, and not content, is the single most important difference between spam filters and content-based censorship.
In short, no one who loves receiving spam will ever have anything blocked by RBL, simply because they would not be subscribed to RBL.
As for mails we send to your personal address, I doubt that such a mail would be a bulk mail. As such, it would not fall under the definition of spam, "Unsolicited Bulk Email."
Before accusing others of being too stupid to operate mail filters, you should consider how ridiculous you look as you accuse voluntary RBL participants of being "unsuspecting." Yes, in case you didn't realize it, participation in the RBL requires active effort and is necessarily voluntary.