As far as I understood it, the very unfortunate VLC situation came about when a purist developer of VLC demanded that Apple would release VLC without DRM on IOS. But all apps on IOS use DRM, it is quite naive to assume that they would make an exception.
So what? He wrote the code, he released it for use under certain terms and conditions and those conditions were being violated. He wanted Apple to stop and Apple stopped, was he unhappy with that outcome? Did he expect something else? Of course it was annoying for everybody else but if people could just ignore the license when it was incompatible or inconvenient the GPL would have died out long ago.
That's not the point. The point is that it's *apple* who gets the bad press and the blame for VLC not being on the App Store because people do not understand the story and just assume that Apple pulled it. They removed it by request of one of the developers, and as you explained, because he did not consent to it being there.
The iOS App Store's policies were changed to make it compatible with the GPL before that (due to a different case) and there are plenty of GPL apps up in there to this day.
The lack of VLC has nothing to do with it not having a compatible licence, or Apple being "hostile" to open source, as is so often repeated; it's merely the choice of one of the original developers to not allow it to be distributed that way (as is his right).
If what the App store is fully compatible with the GPL, and VLC is released under the GPL, then in fact the original developer has no right at all to stop you me or anyone else from releasing it there. So, why then has no one released it if it is compatible?
I am no Apple fanboi but I will say that Android's big problem is all the crapware shoveled with even the most premium Android phones.
My mom just got a Galaxy Note 2 (the most expensive Android phone out there) and even that came with stuff I've never heard of... Samsung wiz stuff and Verizon Navigator and bunch of other Verizon crap.
I suppose it's not an indictment on Android OS itself, which I think is quite nice, but rather the inability of Google and Samsung to control the carriers and tell them flat out, don't put your crapware on our phone. Only Apple seems to be able to do that for some reason.
Apple has this problem too. They put a lame Maps application on their phone and Safari and all this itunes integration crap. The difference is that Apple goes out of there way to stop people from shipping better replacements to their apps. So, you don't realize how much crapware their stuff is.
The image shown as an example has most of the screen real estate tied up with a useless background of car images. Then there's a tiny map. The screen contains no useful information about bypassing the delay. The actual info is less useful than what 511.org or calling 511 provides.
The image you are referring to is a picture of a slide, not a screen shot from a mobile device. So, yeah, their slide isn't that pretty because they included part of a screenshot on a big lame slide background. On an actual device, this is actually way more useful than what 511.org provides. For one thing, you don't have to call anyone. You just unlock your phone and the info is right there. You just look at the notifications on your phone and it tells you that your destination will take you X minutes to get there including Y minutes due to traffic. Your phone has already looked up the best route due to traffic, so in fact it is telling you how to avoid the traffic. If you click on the map, it brings up Google maps and if for some reason you want a different route, you can easily bring up several different routes and choose the one you want. Not only that, but you usually don't even have to actually tell the phone what your destination was in the first place. Because if you googled the location on your computer (tablet, or phone) then it is smart enough to guess you might want to go there and provide the information on how to get there and how long it would take. And if you are somewhere away from home, it will tell you how long it will take to get home (based on current traffic conditions) and the best way to go. Unlike IOS, Metro, and other parts of Android, Google now is not just a scrolable grid of icons. It only shows you the relevant information
Metro's user interface is just a bunch of widgets, and the ones that ship with the OS are poorly designed to look like flash advertisements on web pages. Instead of showing you all the new messages in your inbox, Metro might show you a picture of one person who emailed you, and then 5 seconds later, show you a picture of another person who e-mailed you. After like 60 seconds of staring at the widget, you might have almost as much information as you get in 2 seconds of looking at the Gmail widget in Android. Metro doesn't scale well because it always shows every widget whether or not the information is relevant, and the widgets themselves are designed to look pretty but convey information really slowly.)
Many mobile apps are created by a single developer. So, certainly many of them could be done with a small team. If the projects are small enough, then it makes sense for you to not have an artist (for example) 100% dedicated to a single project. With large projects, there is a lot of learning about the domain specific requirements and the code base and how everything fits together. But, in a smaller project, a new developer who is competent can get up to speed quickly.
They still cost one hundred million dollars each (referring to F-35s retrofitted with drone controls here), so you can't just throw them away in the face of air defense.
Yes. But, depending on the mission, you could use much cheaper drones. For example, the camera on the Predator is much more expensive than the air frame.
That's all fine and well, however if you block GPS over the entire conflict zone, then these aircraft will be useless for any missions within that zone. If you engineer them right, maybe you won't have to worry too much about someone taking them over, but without GPS in the conflict zone where you're trying to use them, they're effectively flying blind. The whole problem with these aircraft is that they rely on radio signals such as GPS for guidance and command and control. Blocking radio signals is not hard to do for someone more advanced than Taliban fighters, so these aircraft are really only good for fighting with very unsophisticated opponents, like the Taliban. Being able to pull 15gs isn't very useful against some yahoos on the ground armed with AK47s and RPGs; it's only useful against very sophisticated opponents, and those nations certainly have the ability to jam radio signals.
But to block GPS in the combat zone, you have to have powerful transmitters that scream "HEY MISSILE!!! I'M RIGHT HERE! COME BLOW ME UP". So, the countermeasure is to just lob a few missiles at the GPS jammers.
Re:Review Ruby for the perl enthusiast please
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Ruby 2.0.0 Released
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And every primitive has a class version, to which the primitives are automatically boxed when they need to be treated like objects. There are only a few places where the distinction matters at all (arguments by value being the chief of these).
That's not true at all. you can't say 'a'.toLowerCase() in Java. You have to do something like Character('a').toLowerCase(). That's not transparent at all. And God forbid you want to add methods to the Integer class in java.
In modern days education is more accessible, and almost everyone strives to get higher education, the result is more college graduates on the market, which allows more position to require a degree which drives more kids to college and the cycle continues.
This also causes more colleges to open up, many of them sacrificing quality and it helps raise the cost of education.
The root issue is lack of feedback between the job market and the universities.
We need the number of seats in colleges and universities to be closely related with limited surplus to the job market requirements.
The colleges will not self regulate and limit the number of seats because too many of them are in the business of making money,
and though this is very unpopular I see no solution other then some sort of governmental regulation to limit the number of seats fro bachelor degrees which will both increase the quality of graduates and save a whole lot of money on wasted tuition and years out of the job market.
Why should we regulate it? If I want to pay to go to college, and I am qualified, why should the college say no to me? Are you saying that businesses should turn away customers because other businesses need to have less qualified employees? That's just silly.
'It sure beats washing cars,' says Georgia State University graduate Landon Crider, 24, an in-house courier who, for $10 an hour, ferries documents back and forth between the courthouse and his company's office."
You work for a law firm and you are publicly quoting your salary figures? Oh. I mean, you "worked" at a law firm?
How many ip addresses does your car typically use? Mine usually uses 1-3. My cell phone and some times my wife's phone and my tablet. Each of these devices is being tracked because they are constantly switching between cell phone towers. In the future, (present?) I expect cars will all come with Google Maps integration and 4G with a built in wifi access point for easy tethering.
A machine can be a doctor because thats how doctors are trained, they are trained to be machines. They treat the problem, they do not treat the person. Treating the person is a nurses job. And treating the problem is simply nothing more than deduction. If patient has multiple problems then you take those numbers and it will lead you to the correct answer. Thats all being a doctor is, you look at the signs and symptoms, then you add them alltogether and you get the answer as to what the cause is. Its all a forumla and nothing more, there is no great mystery to it.
Are you saying that House is not an accurate depiction of how medicine works? T.V. could be wrong??
They could use magnets accelerometers etc to track the position of your hand relative to your phone/tablet. Then, you can wave your hand or do certain gestures to control your phone/tablet. Add a led and use it more or less like a wii controller to interact with a smart tv. Use it with a small projector to do something cool.
Things are asyncronous. You wait for things from disk, ram, user input, over the network etc. How long it will take is non-deterministic. So a task composed of a bunch of these little pieces will be non-deterministic too.
True. But then I suppose if there are a lot of these non-deterministic factors, then according to the Central Limit Theorem, shouldn't the time for the overall process follow a Normal Distribution? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
I don't get it, are you saying his name is not his?
There is a difference between having a name and having a trademark on that name. Say Henry Ford's son had started his own car company. Should he be able to cal it "Ford Car Co"? No, because his father owned the trademark for "Ford Motors" and "Ford Car Co" is confusingly similar. In Ron Paul's case, he may be able to go with a "Right of Publicity" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights) argument if the people who own the site are making a profit off of the site by selling Ron Paul T-shirts or something. But, unless he has a tradmark on "Ron Paul- wacko liberatarian guy" or something, he should not be able to take the domain from them.
Assange fled Sweden rather than defend himself against the charges.
Nonsense. There are no charges. They cannot file charges against him without first interviewing him, which is something that the prosecutors have repeatedly refused to do. I am a bit curious why they want to extradite him without interviewing him first while he is abroad. He has repeatedly tried to get the prosecutors/police to interview him while he is abroad. But, they are specifically are going out of their way to avoid interviewing him (most likely so they can argue that they must extradite him in order to complete their investigation.) It seems quite likely that they feel that once they have interviewed him, they will not have a sufficient basis to press charges against him. I mean, if they felt confident that once they had interviewed him, they would be able to press charges, then they should just do that and file charges and the whole process of extraditing him would have been greatly simplified.
Another way to think about it is that, I can walk into almost any third-party store and for €30 walk out in 15 mins with a new functioning Nokia candy-bar phone with credit. Can't really get that in the US?
You can walk into almost any walmart or many mini-marts and do this.
This is entirely your fault. The carriers that is. You complain about people wanting support without paying the toll. Yet you charge people the subsidized phone monthly service rate even though they have an off-contract phone. (T-Mobile is the only major carrier who doesn't - they'll cut your monthly fee $10-$20/mo once you're out of contract and paid off the "subsidy" for your phone purchase.)
T-mobile has required me to have a 2 year service agreement to use a phone that I paid full price before. They are not consistently better about this. Maybe they have changed recently.
Verizon is so much worse though. They wouldn't let me switch my data plan to a new laptop because apparently once you have a 2 year agreement for a particular device, you are not even allowed to upgrade at full price but must instead buy an additional data plan for it.
The other option is moving to a system that works well elsewhere in the US. The red-yellow light. After a red, before a green, the yellow light comes on with the red, indicating a "fresh" green. You may go as if it's a green, but proceed with caution.
That's not how it works. I grew up with them, and hold a license in a country where they're in use.
Red+amber is treated as a red light, and you get the same fine as for going on a red light.
The purpose of it is to make all the cars waiting prepare[*] for the green light, so they can all start rolling when it turns green. Yes, you read me right, all of the cars, not just the first one. Here in the US, one car slowly starts rolling, then the next one, then the next one. The lights have to stay green a lot longer as a result, which in turn blocks people going the other way, which in turn leads to idiots blocking the intersection or running yellow lights because they don't want to have to wait for three minutes for the next light.
[*]: Like clutch, gear, or handbrake. All foreign concepts to the majority of US drivers, alas.
I wish we would do it like I have seen it in Taiwan where there was an actual countdown next to the light. Then you can really prepare because you know exactly how many seconds there are left before the light is going to change.
VR might be helpfull but on the other hand it may do more harm than good. The more this technology develops the more problems it will create. We already have people who "live" on the internet and if you will enchance their experiances it might even get worse in the future. So moderation in applying new ideas is a must.
It is kind of ironic that you are posting on Slashdot about the dangers of "living on the internet"... But this whole moderation approach to new ideas has its drawbacks too. That's the Amish philosophy on new technology. Anyway, in the future, everyone will live on the internet all the time. Everyone with a smartphone already does. Living on the internet has greatly improved humanity.
If you want to solve the "war on terror" the best way to do it is get as many leaders of extremist countries to chill out and have less animosity towards the U.S. The easiest way to do that is to bring them over to the U.S. when they are 18 or so and introduce them to college life then send them back to their home countries and hope they can influence others.
Sure, I'd be more than happy to open my wifi network...if it meant I wasn't going to be liable for what a guest does on it....
So, probably the better way to do this is to create some kind of non-profit organization and get some funding from donations or whatever. Then, have people join the non-profit organization and give out wifi for free under the auspices of that. Then, when the individual members get sued because of something someone else did, the non-profit organization provides lawyers to defend them.
Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.
How do you consider these portable? Because they were compatible with both Windows 3.0 as well as Windows 3.1?
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As far as I understood it, the very unfortunate VLC situation came about when a purist developer of VLC demanded that Apple would release VLC without DRM on IOS. But all apps on IOS use DRM, it is quite naive to assume that they would make an exception.
So what? He wrote the code, he released it for use under certain terms and conditions and those conditions were being violated. He wanted Apple to stop and Apple stopped, was he unhappy with that outcome? Did he expect something else? Of course it was annoying for everybody else but if people could just ignore the license when it was incompatible or inconvenient the GPL would have died out long ago.
That's not the point. The point is that it's *apple* who gets the bad press and the blame for VLC not being on the App Store because people do not understand the story and just assume that Apple pulled it. They removed it by request of one of the developers, and as you explained, because he did not consent to it being there.
The iOS App Store's policies were changed to make it compatible with the GPL before that (due to a different case) and there are plenty of GPL apps up in there to this day.
The lack of VLC has nothing to do with it not having a compatible licence, or Apple being "hostile" to open source, as is so often repeated; it's merely the choice of one of the original developers to not allow it to be distributed that way (as is his right).
If what the App store is fully compatible with the GPL, and VLC is released under the GPL, then in fact the original developer has no right at all to stop you me or anyone else from releasing it there. So, why then has no one released it if it is compatible?
I am no Apple fanboi but I will say that Android's big problem is all the crapware shoveled with even the most premium Android phones.
My mom just got a Galaxy Note 2 (the most expensive Android phone out there) and even that came with stuff I've never heard of... Samsung wiz stuff and Verizon Navigator and bunch of other Verizon crap.
I suppose it's not an indictment on Android OS itself, which I think is quite nice, but rather the inability of Google and Samsung to control the carriers and tell them flat out, don't put your crapware on our phone. Only Apple seems to be able to do that for some reason.
Apple has this problem too. They put a lame Maps application on their phone and Safari and all this itunes integration crap. The difference is that Apple goes out of there way to stop people from shipping better replacements to their apps. So, you don't realize how much crapware their stuff is.
The image shown as an example has most of the screen real estate tied up with a useless background of car images. Then there's a tiny map. The screen contains no useful information about bypassing the delay. The actual info is less useful than what 511.org or calling 511 provides.
The image you are referring to is a picture of a slide, not a screen shot from a mobile device. So, yeah, their slide isn't that pretty because they included part of a screenshot on a big lame slide background. On an actual device, this is actually way more useful than what 511.org provides. For one thing, you don't have to call anyone. You just unlock your phone and the info is right there. You just look at the notifications on your phone and it tells you that your destination will take you X minutes to get there including Y minutes due to traffic. Your phone has already looked up the best route due to traffic, so in fact it is telling you how to avoid the traffic. If you click on the map, it brings up Google maps and if for some reason you want a different route, you can easily bring up several different routes and choose the one you want. Not only that, but you usually don't even have to actually tell the phone what your destination was in the first place. Because if you googled the location on your computer (tablet, or phone) then it is smart enough to guess you might want to go there and provide the information on how to get there and how long it would take. And if you are somewhere away from home, it will tell you how long it will take to get home (based on current traffic conditions) and the best way to go. Unlike IOS, Metro, and other parts of Android, Google now is not just a scrolable grid of icons. It only shows you the relevant information Metro's user interface is just a bunch of widgets, and the ones that ship with the OS are poorly designed to look like flash advertisements on web pages. Instead of showing you all the new messages in your inbox, Metro might show you a picture of one person who emailed you, and then 5 seconds later, show you a picture of another person who e-mailed you. After like 60 seconds of staring at the widget, you might have almost as much information as you get in 2 seconds of looking at the Gmail widget in Android. Metro doesn't scale well because it always shows every widget whether or not the information is relevant, and the widgets themselves are designed to look pretty but convey information really slowly.)
Many mobile apps are created by a single developer. So, certainly many of them could be done with a small team. If the projects are small enough, then it makes sense for you to not have an artist (for example) 100% dedicated to a single project. With large projects, there is a lot of learning about the domain specific requirements and the code base and how everything fits together. But, in a smaller project, a new developer who is competent can get up to speed quickly.
They still cost one hundred million dollars each (referring to F-35s retrofitted with drone controls here), so you can't just throw them away in the face of air defense.
Yes. But, depending on the mission, you could use much cheaper drones. For example, the camera on the Predator is much more expensive than the air frame.
That's all fine and well, however if you block GPS over the entire conflict zone, then these aircraft will be useless for any missions within that zone. If you engineer them right, maybe you won't have to worry too much about someone taking them over, but without GPS in the conflict zone where you're trying to use them, they're effectively flying blind. The whole problem with these aircraft is that they rely on radio signals such as GPS for guidance and command and control. Blocking radio signals is not hard to do for someone more advanced than Taliban fighters, so these aircraft are really only good for fighting with very unsophisticated opponents, like the Taliban. Being able to pull 15gs isn't very useful against some yahoos on the ground armed with AK47s and RPGs; it's only useful against very sophisticated opponents, and those nations certainly have the ability to jam radio signals.
But to block GPS in the combat zone, you have to have powerful transmitters that scream "HEY MISSILE!!! I'M RIGHT HERE! COME BLOW ME UP". So, the countermeasure is to just lob a few missiles at the GPS jammers.
And every primitive has a class version, to which the primitives are automatically boxed when they need to be treated like objects. There are only a few places where the distinction matters at all (arguments by value being the chief of these).
That's not true at all. you can't say 'a'.toLowerCase() in Java. You have to do something like Character('a').toLowerCase(). That's not transparent at all. And God forbid you want to add methods to the Integer class in java.
In modern days education is more accessible, and almost everyone strives to get higher education, the result is more college graduates on the market, which allows more position to require a degree which drives more kids to college and the cycle continues. This also causes more colleges to open up, many of them sacrificing quality and it helps raise the cost of education. The root issue is lack of feedback between the job market and the universities. We need the number of seats in colleges and universities to be closely related with limited surplus to the job market requirements. The colleges will not self regulate and limit the number of seats because too many of them are in the business of making money, and though this is very unpopular I see no solution other then some sort of governmental regulation to limit the number of seats fro bachelor degrees which will both increase the quality of graduates and save a whole lot of money on wasted tuition and years out of the job market.
Why should we regulate it? If I want to pay to go to college, and I am qualified, why should the college say no to me? Are you saying that businesses should turn away customers because other businesses need to have less qualified employees? That's just silly.
I am sorry sir, your BS from Brown is not acceptable for the Janitorial position. we are looking for people from Yale to fill that position.
If they have people who want to be janitors that got a BS from Yale, why shouldn't they accept that person?
'It sure beats washing cars,' says Georgia State University graduate Landon Crider, 24, an in-house courier who, for $10 an hour, ferries documents back and forth between the courthouse and his company's office."
You work for a law firm and you are publicly quoting your salary figures? Oh. I mean, you "worked" at a law firm?
How many ip addresses does your car typically use? Mine usually uses 1-3. My cell phone and some times my wife's phone and my tablet. Each of these devices is being tracked because they are constantly switching between cell phone towers. In the future, (present?) I expect cars will all come with Google Maps integration and 4G with a built in wifi access point for easy tethering.
A machine can be a doctor because thats how doctors are trained, they are trained to be machines. They treat the problem, they do not treat the person. Treating the person is a nurses job. And treating the problem is simply nothing more than deduction. If patient has multiple problems then you take those numbers and it will lead you to the correct answer. Thats all being a doctor is, you look at the signs and symptoms, then you add them alltogether and you get the answer as to what the cause is. Its all a forumla and nothing more, there is no great mystery to it.
Are you saying that House is not an accurate depiction of how medicine works? T.V. could be wrong??
They could use magnets accelerometers etc to track the position of your hand relative to your phone/tablet. Then, you can wave your hand or do certain gestures to control your phone/tablet. Add a led and use it more or less like a wii controller to interact with a smart tv. Use it with a small projector to do something cool.
Things are asyncronous. You wait for things from disk, ram, user input, over the network etc. How long it will take is non-deterministic. So a task composed of a bunch of these little pieces will be non-deterministic too.
True. But then I suppose if there are a lot of these non-deterministic factors, then according to the Central Limit Theorem, shouldn't the time for the overall process follow a Normal Distribution? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
I don't get it, are you saying his name is not his?
There is a difference between having a name and having a trademark on that name. Say Henry Ford's son had started his own car company. Should he be able to cal it "Ford Car Co"? No, because his father owned the trademark for "Ford Motors" and "Ford Car Co" is confusingly similar. In Ron Paul's case, he may be able to go with a "Right of Publicity" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights) argument if the people who own the site are making a profit off of the site by selling Ron Paul T-shirts or something. But, unless he has a tradmark on "Ron Paul- wacko liberatarian guy" or something, he should not be able to take the domain from them.
Try measuring its terminal velocity by dropping it off of a very tall building. Preferably, drop it off a building owned by Oracle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_Authority
Assange fled Sweden rather than defend himself against the charges.
Nonsense. There are no charges. They cannot file charges against him without first interviewing him, which is something that the prosecutors have repeatedly refused to do. I am a bit curious why they want to extradite him without interviewing him first while he is abroad. He has repeatedly tried to get the prosecutors/police to interview him while he is abroad. But, they are specifically are going out of their way to avoid interviewing him (most likely so they can argue that they must extradite him in order to complete their investigation.) It seems quite likely that they feel that once they have interviewed him, they will not have a sufficient basis to press charges against him. I mean, if they felt confident that once they had interviewed him, they would be able to press charges, then they should just do that and file charges and the whole process of extraditing him would have been greatly simplified.
>
Another way to think about it is that, I can walk into almost any third-party store and for €30 walk out in 15 mins with a new functioning Nokia candy-bar phone with credit. Can't really get that in the US?
You can walk into almost any walmart or many mini-marts and do this.
This is entirely your fault. The carriers that is. You complain about people wanting support without paying the toll. Yet you charge people the subsidized phone monthly service rate even though they have an off-contract phone. (T-Mobile is the only major carrier who doesn't - they'll cut your monthly fee $10-$20/mo once you're out of contract and paid off the "subsidy" for your phone purchase.)
T-mobile has required me to have a 2 year service agreement to use a phone that I paid full price before. They are not consistently better about this. Maybe they have changed recently. Verizon is so much worse though. They wouldn't let me switch my data plan to a new laptop because apparently once you have a 2 year agreement for a particular device, you are not even allowed to upgrade at full price but must instead buy an additional data plan for it.
The other option is moving to a system that works well elsewhere in the US. The red-yellow light. After a red, before a green, the yellow light comes on with the red, indicating a "fresh" green. You may go as if it's a green, but proceed with caution.
That's not how it works. I grew up with them, and hold a license in a country where they're in use. Red+amber is treated as a red light, and you get the same fine as for going on a red light.
The purpose of it is to make all the cars waiting prepare[*] for the green light, so they can all start rolling when it turns green. Yes, you read me right, all of the cars, not just the first one. Here in the US, one car slowly starts rolling, then the next one, then the next one. The lights have to stay green a lot longer as a result, which in turn blocks people going the other way, which in turn leads to idiots blocking the intersection or running yellow lights because they don't want to have to wait for three minutes for the next light.
[*]: Like clutch, gear, or handbrake. All foreign concepts to the majority of US drivers, alas.
I wish we would do it like I have seen it in Taiwan where there was an actual countdown next to the light. Then you can really prepare because you know exactly how many seconds there are left before the light is going to change.
VR might be helpfull but on the other hand it may do more harm than good. The more this technology develops the more problems it will create. We already have people who "live" on the internet and if you will enchance their experiances it might even get worse in the future. So moderation in applying new ideas is a must.
It is kind of ironic that you are posting on Slashdot about the dangers of "living on the internet"... But this whole moderation approach to new ideas has its drawbacks too. That's the Amish philosophy on new technology. Anyway, in the future, everyone will live on the internet all the time. Everyone with a smartphone already does. Living on the internet has greatly improved humanity.
If you want to solve the "war on terror" the best way to do it is get as many leaders of extremist countries to chill out and have less animosity towards the U.S. The easiest way to do that is to bring them over to the U.S. when they are 18 or so and introduce them to college life then send them back to their home countries and hope they can influence others.
Sure, I'd be more than happy to open my wifi network...if it meant I wasn't going to be liable for what a guest does on it....
So, probably the better way to do this is to create some kind of non-profit organization and get some funding from donations or whatever. Then, have people join the non-profit organization and give out wifi for free under the auspices of that. Then, when the individual members get sued because of something someone else did, the non-profit organization provides lawyers to defend them.
Microsoft BASIC and later Visual Basic: Unjustly despised, but introduced many to programming (and the very first ones were marvels of micro-programming too). Also interestingly portable at a time where portability was on nobody's radar.
How do you consider these portable? Because they were compatible with both Windows 3.0 as well as Windows 3.1?
I think Doom was one of the more influential pieces of software.